[FC-discuss] "Change of the Century: Free Software and the Positive Possibility"

[Matthew Z]

http://www.metamute.org/en/Change-of-the-Century-Free-Software-and-the-Positive-Possibility

If anyone has read this, I would love to hear some thoughts (especially from
those ironic apologists who support notions of "free culture" as guided by
capital). Here is a potent excerpt (I'll make bold key areas):

THE LOGIC AND RHETORIC OF FREEDOM

Considering FLOSS (Free/Libre and Open Source Software) within this zone,
two primary conditions are exposed. On one hand, there are the technical
conditions, the standards, that are necessary for the perpetuation of the
particular technological, informational and communications infrastructure.
On the other hand, these wires transmit a rhetoric and logic that purports
to be counter cultural or a 'social movement', based upon the alternative
use of legal principles. On investigation, this 'social movement' appears as
broadly constructive of the imperial regime and its pursuance of the
creation and sustenance of global market conditions.

The narrative of FLOSS and law extends particular American notions of
innovation and Intellectual Property (IP) across the globe. This logic
pilots the technological processes and their protrayal in popular
storytelling, feeding back into the broader meaning of freedom in today's
globalised world. It is this telling of freedom and its deference to legal
principle that seems to prevent us from encountering any positive
possibility.

Here law plays a unifying role. It presents a linear and unified story that
masks over many of these signal flashes throughout the network. This
approach reduces the contrast space of the enquiry by constraining both its
presuppositions and the possible open alternatives. The discourse
surrounding FLOSS is limited to only considering FLOSS as an alternative to
forms of production bounded within the walls of the modern corporation and
does not conceive of alternatives within the postmodern forms.10 The detail
of time sharing's history and critical opalescence defies both the linear
approach and the sort of unification that the popular legal story portrays.

In the popular narrative, 'social movements' such as the Free Software
Foundation (FSF), and its relations, the Creative Commons and the Electronic
Frontier Foundation, act as 'patriots' and guardians of 'our' law and
freedom.11 This freedom is bound intimately with the logic of open democracy
and with free and open markets. Witness pop professor and driving force
behind the Creative Commons and Electronic Frontier 'movements', Lawrence
Lessig, writing about his trip to the World Social Forum in Brazil in June
2005 under the banner of 'The People Own Ideas'.12 Under the subheading
'Truly Free Market', Lessig gets to the core of this freedom: it is about
technology, wealth, efficiency and growth. In rejuvenating a long standing
U.S. Republican logic, this rhetoric seeks to justify the link between
science and commercial prosperity, both national and global, by invoking a
moral and political vision of freedom. In its shamelessly American vision:
'the kids at Porto Alegre' find their solace in a 'free culture'; an
'economy that governed creative industries for at least the first 186 years
of the American republic.'13

The rhetoric of FLOSS proposes the technical device (the software) and the
literary device (the licence) as machines of liberty and freedom. 'Free as
in speech and not as in beer', locates FLOSS firmly within the tradition of
U.S. constitutionalism. Lessig envisages the 'Future of Ideas' concerning
'our future' as a 'free society' in the age of the internet as a
constitutional question – explicitly, then, as an American constitutional
question determined by reference to the intent of 'our founders'.14 This
spreading of American freedom is consistent with the imperial, supranational
form of the global constitution, Empire, and its heritage in an American
constitutional genealogy.15
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