Bookmarker tag: topic/open-source (17 notes)

While Taylor’s dismissal of free software as ‘freedom to tinker’ captures something real about its prima facie narrowness as a political programme, she misses the peculiar way in which this very narrowness gives rise to significant implications when we broaden the frame and examine a more social picture. While the individual user may not be interested in tinkering with, for example, the Linux kernel, as opposed to simply using it, the fact that it can be tinkered with opens up a space of social agency that is not at all trivial. Since everyone can access all the code all the time, it is impossible for any entity, capital or state, to establish any definitive control over users on the basis of the code itself. And since the outcomes of this process are pooled, one does not have to be personally interested in ‘tinkering’ to benefit directly from this freedom. With non-free software one must simply trust whoever, or whichever organization, created it. With free software, this ‘whoever’ is socially open-ended, with responsibility ultimately lying with the community of users itself.

Hackers use their knowledge and their wits to maintain
their autonomy. Some take the money and run. (We must
live with our compromises.) Some refuse to compromise.
(We live as best we can.) All too often those of us who take
one of these paths resent those who take the other. One lot
resents the prosperity it lacks, the other resents the liberty it
lacks to hack away at the world freely. What eludes the
hacker class is a more abstract expression of our interests as
a class, and of how this interest may meet those of others in
the world.

[...] Neoliberalism depended on drawing women into wage work, often low-wage service jobs, as falling salaries meant that the "family wage" of a single (male) wage earner could no longer support a family. [...] feminism left behind the social justice dimension of its earlier agenda to focus on women getting a leg up in the job market, breaking the glass ceiling, and finding emancipation through entry into the market. Undoubtedly this gave women a new sort of power, as members of the waged working and middle classes with the ability to act collectively in the workplace - as white- and blue-collar workers, women had a potential strength that differed from the atomized unwaged work of the home. But such priorities were no longer framed within an anticapitalist agenda or struggle, and overlapped easily with the drive to tap into a pool of labor hitherto outside of the market.

As open source developers gave away their software for free, many could see only the devaluation of something that was once a locus of enormous value. Thus Red Hat founder Bob Young told me, “My goal is to shrink the size of the operating system market.” (Red Hat, however, aimed to own a large part of that smaller market.) Defenders of the status quo, such as Microsoft VP Jim Allchin, claimed that “open source is an intellectual property destroyer,” and painted a bleak picture in which a great industry is destroyed, with nothing to take its place.

The commoditization of operating systems, databases, web servers and browsers, and related software was indeed threatening to Microsoft’s core business. But that destruction created the opportunity for the killer applications of the Internet era. It is worth remembering this history when contemplating the effect of on-demand services like Uber, self-driving cars, and artificial intelligence.

I found that Clayton Christensen, the author of The Innovator’s Dilemma and The Innovator’s Solution, had developed a framework that explained what I was observing. In a 2004 article in Harvard Business Review, he articulated “the law of conservation of attractive profits” as follows:

When attractive profits disappear at one stage in the value chain because a product becomes modular and commoditized, the opportunity to earn attractive profits with proprietary products will usually emerge at an adjacent stage.

I saw Christensen’s law of conservation of attractive profits at work in the paradigm shifts required by open source software. Just as IBM’s commoditization of the basic design of the personal computer led to opportunities for attractive profits “up the stack” in software, new fortunes were being made up the stack from the commodity open source software that underlies the Internet, in a new class of proprietary applications.

Google and Amazon provided a serious challenge to the traditional understanding of free and open source software. Here were applications built on top of Linux, but they were fiercely proprietary. What’s more, even when using and modifying software distributed under the most restrictive of free software licenses, the GPL (GNU Public License), these sites were not constrained by any of its provisions, all of which were framed in terms of the old paradigm. The GPL’s protections were triggered by the act of software distribution, yet web-based applications don’t distribute any software: It is simply performed on the Internet’s global stage, delivered as a service rather than as a packaged software application.

As we moved from the Web 2.0 era into the “mobile-social” era and now into the “Internet of Things,” the same principle continues to hold true. Applications live on the Internet itself—in the space between the device and remote servers—not just on the device in the user’s hands. This idea was expressed by another of the principles I laid out in the paper, which I called “Software Above the Level of a Single Device,” using a phrase first introduced by Microsoft open source lead David Stutz in his open letter to the company when he left in 2003.

The implications of this principle continue to unfold. When I first wrote about the idea of software above the level of a single device, I wasn’t just thinking about web applications like Google but also hybrid applications like iTunes, which used three tiers of software—a cloud-based music store, a personal PC-based application, and a handheld device (at the time, the iPod). Today’s applications are even more complex. Consider Uber. The system (it’s hard to call it an “application” anymore) simultaneously spans code running in Uber’s data centers, on GPS satellites and real-time traffic feeds, and apps on the smartphones of hundreds of thousands of drivers and of millions of passengers, in a complex choreography of data and devices.

Linux is no longer the product of “part-time hacking.” Most of the programmers who work on the project earn a good living for doing so, just as do those who work on proprietary software. The companies that sponsor and contribute to Linux do not do so out of the generosity of their hearts, they do so for solid commercial reasons.

Linux is no longer subversive. It has moved steadily away from being an outsider to taking its place as a comfortable part of the existing commercial world. In a way, if there was a revolution, Linux has won, but it’s an Animal Farm victory. In winning, Linux has become like those it displaced: more professional, more structured, more carefully governed. Linux has not undermined powerful institutions and companies (although it has made some operating systems obsolete); instead, those institutions have learned to live happily with Linux, and even profit from it.

From a Marxist-Hegelian angle, Barbrook saw the high-tech gift economy as a process of overcoming capitalism from the inside. The high-tech gift economy is a pioneering moment that transcends both the purism of the New Left do-it-yourself culture and the neoliberalism of the free market ideologues: “money-commodity and gift relations are not just in conflict with each other, but also co-exist in symbiosis.” Participants in the gift economy are not reluctant to use market resources and government funding to pursue a potlatch economy of free exchange. However, the potlatch and the economy ultimately remain irreconcilable, and the market economy is always threatening to reprivatize the common enclaves of the gift economy. Commodification, the reimposition of a regime of property, is, in Barbrook’s opinion, the main strategy through which capitalism tries to reabsorb the anarcho-communism of the net into its folds.

This early attempt to offer a polemical platform from which to think about the digital economy overemphasizes the autonomy of the high-tech gift economy from capitalism. The processes of exchange that characterize the Internet are not simply the reemergence of communism within the cutting edge of the economy, a repressed other that resurfaces just at the moment when communism seems defeated. It is important to remember that the gift economy, as part of a larger digital economy, is itself an important force within the reproduction of the labor force in late capitalism as a whole. The provision of free labor, as we shall see later, is a fundamental moment in the creation of value in the economy at large—beyond the digital economy of the Internet. As will be made clear, the conditions that make free labor an important element of the digital economy are based in a difficult, experimental compromise between the historically rooted cultural and affective desire for creative production (of the kind more commonly associated with Gilroy’s emphasis on “individual selffashioning and communal liberation”) and the current capitalist emphasis on knowledge as the main source of added value.

[...] Opensource companies such as Cygnus convinced the market that you do not need to be proprietary about source codes to make a profit: the code might be free, but tech support, packaging, installation software, regular upgrades, office applications, and hardware are not.

The fetishization of content underwrites the fantasy that it is somehow detachable from the infrastructure that supports it. The thrust of Smythe's argument is to dismantle this fantasy, a task which remains a pressing one on the digital era in which, we are told, everyone (or at least a lot more people than before) can create their own content--but not, significantly the structures for organizing, sorting, and retrieving it. We can make our own Web page, but not our own Google; we can craft our own Tweets, but not our own Twitter (at least not without a fair amount of expertise and venture capital). By focusing on practices seemingly associated with the superstructural realm of cultural consumption, Smythe nonetheless reminds us of the importance of control and ownership over productive resources, including the means of information sharing, organization, and retrieval. Even in the digital era, matter still matters--especially the expensive kind, such as network infrastructure, data storage facilities and processing power.

But the driving assumption was that (a) contrary to both SBTC and its neighbors and Polanyi, technology was very much a function of institutions; (b) cutting edge innovation did not have to follow one narrow “most-efficiency creating” path, but that there was meaningful choice in how innovation progressed; and (c) contrary to the primary explanations of inequality as a function of institutions (deunionization; erosion of minimum wage, etc.), technology had a significant independent role in structuring social relations in the economy, such that winning battles over the dominant designs of the technology could be independently more powerful at structuring social relations than winning political battles or institutional changes that directly regulate those social relations. In its most ambitious version, it could mean that winning political battles over free software or open source hardware could make people better able to live independent lives than winning political battles over labor or employment law. The past decade has led me to be more skeptical of this stronger claim on behalf of technology [...]

[...] C4SS subscribes to the techno-utopian potentials for a new arrangement of production driven by digital technology, which has the potential to reduce prices on goods, making them within the reach of anyone (once again, music piracy is held up as a precursor). However, this potential has not been realized because “economic ruling classes are able to enclose the increased efficiencies from new technology as a source of rents mainly through artificial scarcities, artificial property rights, and entry barriers enforced by the state” (Carson 2015a). Monopolies, enforced by the state, have “artificially” distorted free market transactions.

These monopolies, in the form of intellectual property rights, are preventing a proper Proudhonian revolution in which everyone would control their own individual production process. [...] once these artificial monopolies are removed, corporations will lose their power [...]

This revolution is a quiet one, requiring no strikes or other confrontations with capitalists. Instead, the answer is to create this new economy within the larger one, and hollow it out from the inside:

The goal of this paper is not to question the creativity of remix culture or the maker movement, or to indict their potentials for artistic expression, or negate all their criticisms of intellectual property. What I wish to criticize is the outsized economic and political claims made about it. [...]

Digital Proudhonism and its vision of federations of independent individual producers and creators (perhaps now augmented with the latest cryptographic tools) dominates the imagination of a radical challenge to digital capitalism. Its critiques of the corporate internet have become common sense. What kind of alternative radical vision is possible? Here I believe it is useful to return to the core of Marx’s critique of Proudhon.

[...]

The socialization of production under the development of the means of production—the necessity of greater collaboration and the reliance on past labors in the form of machines—gives way to a radical redefinition of the relationship to one’s output. No one can claim a product was made by them alone; rather, production demands to be recognized as social. [...]

[...] The romance of “DIY” obscures the reality that nothing digital is done by oneself: it is always already a component of a larger formation of socialized labor.

The labor of digital creatives and innovators, sutured as it is to a technical apparatus fashioned from dead labor and meant for producing commodities for profit, is therefore already socialized. While some of this socialization is apparent in peer production, much of it is mystified through the real abstraction of commodity fetishism, which masks socialization under wage relations and contracts. Rather than further rely on these contracts to better benefit digital artisans, a Marxist politics of digital culture would begin from the fact of socialization, and as Radhika Desai (2011) argues, take seriously Marx’s call for “a general organization of labour in society” via political organizations such as unions and labor parties (212). Creative workers could align with others in the production chain as a class of laborers rather than as an assortment of individual producers, and form the kinds of organizations, such as unions, that have been the vehicles of class politics, with the aim of controlling society’s means of production, not simply one’s “own” tools or products. These would be bonds of solidarity, not bonds of market transactions. Then the apparatus of digital cultural production might be controlled democratically, rather than by the despotism of markets and private profit.

However, not everything online lent itself to the metaphor of a frontier. Particularly in the realm of music and video, artisans dealt with a field crowded with existing content, as well as thickets of intellectual property laws that attempted to regulate how that content was created and distributed. [...] The project of Lessig and others was not to create the conditions for erecting a new society upon a frontier, as a yeoman farmer might, but to politicize this class of artisans in order to challenge larger industrial concerns, such as record labels and film studios, who used copyright to protect their incumbent position. This very different terrain requires a different perspective from Jefferson’s.

While the thrust of these critiques of copyright focus on egregious overreach by the culture industries and their assault upon all manner of benign noncommercial activity, they also reveal a vision of an alternative cultural economy of independent producers who, while not necessarily anti-capitalist, can escape the clutches of massive centralized corporations through networked digital technologies. This facilitates both economic and political freedom via independence from control and regulation, and maximum opportunities on the market. [...] As it so often does, the fusion of ownership and labor characteristic of the petty producer standpoint, the structure of feeling of the independent artisan, articulates itself through the mantra of “Do It Yourself.”

These analyses and polemics reproduce the Proudhonist vision of an alternative to existing digital capitalism. Individual independent creators will achieve political autonomy and economic benefit through the embrace digital network technologies, as long as these creators are allowed to compete fairly with incumbents. Rather than insist on collective regulation of production, Digital Proudhonism seeks forms of deregulation, such as copyright reform, that will chip away at the existence of “monopoly” power of existing media corporations that fetters the market chances of these digital artisans.

Online platforms aren’t simply replacing stores by replicating their function. Instead they are making themselves gatekeepers capable of controlling and regulating commerce — just as Steam regulates the weapon skins market — playing a decisive role in which sellers continue to exist and which workers get to show up to work tomorrow. Culture is constrained and warped by this gatekeeping dynamic, which not only maintains the existing monoculture — in which a few popular titles dominate markets — but intensifies it.

This is not a matter of goods or marketplaces being digital, but how digitality proves conducive to monopolistic domination. In Monopoly Capital (1966), Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy define what they call “epoch-making” technologies: those which radically reshape space and time — that “shake up the entire pattern of the economy and hence create vast investment outlets in addition to the capital they directly absorb.” [...]

In the 21st century, networked computing and phones have superseded autos as the epoch-making technology. If the previous age of monopoly capitalism was defined by cars, suburban landscapes, and regular trips to the department store, then our new age is defined by ride-sharing apps, gentrified landscapes, Prime Day sales, and the fulfillment centers that make it possible. Online connectivity — virtual assistants like Alexa, PCs with internet browsers, smart TVs with streaming services, and phone apps — all reduced the space and time consumers had to traverse to engage in commerce, but at the same time it has centralized it.

The resulting new monopoly capitalism has produced a new kind of consumerism — if not a new way of life, at least a new intensity of it — that passes principally through the gates of Amazon, Paypal, Venmo, Salesforce, Steam, Shopify, the iOS App Store, and other platforms. Amazon, for instance, is now larger by valuation than virtually all other retailers combined. Together, these platforms plug us into a more “frictionless” system of commerce: In exchange for a modest increase of speed and convenience, they etch themselves into our collective consciousness as we etch ourselves into their databanks as consumer profiles. The platform [...] You half-expect the word platform to be capitalized, like some Platonic ideal.

As commerce has consolidated into digital platforms, digital commodity production — which best suit the platforms’ economic advantages — has ramped up: skins in Counter-Strike and Fortnite and Twitch.tv’s “Cheer chat” badges, along with conventional digital products like games and Adobe’s software suites. These are capable of near-instant delivery and are more amenable to platform-sustained content restrictions: DRM, paywalls, subscriber access, and other forms of intermediate fees. The consolidation of retailing into platforms has also triggered the development of dropshipping — when a entity sells products it doesn’t have in stock and has them shipped from a third party directly to the consumer. As Alexis Madrigal reported, there are Instagram brands that don’t buy or sell goods but exploit aspirational lifestyle imagery and the platform’s advertising algorithms to lure customers. They simulate manufacturing and professional branding but exist only as social media accounts. All this may seem to diversify economic participation — so many products! so many retailers! — but the profits still flow to the a single monolithic place.

[...] It used to be that software was something you installed on your machine; now, many software-makers have moved towards software as a service (SaaS), which involves accessing software through one's browser, without having to install anything. [...] companies like Microsoft can now 'leverage the gratis work of the open-source community to run the servers' that power SaaS services. 'As a result, it is beneficial for [companies like Microsoft] to rehabilitate their image in the open source community,' in order to 'garner goodwill from the community and attract talented developers,' Robinson added.