Roots Culture: Free Software Vibrations "inna Babylon" ======================================================
by Armin Medosch
In this article I want to focus on free software as a culture. My
first reason for doing so is to make it very clear that there is a
difference between open source and free software, a difference that
goes beyond the important distinction made by Richard Stallman. [1]
His ideas have grown legs and now the notion of free software (with
'free' as in 'freedom') has been taken further in ways he could not
have imagined. Second, I want to show that at least a specific part
of the free software scene shows all the traits of a culture; this is understood by protagonists of the scene and is made explicit through
the way they act. With software development rooted in culture, it
becomes a discipline distinct from engineering, and is invested with
social and cultural values.
Rasta Roots and the 'Root' in Computing
=======================================
The first part of the title, 'Roots Culture', is designed to resonate
with the hacker pride of being 'root' on a Unix system, and with
Rastafarian reggae 'roots' culture. In a file system, root is the
uppermost directory, the one from where all other sub-directories
originate. In Unix-style operating systems (including GNU/Linux),
'root' is also the name of the super-user account, the user who has
all rights in all modes and who can set up and administrate other
accounts. Roots reggae is a specific type of reggae music with heavy
bass lines and African rhythmical influences.
Roots reggae originated in Jamaica, and is closely associated with
Rastafari. This is sometimes described as either a sect/religion, or
a subculture, but neither of these definitions can fully do justice
to the diversity of this phenomenon. Therefore it is better to
follow Paul Gilroy who suggests that Rastafari be understood as a
popular movement whose "language and symbols have been put to a broad
and diverse use". [2] It originated in Jamaica in the 1930s, and took
some inspiration from the black nationalism, PanAfricanism and
Ethiopianism of Marcus Garvey. Through Rastafari, the African
Caribbean working class found a way of fermenting resistance to the
continued legacy of colonialism, racism and capitalist exploitation.
It is eclectic and culturally hybrid, drawing from a range of
influences such as African drumming styles, African traditions in
agriculture, food and social organisation, [3] and American Black
music styles such as R&B and soul. The central trope of the
Rastafari narrative is that the Rastas are the 12th tribe of Judah,
living in captivity in Babylon, and longing to go back to Africa,
identified as a mythical Ethiopia.
Paul Gilroy (borrowing a phrase from Edward Said) describes Rastas as
an "interpretive community". The ideas and stories of Rastafari
"brought philosophical and historical meaning to individual and
collective action". [4] Through the enormous success of reggae as a
form of popular music, particularly the work of Bob Marley and the
Wailers, Rastafari became popular throughout the world in the 1970s;
now, many non-Jamaicans sport Rasta hairstyles and dreadlocks, and
dedicate themselves to the music and the activity of ganja smoking.
In the UK, versions of Rasta culture now span all ages and
ethnicities; [5] it is probably, by consensus, the most popular
subculture in Britain today. Aspects of it have been heavily
commercialised and roots reggae has therefore been unfashionable for
a while. It has, however, made a strong comeback recently. The
reason for this can only be that it is more than a music style or a
fashion (not everybody with dreadlocks is a Rasta and not every Rasta
wears 'dreads'): it is a culture in a true and deep sense (the
meaning of which I will come back to later). 'Roots' influences can
now be found in hip-hop, jungle, drum & bass, 2Step and other forms
of contemporary urban music.
Both notions, the 'roots' in computing and in Rastafari, are not to
be understood in any literal or narrow meaning, but as points of
association and affinity. Knotted together, the two narrations form
a crucial potential point of departure for the radical social
imaginary. [6] Neither Rastafari nor hacker cultures are without
problems of their own. Rastafari, for instance, is a very male
culture, where homophobia is rife and women suffer a subordinated
role in the midst of a supposed liberation struggle. [7] I have
chosen the Rastafari theme for a number of reasons. The main one is
that it has developed a language of revolution which it uses to very effectively recount, judging from the massive reception it has got so
far, stories about political resistance and the struggle for freedom,
peace and justice. These accounts have resonated far beyond Jamaica
and the urban African Caribbean communities in the US and Britain.
Roots reggae, as music and as a liberatory mythmaking machine, has a
huge influence in Africa and Latin America.
Rastafari lends itself to be adopted by other communities and
cultures due to its eclectic and hybrid nature. The experience of
diaspora, central to the Rastafari story, is shared by many people
who feel displaced and uprooted. This is understood well by some of
the musical protagonists of roots music, who encourage 'togetherness'
of all people who feel alienated in the societies where they live.
In the words of Humble Lion from the Aba Shanti Sound System from
south London: "Ultimately, people who are like us, who hold similar
attitudes, will gravitate towards us, because we are aiming for the
same virtues that they are, and this creates a something a lot better
than what society stands for. Right now, it's obvious that our
societies are controlled by money, polarised, xenophobic. The major
world powers back their puppet leaders and the media sanitises,
separates 'spectators' from reality. [...] I have to say that now it
is not only the black youths who are suffering in this land, so to
me, increasingly, the true inner meaning of Rasta is not concerned
with colour". [8]
Hackers, young and old, have their own reasons to feel alienated in
society, one of which is the misrepresentation of their creed in the
media. Originally 'hacking' meant nothing else but feeling
impassioned about writing software to the extent of pursuing this
interest sometimes outside the norms, which would not necessarily
imply anything illegal. The original 'hackers' such as Richard
Stallman were employees of research institutions like the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) anyway, so they could
hardly be seen as being outside the state system. But during the
1980s, in the course of the boom in computer science research
(sponsored by the military pursuing projects such as Strategic
Missile Defense and Artificial Intelligence), [9] the mood in these
research ivory towers, which had been fairly liberal in the 1970s,
changed. Mavericks like Stallman left, and hackers outside the state-sanctioned system were increasingly perceived as a potential
threat to national security.
From the mid-1980s onwards, secret services and other law enforcement
agencies started their 'war against hacking', with a compliant mass
media doing their best to stigmatise hackers as criminals, or even as terrorists. [10] With the mass adoption of the Internet in the 1990s,
a new breed of hacker emerged, so-called 'script kiddies', who did
not have to develop deep knowledge of computers because hacking tools
had become relatively easily obtainable. Script kiddies, not
considered 'real' hackers but instead called 'crackers', have
developed an obsession with breaking into web servers, obtaining
'root' privileges and inscribing digital graffiti on the web server's
homepage. This activity served as legitimation for the strengthening
of the legal regime, and allowed centrally owned mass media to
continue, in full force, their denouncement of computer subcultures
in general. Welcome to Babylon!
Hacker Ethics
=============
I do not want to enter into a discussion here of what 'true' hackers
are, especially since the factional infighting between hackers
sometimes rages over topics such as which 'free' version of BSD is
the better or 'truer' one, which seems rather pointless to the
noninitiated. [11] Nevertheless, a common theme can be identified
that transcends internal schisms in the hacker community. Most
hackers share an ethical code in relation to computers and networks.
Central to this ethical code is that hackers do not disrupt the flow
of information and do not destroy data. It is not my intention to
idealise hackers as freedom fighters of the information age, but it
must be said that their ethics stand in marked contrast to the
behaviour of the state and certain industries who do their best to
erect barriers, disrupt communication flows and enclose data by
various means, including threats of breaking into the computers of
users who participate in file-sharing networks. This hacker ethic
has been a shared commitment to a 'live and let live principle'. It
is an ethos that is born out of love for the craft of hacking and the
desire to let as many people as possible benefit from the sources of
knowledge. Hackers do not represent one homogenous community; they
are split and divided into many subgroups, but are united in that for
them hacking is more than just writing code. It is a way of life, it
has its own politics and it has many characteristics of a culture.
Hacker culture has developed its own ways of speaking, certain types
of 'geek' humour, and even some sort of a dress code. Hackers
regularly meet at conventions (some highly publicised, some more
subterranean) with an atmosphere more resembling a picnic of a large
family or a tribe than any sort of formal 'meeting'. From this point
of view, there are similarities between hackers and Rastafari.
The Hijacking of Free Software
==============================
As Ur-hacker Richard Stallman makes clear whenever he speaks in
public, there is not much difference between 'open source' and 'free'
software in the way the software is developed technically. Most free
and open source software packages are also protected by the same
licence, the General Public Licence (GPL) developed by Stallman with
the support of Columbia University law professor Eben Moglen. Yet,
according to Stallman, there is a profound difference insofar that
'free' software is linked with a political concept of freedom centred
on freedom of speech. The term 'open source' was introduced by a
group of probusiness computer libertarians in direct opposition to
this political position. Eric Raymond and others proposed the use of
the term 'open source' to make the idea of releasing source code and
developing software collaboratively more appealing to American IT
investors. This move by the proponents of open source was
fantastically successful. It opened the way for IPOs of Linux
companies at the height of the new economy boom, and drew the
attention of companies like Sun and IBM to the existence of open
source as a potential antidote to the market dominance of Microsoft.
It is easy to see how open source lends itself to be adopted by
businesses much more easily than free software. Open source gained
the support of the industry and of many software developers who
mainly want to be able to make a living from their programming
skills. Many open source developers make it very clear that they see themselves as engineers and engineers only; that they have no
interest in politics and are glad to leave that to the politicians.
Since the launch of the open source bandwagon, Richard Stallman has
been on a kind of a mission to remind the world that free software is
about 'free' as in free speech "and not free as in beer". He also
keeps reminding us that the Linux kernel could not have been written
without the GNU tools and libraries, and therefore it should always
be called GNU/Linux. However, Stallman's style of oratory and his
evangelical zeal do not appeal to everyone. The promotion of the
type of freedom that is implied with free software needs support. It
benefits from being linked to other social concepts of freedom.
The Whitewash: Hegemonic Computer and Internet Discourse and the ================================================================
Denial of Difference
====================
Constructions of race in the form of mental images are much more
than simple indexes of biological or cultural sameness. They are
the constructs of the social imagination, mapped onto geographical
regions and technological sites. [12]
The predominant social imagination of computer science and the
Internet is a whitewash. This whitewash is the product of an
entanglement of historical developments, the creation of certain
'facts on the ground' and a hegemonic discourse led from the centres
of Western power (which in my definition includes Japan). The
starting point here is the development of Western rationality and
science from the early Renaissance onwards, associated with heroes of
the various scientific revolutions, such as Descartes, Leibnitz,
Newton. Cartesianism, with its positing of an abstract space of
reasoning through which alone the divine rules of nature can be
identified, must bear the brunt of the criticism. [13] As Donna
Haraway has pointed out, the rise of rationalism and the scientific
worldview had, from the very beginning, negative dialectics inscribed
into it:
... I remember that anti-Semitism and misogyny intensified in the
Renaissance and Scientific Revolution of early modern Europe, that
racism and colonialism flourished in the travelling habits of the cosmopolitan Enlightenment, and that the intensified misery of
billions of men and women seems organically rooted in the freedoms
of transnational capitalism and technoscience. [14]
Computer science has its roots in the military-industrial complex of
the Cold War era. The dominant social imagination was one of
containment, of separating the world into zones of influence by the
United States and the Soviet Union, divided by electronic fences and
locked into each other by the threat of mutual annihilation. Early
computer projects received huge funding increments when it was
recognised that computers could play an indispensable role in air
defence and 'smart' guided ballistic missile systems. [15] The cyborg
discourse of Cold War think-tanks such as Rand Corporation and
research centres like the MIT generated the imaginary signification
of Artificial Intelligence, a brain without a body, a sentient being
that is not born, but is constructed by scientists in the laboratory.
It is easy to see how archaic religious ideas live on in this
'dream' of AI that conducts itself so rationally. [16] The computer
brain has a godlike omni-science. With the Internet conceived in the
same laboratories of the Western scientific elite, sponsored by
Defense Advanced Projects Agency (DARPA), the AI brain grows nerves
that will soon stretch around the globe and, via satellite, would
gain a godlike viewpoint in space, from which earth looks like a
little, fragile blue ball. Omni-science plus omni-presence equals omni-potency, but only just, only maybe, and mostly in the
imagination of the protagonists of this 'vision'.
The Internet, based on Western communication protocols constructed by
Western males, is imagined to be populated mostly by white and
relatively affluent people. This was maybe the case in 1995, when approximately 20 million people used the Internet, but certainly does
not match the true demography of the Net in 2005, with its users
numbering more than 600 million, and the highest growth in numbers in
countries such as China and India. The whitewashed mass media
discourse continues to associate the Net with a Western and
particularly American worldview and an ultra-libertarian,
anti-socialist political programme. The ingrained assumption of a non-gendered, non-ethnically defined cyberspace automatically makes
cyberspace 'white', a colour blindness that is inherently racist.
ACADEMIC TECHNO-TOPIA
=====================
Bobby Reason was born weak from typhus fever and unable to crawl
away from his body of infection. He spends his time passing
voltage through the pathways of least resistance to help him
amplify, copy, and replay sounds. Extending his ears to where his
eyes used to be, he forms lenses to put in place of his
imagination. Whilst doing so he manages to split light and holds
the lower end of the spectrum (radiation) with special tools he
forged out of the Industrial Revolution to replace his hands. And
after all is done, he gets out the air-freshener to replace his
nose. [17]
From the early to mid-1990s, the Internet spawned an elaborate
theoretical discourse about the Net in print form, and to a large
extent, on the Net as well. The more mainstream currents of this
discourse hailed the Net as a force that would bring about a more
democratic and egalitarian world. Unfortunately, again the Net was
imagined as a homogenous zone, free of connotations of gender, race
and class divisions. [18] The only distinction that was identified
was the existence of a 'digital divide': the realisation that the
promise of the Net could not be realised until all people had equal
access to it. The debate around the digital divide was well
intentioned, but catalysed the proliferation of another version of
Western hegemonic thinking with its polarised rhetoric of 'access':
there is the Net, based on open standards, egalitarian, global,
democratic, hard to censor, and 'we' have to give 'those people' down
in Africa or elsewhere access to it. This unilateral, US/Eurocentric
version of Internet 'freedom' did not even attempt to imagine the
possibility that the Net itself could become a more diverse cultural
space, and that even its technical protocols might become
'mongrelised'. The schema of the Internet, narrated as the success
story of Western rationality and the scientific worldview, did not
allow such digressions.
Theoretical Internet discourse very early on embraced open standards,
free software and open source. The principles embodied in the
Internet Protocols and the Gnu General Public Licence (GPL) would
guarantee freedom of expression and communication. The discourse
produced by Internet intellectuals tended towards highlighting
abstract principles enshrined in code. In doing so, the discourse,
by default, prioritised its own inherited values of 500 years of book
culture. American cyber-libertarians even went so far to describe
the space of lived reality by the derogatory term 'meatspace'. The well-meaning left-liberal discourse about the Net found itself in the
classic Cartesian trap of mind-body dualism.
The Internet-left adopted Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) as
a potential saviour from the corporate world, yet by doing so they
followed entrenched, existent patterns of thought. Too often, only
the abstract qualities of FLOSS are highlighted: the 'viral'
character of the GPL, the properties of the Net of being highly
'distributed', the 'meshed network topology' in wireless networking,
the importance of 'copyleft principles'. [19] What gets much less consideration is that those principles and abstract values in and of
themselves don't do anything at all without human agency, without
being embedded in communities who have internalised the values
contained in those acronyms. The proactive making and doing by
humans, in other words 'work', is once more written out of the story.
The desires and passions invested in the writing of programme code
get little 'air time' in FLOSS discourse. In this sense a certain
type of FLOSS discourse can be understood as another prolongation of
the project of modernity, with its preference for abstract reasoning
and the codification of knowledge. The values and norms of society
are formulated as the Bill of Rights or as the Human Rights Charter
of the United Nations, so-called "inalienable" and "universal" rights
and freedoms, but which de facto exist mainly on a piece of paper
that politicians like to quote in Sunday speeches, and which are
quickly forgotten overnight.
The relationship between code as programme code and as an ethical or
legal code, and the importance that it is assigned by Western
societies, is a very broad topic that I cannot explore in detail
here. I will however assert that, generally speaking, putting one's
faith in abstract [20] truth only, one that has cut its ties with
lived reality and become transcendent to society, implies the
creation of a form of absolutism. The divine power of God returns
through the back door into 'rational' discourse. Abstract,
transcendent truth takes away the individual and collective freedom
of people to make their own decisions and subjects them to the rule
of a truth that is already given, independent of history and the
situated-ness of being. [21]
If FLOSS discourse cuts itself off from the roots of lived culture,
it empties itself of all meaning. The 'free' and 'libre' in FLOSS is
not given once and for all by being laid down in the GPL; it is a
freedom that needs to be constantly worked out and given new meanings
by being connected to situations, to concrete social struggles. The
content of this freedom cannot be understood in the abstract, it
needs to be created in the actuality of sensual and bodily existence,
which is, by the way, the only thing that really makes 'sense'. [22]
By following the default patterns of Western rationality, academic
FLOSS discourse risks generating a vacuous fiction, an idealisation
that lacks body, guts, feelings, pain, joy and anything else that
makes life worth living.
Culture and the Social Imaginary
================================
The term 'culture' can subsume all those human activities that are
not directly utilitarian, which do not serve, in a narrow way, the
goal of material survival. Yet at the same time culture is an
indispensable component of human life, without which communities or
societies could not survive. Culture provides the cohesive element
for social groups; it motivates the actions of individuals and groups.
I use the term motivation here not in a trivial sense, as when an
athlete is asked by television sportscasters about what 'motivates'
him or her. What I have in mind is closer to the German word
Leitmotif that roughly translates as 'guiding idea'. But it would be
wrong to imagine those 'motives' as something outside culture or
social reality. They are at the centre of the social life of
societies, anchoring it, but also giving it direction. This concept
of motives is closely related to the concept of values. It would be
wrong to say that something is 'based on' values, because values can
be both implicit and explicit, internal and external. Here we cannot
use architectural metaphors of foundation and superstructure.
Culture is not the only, but clearly one of the most important
forces, behind the creation of values and motivations, of 'making
sense' and 'giving meaning' to our existence. Society, in a constant
state of self-creation, develops social imaginary significations
through cultural feedback loops. In this sense, culture is not just
limited to cultural representations in various media forms, but is
constantly realised in the actions and interactions of everyday life.
Culture 'finds expression' in various ways, in how people dress,
what they eat and how it is prepared, in social protocols and forms
of behaviour. The social and cultural knowledge of a society is
expressed in those forms, in both the patterns of behaviour of
everyday life and in explicit cultural representations.
Unfortunately, Western society has developed a hierarchy of different
forms of knowledge, with hard science at the top, social sciences
somewhere in the middle and culture per se at the bottom. The
positivistic divide claims that what can be described in scientific
language, logic, mathematics, theorems, is the only form of objective knowledge, whereas the rest is regarded as the soft underbelly, as a
somehow lesser form of knowledge. Philosophers and historians of
science have argued that the claims that science progresses only
through rational methods and in logical steps are not true. Many
other factors inform the conduct of scientific research and
development: politics and the economy, cultural and sociological
factors, funding and institutional structures, belief systems and
tacit knowledge. Despite the well known works of authors such as
Kuhn and Feyerabend, and later Latour and Haraway, and an ongoing
investigation into what 'informs' science from many different
viewpoints (anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, etc.), the
results of techno-science are invariably presented as ideologically
neutral and free of contingent forms of social knowledge.
Computer science, which is conventionally understood to be closer to engineering than to basic research, is presenting itself as a hard
science. The conventional views about software development deny the
link between software and culture as something that comes before the
actual creation of the code. Yes, software is understood to
facilitate the production of cultural representations and to
influence culture by the tools that it makes available, but it is
usually not seen to be a product of social imaginary significations.
I have tried to describe the true content of culture as a form of
knowledge, as 'immaterial'. Nevertheless, culture is quite obviously
also 'material' and has various economic aspects. Cultural values
define which objects are desirable, what gets produced and what is
left out. The production of cultural representations is of course a
form of human labour and therefore always includes economic
transactions, independent of the form of the exchange value, if it is
based on money or other forms of exchange. The commodification of
the production of culture in capitalist economies has been criticised
by the Frankfurt School in the early 20th century. Now, at the
beginning of the 21st century, this work, even if some of it is
flawed, [23] gains heightened significance as the commodification of
culture reaches unprecedented levels.
The culture industry has been re-branded as 'creative industry', and
is seen by many governments of overdeveloped countries, particularly
in Britain, as a central plank in government strategies for economic
growth and urban development (i.e., gentrification). Problems are
aggravated by the aggressive conduct of the copyright industries, and
the power of media conglomerates who have become highly integrated
and own production companies, distribution channels and advertising
agencies. Each of these industries has become highly oligopolistic,
even monopolistic, and their combined influence greatly controls what
can be seen or heard, and how it is distributed. New borders have
been created by various means such as copyright, patents or the
gatekeeper functions of communication providers. The exchange and
transmission of cultural knowledge is now in danger of being
interrupted or seriously hampered by those powerful formations. [24]
One could go even further into the darkness of these developments and
predict a closure of the cultural production of social imaginary significations.
I have described two processes: one that excludes cultural knowledge
from the official scientific body of knowledge; and one that encloses
cultural knowledge in the products of the military-entertainment
complex, a.k.a the creative industries. [25] Through both, exclusion
and enclosure, what could happen is a lockdown on the creation of new
meanings, of new powerful significations that 'rock the world'.
There are already strong signs of such a lockdown in the mass
conformity that is promoted by the mass media, which could only be
expected and has been going on for a long time.
It was disillusioning for many to see how the Internet has been tamed
within a very short time span and risks becoming just another agent
of conformity. The centralisation of Internet resources, whose
content is created by its users, but whose surplus value is harvested
with enormous financial gain by Google and others, plays into the
hands of a further centralisation: web sites that are not ranked
highly on Google appear to be peripheral; information which cannot be
found easily on the symbolic battleground of the web appears to be
marginal. However, I think that any lockdown can only be temporal
and not total; that cultural production based on a more radical
social imaginary will not cease but is currently operating at a
reduced level. The combined totalities of government and large
corporations, both increasingly using the same forms of bureaucratic
rule and threatening to choke life out of the cities and the
countryside, motivate powerful counter reactions. Many people find
inspiration in the language of resistance created by African
Caribbeans and African Americans and expressed in musical styles such
as roots reggae, hip-hop and underground house.
Rasta Science
=============
The Rastas have found their own way of criticising power structures,
the class and knowledge systems of 'Babylon'. Rasta-inspired female
dub poet Jean Breeze writes:
Four hundred years from the plantation whip
To the IMF grip
Aid travels with a bomb
Watch out
Aid travels with a bomb
They rob and exploit you of your own
Then send it back as a foreign loan
Interest is on it, regulations too
They will also
Decide your policy
For you.
[26]
Rejecting the language of the slavemaster, Rastas have created
alternative linguistic reference systems based on Jamaican patois and
Creole English. For instance, Rastas say 'overstanding' instead of 'understanding', because the latter would imply submission. The
Internet, of course, becomes the 'Outernet', an interview an
'outerview'. [27]
Consistent in this critique of the West is the critique of the
murderous potential of technoscience and of industrial scientific
warfare in the interest of capital. Whereas some fans of Bob Marley
drifted towards a hippie-esque type of environmentalism and roots
reggae lost its hegemonic grip around 1980-81 (Gilroy, 1986), the
sharp edge of this critical spirit was carried on by dub poets, disc
jockeys and 'toasters' working with mobile sound systems and on
pirate radio.
The 'dub' style created in the early 1970s by King Tubby and Lee
'Scratch' Perry introduced a technological element into reggae music,
keeping the 'roots', but working with echo, tapes, noises, reverb and
other special effects. Music making became a 'science' [28]; in the
1980s this was reflected by the names of dub artists such as Mad
Professor and The Scientist. Besides the critique of Western
capitalist science as producer of weapons of mass destruction, a
frequent theme during the nuclear arms race in the 1980s, dub artists
created their own 'science', for instance the African Arkology of Lee
'Scratch' Perry:
I am the first scientist to mix the reggae and find out what the
reggae really is. The recording studio was my spaceship that was
polluted by the dreadlocks in the moonlight. [29]
The culture of sound systems playing out in the open or at cultural
centres (almost never in regular clubs) introduced another
'scientific' element into roots culture: the optimisation of a system
of speakers, special effect boxes and amplifiers for the specific
needs of roots reggae and dub. The effect of such systems can only
be translated into English by a poet. Linton Kwesi Johnson
wrote:
Thunder from a bass drum soundin'
Lightnin' from a trumpet and a organ
Bass and rhythm and trumpet double up
Keep up with drums for a deep pound searchin'
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