[Fsfe-france] le point d'une anthropologiste sur le libre

[Jean-Baptiste Soufron]

http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/Political-Agnosticism-Open-Source- 
Politics-of-Contrast-36906.html

A mon avis voici un excellent article sur le mouvement libre, vu du  
point de vue d'une anthropologiste qui s'est spécialement intéressée à  
la nature politique du mouvement. Elle en conclut que celui-ci n'est  
pas spécifiquement lié à un mouvement, mais qu'il s'intéresse  
essentiellement à la libération des savoirs.

Je vous laisse lire, c'est excellent pour occuper un début de dimanche  
après-midi :)

Jean-Baptiste Soufron
http://soufron.free.fr

-------------------------

Free and open source

 software (FOSS), which is by now entrenched in the technology

 sector, has recently traveled far beyond this sphere in the form of 
artifacts, licenses, and as a broader icon for openness and 
collaboration.

FOSS has attained a robust socio-political life as a touchstone for 
like-minded projects in art, law, journalism, and science-some examples 
being MIT's OpenCourseWare project, School Forge, and the BBC's 
decision to release all their archives under a Creative Commons 
license.

One might suspect FOSS of having a deliberate political agenda, but 
when asked, FOSS developers invariably offer a firm and unambiguous 
"no" -- usually followed by a precise lexicon for discussing the proper 
relationship between FOSS and politics.

For example, while it is perfectly acceptable and encouraged to have a 
panel on free software at an antiglobalization conference, FOSS 
developers would suggest that it is unacceptable to claim that FOSS has 
as one of its goals antiglobalization, or for that matter any political 
program -- a subtle but vital difference, which captures the uncanny, 
visceral, and minute semiotic acts by which developers divorce FOSS 
from a guided political direction.


 Complex Political Life

 FOSS, of course, beholds a complex political life despite the lack of 
political intention; nonetheless, I argue that the political 
agnosticism of FOSS shapes the expressive life and force of its 
informal politics.

FOSS gives palpable voice to the growing fault lines between expressive 
and intellectual property rights, especially in the context of digital 
technologies. While free speech and property rights are often imagined 
as linked and essential parts of our American liberal heritage, the 
social life of FOSS complicates this connection while providing a 
window into how liberal values such as free speech take on specific 
forms through cultural-based technical practice: that of computer 
hacking.

Whereas, traditionally, censorship and state intervention were seen as 
the primary threats against the realization of free speech, the social 
practices of free and open software raise the idea that forms property 
can be antithetical to the principles of free speech, "principles" that 
are constantly under social revision though they might appear as 
timeless and obvious.

Source code, the blueprint for programs that most nontechnical users 
rarely see, is becoming an object to construct claims about vocational 
rights and the appropriate scope of First Amendment law.

FOSS has not only transformed the dynamics of software development but 
is also shifting understandings of the appropriate use of intellectual 
property instruments and the scope of free speech protections.

I argue that the wedge placed by practitioners between FOSS and 
politics is significant to an anthropological assessment of the liberal 
underpinnings and reformulations of FOSS and the wider sociopolitical 
effect of its vast circulations.

 Artifacts, Metaphors

 My thesis is that the denial of FOSS' formal politics enacted through 
a particularized cultural exercise of free-speech facilitates the broad 
mobility of FOSS as artifacts and metaphors and thus lays the 
groundwork for its informal political scope: its key role as a catalyst 
by which to rethink the assumptions of intellectual property rights 
through its use and inversion.

It works because it recalibrates some of the distinctions and 
associations between free speech and intellectual property -- it 
revises intellectual property law and channels it toward the protection 
of free speech, instead of its "conventional use" of securing property 
rights.

Christopher Kelty aptly describes this as "openness through 
privatization, which makes it the most powerful political movement on 
the Internet, even though most of its proponents spend all their extra 
energy denying that it is political."

Political intent and subjectivity are indeed noticeably absent in the 
constitution of the free software and open source movement, which 
differs from more formal political endeavors and new social movements 
predicated on some political intentionality, direction, or reflexivity 
or a desire to transform wider social conditions.

FOSS uniqueness as a "new social movement" stands precisely in the 
"extra energy" noted by Kelty to deny political associations of various 
kinds.

While technical or economic rationalities are often the native 
explanation for FOSS, a taken-for-granted form of cultural liberalism 
and the pragmatics of programming mutually inform and reinforce the 
hacker

 aesthetic distaste for politics.

 Political Neutrality

 In other words, political denial is culturally orchestrated through a 
rearticulation of free-speech principles, a cultural positioning that 
simultaneously is informed by the computing

 techniques and outwardly expresses and thus constitutes hacker values. 
It is this practice that I refer to here as "political agnosticism."

The purported political neutrality of FOSS, inscribed into its 
technological artifacts through licenses, has facilitated an unfettered 
circulation of its technologies.

FOSS is made visible to wider publics through its extensive use and 
resignification. The witnessable set of practices, such as 
collaborative production and the creative deployment of licenses, has 
become a social point of contrast by which the assumptions of the 
American legal intellectual property system are partially destabilized. 
It thus conveys an implicit critique of the opaque logics enveloped in 
the neoliberal drive to make property out of everything and, at this 
historical conjunction, seemingly out of very little.

As noted by Herman and Coombe in this journal, the persuasive force of 
neoliberal rhetorics of property rights lie in their corporeality as an 
habituated ethos that defines the proper, veritable, and, thus, 
supposedly singular relationship between consumers, objects, and 
corporations.

Though they astutely assert that intellectual property regimes are bent 
toward the "incorrigible" and are "resistant to revision," FOSS has 
inadvertently performed with some degree of success against this 
habituated stance.

FOSS provides another existing and transposable model for new legal 
possibilities composed of an aggregate of practices, licenses, social 
relationships, artifacts and moral economies and, thus, enters a wider 
public debate on the limits of intellectual property primarily though 
visible cultural praxis. Its "success" is that it transformed what is 
purported to be a "singular" field of intellectual property law into 
one that is now multiple, offering new instruments and justifications 
for their use.

 Political Agnosticism

 To understand the logic of political denial, it is instructive to 
define the rationale for freedom formulated in the philosophical 
underpinnings of FOSS licenses. The moral and semiotic load of free 
software is a commitment to prevent limiting the freedom of others. 
This is done to realize a sphere for the unfettered circulation of 
thought, expression, and action for software development.

This vision is clear in three key documents that guide the choice and 
creation of every free and open source license: the Free Software 
Definition, the Debian Free Software Guidelines, and the Open Source 
Definition.

In these charters, freedom underscores an individual's right to create, 
use, and distribute software in a manner that will allow exactly the 
same for others, so long as license rules are followed-the goal of 
which is to enact a universal sphere for the flourishing of free forms 
of action and thought.

All provisions in these documents work through a logic of 
nondiscrimination as to achieve universality. Within this purview, 
source code, the line-by-line directions that programmers write to make 
software applications, is treated implicitly and explicitly as a form 
of speech. Writing source code is thus akin to "speaking" while 
licenses establish the conditions that allow for the free and 
unrestricted expression of speech.

A utilitarian ethic of openness is increasingly seen as obvious and 
indispensable in order to develop the "state of the art." FOSS 
developers also place an extremely high premium on open technical 
production as an avenue for expressive activity.

 Personal Significance

 While hackers see the spread of free software as socially beneficial 
because it allows a diverse range of "others" to deploy their software 
(like you, me, the Mexican school system, the government, and even "Big 
Brother"), the primary significance of FOSS is personal: it is 
something which protects the "food" for them to "hack on" so that they 
can exercise their right to learn from and create more speech (source 
code) for others to share and extend.

According to hackers, the fact that anyone can use FOSS and that it can 
be directed towards economic, political, and personal ends is a 
positive side-effect of openness; they consider it a testament to the 
power of a neutral political commitment.

The "free" of free software rests on yet reposes a wider Anglo-European 
socio-cultural sensibility for expressive rights, which underscores 
ideas of individual autonomy, self-development, and a value-free 
marketplace for the expression of ideas.

As a number of critical scholars argue, forms of political neutrality 
are immanent to free speech doctrine (Brown 1995, Fish 1999, Marcuse 
1965, MacKinnon 1993, Passavat 2002). These critiques treat 
decontextualized neutrality primarily as ideological scaffolding that 
justifies a politics of individual liberties over those of structural 
equality.

While relevant in other ways, it is analytically deficient to analyze 
the free-speech elements of free software as an example of these 
otherwise cogent analyses -- that is, as an augmentation or 
verification of an already existing and mystified American liberal 
tradition.

The hacker aesthetic distaste for politics and their free-speech codes 
can only be meaningfully ascertained as "cultural practice" if placed 
within the scope of their lived practical and material actions, not 
just in relation to how their values express or map perfectly onto some 
existing regime of value such as liberalism.

 Key Questions

 If not, we construe their moral orders as vacuous and thus, decouple 
their values from a particular way of life and the historical 
conditions that enable and constrain what they do.

Also to simply assert that the free-speech character of FOSS is an 
expression of liberal values occludes key questions of investigation, 
for example: why is a language of expressive rights compelling to 
programmers, and how does the local rearticulation of expressive rights 
shift the wider juridical and cultural face and expressions of liberal 
values?

Continuity of liberal traditions does not mean sameness. In other 
words, it reminds us that free speech, privacy

, and property right have complex histories born from material and 
discursive struggles over meaning, even if such principles are socially 
construed as beyond the turmoil of history.

The freedom of free software, while influenced by wider liberal 
sensibilities, is fundamentally shaped by the pragmatics of programming 
and the social context of Internet use.

My contention is that values for expressive rights as formulated in 
free software philosophy were and are compelling to programmers because 
they hold affinities with their technical habitus borne from 
"practical" (as in meaningful, embodied, and collective action) 
experiences formed around the pragmatics of programming and the 
aesthetics of technical architectures.

In addition, in recent times, it has afforded a wider cultural and 
political language by which to objectify to themselves and larger 
publics the nature of their technical life world, an objectification 
buttressed within a hacker public sphere and as a political vector to 
make claims against the aggressive application of intellectual property 
restrictions.

 Forms of Creativity

 Programmers describe their craft as an activity that allows for 
personal unrestricted forms of creativity, expression, learning, and 
action, enacted through a medium, the digital computer, and preferably 
interfaced through a transparent and flexible, technical environment 
(like UNIX).

Passion that is understood to be the basis of the hacker ethic (Himanen 
2001, Levy 1984) is fueled by a practice that allows programmers great 
flexibility and control in creation (Turkic 1984), creations which are 
put to use and hence seen as highly valuable.

Programmers over decades of intense interaction come to viscerally 
experience the computer as a general purpose machine that can be 
infinitely programmed to achieve any task through the medium of 
software written by humans with a computer language.

The technological potential for unlimited programmable capabilities 
melds with what is seen as the expansive ability for programmers to 
create. For programmers, computing in a dual sense, as a technology and 
as an activity, becomes a total realm for the freedom of creation and 
expression.

In essence, computing is understood and experienced (sometimes 
reflectively, other times implicitly) by FOSS hackers as the very 
micro-sphere for the unfettered circulation of thought, expression, and 
action that freedom within the macro-sphere FOSS seeks to achieve 
through licenses.

Downloading music and watching movies, socializing in chat rooms, 
playing highly addictive mutliplayer games, creating software libre, 
meeting future girlfriends and wives on chat channels, reading your 
news daily online-all these activities contribute to a strong practical 
orientation and embodied disposition that the activity of communicating 
on and creating through a computer is a space of freedom for 
entertainment, production, pedagogy, and sociality.

 Application of Patents

 More than ever, hackers actively and self-reflexively constitute these 
values within a type of public sphere where hackers discuss the 
corporate and legal practices that are seen to impinge on their ability 
to engage in such forms of "free" expressive making (Coleman and Hill 
2004).

The indiscriminate application of patents to software algorithms and 
other encryption

 and copyright laws, such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act 
(DMCA), are construed as threats to the free ability of programmers to 
write source code, which hackers and programmers have only recently 
come to conceptualize as a form of communication worthy of the broadest 
protections afforded by First Amendment law.

Despite this incipient cognizance of the legal threats to free speech, 
what grows out of this particular life world of intense, lifelong 
programming and networked sociality is an overt aesthetic dislike for 
politics and a culturally embodied experience of freedom that 
conceptually shuns politics.

Put simply, political claims outside of software subtract from, 
tarnish, and censor the sphere for the free circulation of thought, 
action, and expression. It is felt that if FOSS was directed towards a 
political end, it would sully the "purity" of the technical 
decision-making process. Political affiliation also might deter people 
from participating on development, thus creating an artificial barrier 
to entry into this sphere whose ideal and idealized form is a 
transparent meritocracy.

A political tag is also perceived to curtail one's personal freedom for 
deciding how to best interpret this domain of activity-a form of 
censorship and thus a highly polluted association to conjure.

In addition, the pragmatics of computing is a means by which to typify 
political activity as distasteful, unappealing, and ineffective.

While programming is considered a transparent, neutral, highly 
controllable realm for thought and expression where production results 
in immediate gratification and something useful, politics tend to be 
seen by programmers as buggy, mediated, and tainted action clouded by 
ideology that is not productive of much of anything while it 
insidiously works against true forms of free thought. You can't tweak 
politics in an elegant and creative way to achieve something 
immediately gratifying, and thus it goes against everything programmers 
think and love about computing.

 Inadvertent Politics of Contrast

 I now shift my discussion to assess the political implications of 
FOSS. The multiple uses of FOSS and its transposability and visibility 
are simultaneously conditions for what I call a cultural critique 
through contrast.

To explain what I mean, let's visit our own field for a moment. 
Anthropology has historically unsettled our essentialist and universal 
assumptions about human behavior by contrasting them with those of 
people from other places (cf. Benedict 1959, Mead 1928, Marcus and 
Fisher 1986, Mauss 1967, Sahlins 1976).

The disciplinary vehicle for this, it has been noted eloquently, is 
ethnography which "serves at once to make the familiar strange and the 
strange familiar" (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992:6). FOSS, among many 
other things, functions as a form of critical ethnography writ large.

While a critical anthropology is based on a consciousness of its 
politics, FOSS inadvertently has become a vehicle by which to rethink 
the naturalness of intellectual property law. It exemplifies what 
Marcus and Fisher call "defamiliarization by cross cultural 
juxtaposition" (1986), the difference being that juxtaposition arises 
out of an accidental cultural and not intentional anthropological 
practice.

Its ability to conjure contrast, I argue, results from its marked 
visibility and transportability partially borne from its purported 
political neutrality.

Free and open-source hackers have been effective in coding FOSS as 
politically removed -- a "neutrality" made material and socially 
effective through licenses. The effect is that the freedom within FOSS 
exudes a similar productive ambiguity that Prakash (1999) locates in 
the sign of science in his study of Indian nationalists who directed 
the icon of sciences as "the sign of rationality and progress" towards 
justifying their anti-colonial liberation aspirations.

Due to this productive ambiguity that resists political affiliation of 
left, right and liberal, FOSS has circulated extensively, though the 
relevance of freedom and openness mutates along the way of its 
excursions, fueling economic, governmental, popular, and leftist 
articulations as justifications and alternatives.

 'Market Agility'

 For example, I.B.M and other business that use FOSS emphasize it for 
its "market agility" and its ability to empower the consumer. I.B.M. 
adopts a neoliberal language to interpret the significance of FOSS to 
its consumer publics.

On the opposite side of the spectrum, leftist media websites such as 
lndymedia.net run almost entirely on FOSS while its activists adore it 
for its subversive, anticapitalist potentialities. The commons 
movement, centered on the idea of creating public goods to reinvigorate 
democratic principles, pragmatically built their licenses and 
justifications around the already existing practice of FOSS (Bollier 
2002, Lessig 2001).

Each group situates it in ways that empowers and legitimates their own 
aspirations, but through their particular efforts they extend FOSS to 
wider publics. And though there are distinct imaginaries grafted onto 
FOSS, certain implicit political messages within the labor and law of 
free and open source software also gain visible prominence.

Through its visibility and use by multiple publics, FOSS makes 
apparent, and to some extent "strange," the assumptions that dominate 
the social landscape of intellectual property. It opens to critical 
scrutiny the liberal moral "habituations" that stringent intellectual 
property instruments are indispensable to foster innovation and 
creation.

Thousands upon thousands of developers laboring to make software libre 
provides potent critiques and viable alternatives since it is realized 
by the social performance of collective labor and licenses that others 
can and now do use. Perhaps most significant is that FOSS enjoins 
others to become part of its performance in various ways: use of FOSS 
artifacts and licenses, participation in projects, reflection of the 
larger meaning of collaboration, and the reuse (and reconfigurations) 
of its licenses for other non-technological objects, such as college 
courseware, music, books, and movies.

Actualized labor in practice undermines current theories of labor in 
the law whose nature is to pose singular models for the proper 
relationship between legal means and ends.

Licenses like the copyleft rupture the naturalized "form" of 
intellectual property by inverting its ossified and singular 
logic-through the very use of intellectual property-a move not unlike 
Marx's inversion of Hegelian idealism, which retained Hegel's 
dialectical method to repose history not as an expression of the 
"Absolute Idea" but as humanity's collective creation through labor.

Using copyright as its vehicle, the copyleft places copyright literally 
on its head and in the process demystifies copyright's "absolute" 
theory of economic incentive. The copyleft says, we are not the passive 
"subjects" of an almighty, unchangeable law, but actually can create 
the law to serve us for other ends: in the case of FOSS, that of free 
speech.

While many hackers might think you can't tweak politics in an elegant 
and creative way to achieve something immediate and useful, Richard 
Stallman, the mastermind behind the copyleft, showed through a clever 
legal hack that politics can be gratifying and indeed very productive.

 Conclusion

 Over the course of the last thirty years, anthropologists have 
increasingly left for the field by staying home. Research in medical 
clinics, scientific laboratories, online communities, city 
neighborhoods, and high schools, to name a few such locations, has 
shifted the meaning of anthropological practice, the implications of 
theoretical critique, and the identity of the ethnographer (Marcus 
1999).

The nature of this research makes more clear that normative and 
ubiquitous regimes of values, such as those posed by liberalism, 
science, and capitalism, have a much more variegated expression when 
located in particular institutions, social groups, or an assemblage 
between them.

In other words, the local is as much here as it is "there" in foreign 
or small scale societies, and part of the task of a critical 
anthropology is to conjoin the exercise of anthropological critique 
with the cultural processes of "defamiliarization" and critique located 
in historical practice, not in theory.

The source and the effect of political agnosticism has been the focus 
of this piece. FOSS, I have argued, is one local instantiation of 
liberal values, a rearticulation centered on reposing the relationship 
between intellectual property and free speech law by redirecting the 
use of licenses to protect expressive activity.

 Source Code as Speech

 FOSS sensibilities of freedom and the growing hacker assertion that 
source code is speech, largely regimented as politically neutral 
through liberal values, are also rooted in methodologies, values, and 
techniques constituted around the act of writing code and expressed 
visibly in a wider public social sphere of hacking.

Through FOSS' visibility, circulation, and use, the juridical 
understanding of free speech is shifting while some of the ingrained 
assumptions of intellectual property law have already been partially 
destabilized, the wider effect of which has been to open up a social 
space for new legal possibilities.

The feature of critique that arises through the cultural struggle to 
recreate and redefine meanings and associations, I have come to learn, 
is much more ephemeral than the supposed ephemera of virtual social 
spaces.

It is a moment in time whose nature is to shock other "socially 
situated actors" into a process of cultural rethinking that shifts 
practices in other areas of social life. The nature of the shock is to 
lose its "shock value" so to speak and sink back into the natural state 
of affairs as soon as a set of practices are more or less stabilized.

The journalistic, popular, and native narrative retelling of the rise 
and importance of new practices or political sensibilities often don't 
integrate this moment of cultural defamiliarization, focusing instead 
on the rubric of great men and their ideas or explanation through 
unintended consequences that may not have been part of its genesis.

Thus, the task of a critical anthropology within complex multi-cultural 
societies is to keep a mindful orientation toward these powerful yet 
elusive processes of cultural contrast and defamiliarization so that 
its politics can be more effectively known, acknowledged, and directed.