Open and closed systems and the spiral of reciprocal mistrust by risa
the open source internet is a written media (text upon code) but it’s so deep that it has a time quality that’s like orality. not just the immediacy of orality- like voice over internet orality- though that is half, and cool. (so cool we actually have an interview with an open source programmer who’s working on Asterix VOIP servers coming up soon, and we’ll be talking about how numbers and electricity carry voice) but orality in the second and sort of contradictory sense. orality as a fertile space of timelessness that is (here we go with Innis again) the space of cultivation itself.
Anyway- that was the paragraph I had started and saved as draft a few days ago, and now Neil has sent an open source and defense question, that puts the security of cultivation in a new light.
This from Neil:
(risa: seeing as you’re theoretically and practically involved with the open
source trajectory, i wonder what you think of this kind of complcity. hijack?
enclosure? constraint)***Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science****
“Concordia Institute for Information Systems Engineering professors Mourad
Debbabi (principal investigator), Chadi Assi, Prabir Bhattacharya and Amr
Youssef were awarded a grant of $777 000 under NSERC’s National Partenership
Program with Bell Canada.The researchers will work to develop a practical framework with underlying
theoretical foundations on the security of free and open source software
(FOSS), programs available at no cost and that allows users access to improve
their designs. The grant spans a period of three years, starting March 2006.
The research is a joint collaboration between the Computer Security Laboratory
of Concordia, Bell Canada and National Defence, through Defence Research and
Development Canada at Valcartier.”[re: bell’s role. you should note that only in the last five years have
militaries begun to harvest communication technology developments from
commercial communication corporations, taking hardware and software as is and
bringing it up to military standard. the mp3 player is an experiement in
mobilized military communication technology, ready to be reworked to suit
military needs. the earlyier part of the revolution in military affairs (RMA;
1994-1999) saw militaries working with the established and preferred
weapons/systems producers (lockheed-martin, raytheon, general dynamics, etc.),
who undertook to craft the desired communication and network systems.]
Here’s an article about how the department of defense has embraced open source in the United States:
http://weblog.infoworld.com/openresource/archives/2006/07/open_source_in_1.html
And it is a tricky question. Will the military involvement in open source twist the best it in toward violence? or will the systems that have been made in an open source environment have communicative effects on the closed systems they come into contact with? In the latter article, we hear hints of this, with the talk about the culture of the military needing to be connected to outside time, protocals and thinking. But because an active open source project moves incredibly quickly, it is possible to imagine individuals and ideologies using open source tools for their own refactoring. Not to add malicious code to major open source projects- the system doesn’t really work in a way that would make that really plausible- but perhaps to create monster viruses or evil robots or something like that on the margins of open source, using code from withing the community. I’m not even joking, unfortuneately. There are countless software projects underway with countless motivations behind them and a world of diverse possibility ahead, and artificial intelligence is not scifi anymore. Studying the security questions involved from a theoretical and practical perspective is important.
Personally, I think conversations between system types are positive. (Between Microsoft and OSS, for example.) More scary to me then research into open systems, is no research, no communication, no investigation.
There is war again in the Middle East, allowing rascist single-minded-ness and sorrow to flourish on both sides, and forcing otherwise peaceful people into a situation where ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ (trauma, and the frozen repetitive thought formations that follow, is perfect breeding ground for fundamentalism). The “spiral of reciprocal mistrust”, as Habermas puts it in interview with Borradori in Philosophy in a Time of Terror, is the scariest thing that can happen between Others. It is perpetuated and sustained by closed, one-directional communicative systems that wind up supporting simplified and horrified world views. So in my opinion, the more work done on developing and understanding open systems, the better.
That’s what I say, what do you say, Neiler?
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