[continued from previous message]

Ridim of a tropical, electrical storm
Cool doun to de base of struggle
Flame ridim of historical yearnin'
Flame ridim of de time of turnin'
Measurin' de time for bombs and for burnin'
[30]

Sound systems have allowed roots and dub reggae styles to survive in
times when they were less popular. Reggae dances in the UK were
stigmatised by the press as notoriously violent, so that either
Thatcher's police shut down venues or the venues cancelled raves
because they feared raids by the police. Sound system culture also
highlights a number of other important aspects. Sound systems
usually have a community that follows them wherever they play. The
music played is often commercially not available, except on cheap
cassettes or nowadays on home-burned CDs sold at the gigs. The DJ's
play 'dub plates', specially cut vinyls that exist only in small
numbers. The music can be heard best on the sound system and is not
really for home consumption. By thus keeping the music rare, sound
system events have aspects of cathartic rituals, an experience of
love, strength and unity. Despite attempts to commercialise sound
systems, this spirit is still very much alive at the annual Notting
Hill Carnival in London and other carnivals around the country, the
flame kept burning by sound systems such as Aba Shanti. At this
year's Carnival, a carnival of anniversaries (40 years of Notting
Hill Carnival, 170 years of abolition of slavery), Aba Shanti showed
that they have lost nothing of their political edge, rocking a crowd
of thousands with thunderous bass rhythms, and lyrics about the war
in Iraq.

The collective identification with roots culture leads also to
another interesting phenomenon, the importance of the 'Riddim'. The
riddim is the instrumental track of a record, stripped off the
vocals. It is still normal today in Jamaica that certain riddims are especially popular at a certain time, so that often hundreds of
interpreters record versions with their own lyrics on top of one of
the popular riddims. This shows a direct relationship with the
'copyleft' principle in free software.

SOFTWARE AS CULTURE
===================

This software is about resistance inna Babylon world which tries to
control more and more the way we communicate and share information
and knowledge. This software is for all those who cannot afford to
have the latest expensive hardware to speak out their words of
consciousness and good will. [31]

A number of artists/engineers have started to bring software
development back into the cultural realm, and they are infusing
culture into software. But 'they' are a very diverse collection of
people and it would be wrong to categorise them as a movement or a
group. I will focus on a few specific individuals and projects. As
tempting as it always is for writers to extract abstract common
properties from a social phenomenon, I will also try to control this
impulse because I think it is much too early for any kind of a more
systematic approach.

One of the earliest works in this area, to my knowledge, was carried
out by a group called Mongrel, which was founded in 1996 in London.
The group consists of Graham Harwood, Matsuko Yokokij, Matthew
Fuller, Richard Pierre Davis and Mervin Jarman. Coming from
different ethnic and cultural backgrounds (Irish-English, Japanese,
West Indian), they choose to call themselves 'mongrel', a term that
is highly loaded with resonances towards a more open racism when it
is applied not to dogs but to humans. Their inquiry started with the realisation that software tools are not neutral but charged with
social significations.

In their earlier work they focused on laying bare those
significations. A re-engineered version of Photoshop would become a construction kit for ethnic identities; a spoof of a popular search
engine would react very sensitively to certain search terms. If
somebody was searching for "sex", they would be directed to a website
which at first appeared like a genuine porn website but subsequently
revealed itself as a work about the construction of gendered
identities. Racist search terms such as 'Aryan' would lead to
similar results, bringing up aggressive, but in a certain way also
subtle, anti-racist web pages.

Mongrel never went the easy way of reproducing the clichés of Western
educated liberalism. Their work attacked the 'tolerance' of the
middle classes as much as anything else. The name is the programme.
By calling themselves 'mongrels', they claim a distance from the
norms of polite society. The aggressive 'mongrelisation' of popular
software programmes and search engines made race an issue at a time
when the Internet hype was getting into full swing and everybody was
meant to forget that such problems still existed, or made to believe
that the Internet would somehow, magically, make them disappear. One particular work, mainly created by Mervin Jarman, put the spotlight
on the death of Joy Gardner, a Jamaican woman, in police custody at
Heathrow airport. The free flow of information was contrasted with
border technologies, i.e., the techniques designed to control the
influx of people. The investigation into the social content of
software was carried further by group member Matthew Fuller who wrote
a seminal essay about MS Word in which he showed how the software
contains a flurry of social significations: assumptions about the
usage people would make, what they would try to do, what kinds of
people would want to use the software, etc. He revealed a deep
universe of meanings inscribed into what was originally a 'text
processing' software.

The Art of Listening
====================
Mongrel later moved on from the applied critique of the social
content of software to a more constructive approach: they started to
write software from scratch. The social orientation of their work
had led them to carry out workshops during which they tried to help
young people from disadvantaged backgrounds to create their own
digital representations. Doing this, they found out that no existing
software provided a useful platform. The programmes were either too
difficult to use, or they imposed a certain way of thinking that
alienated the user. They first produced a software called 'Linker'
that would allow people to put together a website full of multimedia
content without having to go into the deep end of multimedia
programming, or even learning HTML. But Linker, written in
Macromedia Director, a proprietary software, turned out not to be the
solution, merely a step towards it. Mongrel tried a radically new
approach: listening to users in order to ascertain their needs. They
used workshops to find out what people would want to do with and
expect from such a software platform – people who had previously had relatively little exposure to digital technology and who came from a
variety of backgrounds and age groups. At the same time, Mongrel
taught themselves the skill of mastering the LAMP package (an acronym
composed of the initials of various free softwares: the operating
system Linux, the webserver Apache, the database MySQL and the
scripting languages Perls, Python and HP). In a long, painstaking
process they developed Nine9, an application sitting on a web server
that provides a user-friendly interface for the creation of digital representations online.

Nine9 elegantly solves one of the core issues that plague many such
projects: the issue of categorisation. With any server-side web
application, there is always a database in the background. Computers
are completely ignorant to the type of content that is stored on
them. From texts, keywords can be extracted by some algorithms that
can be used as meta-tags to indicate the nature of the text. But
images, audio, video, don't offer this possibility. Generally the
user, who uploads 'content' to the Net, is asked to categorise the
content. This can be completely open, i.e., it is left up to the
individual user to describe or categorise the content as he or she
thinks fit; this often makes it difficult later to create a coherent
and searchable database. The other option is that the creator of the
database may have already predefined the categories, and the content
is to be uploaded within these. Mongrel had discovered that
predefined categories usually don't work with their user group. Any
system of categorisation, any taxonomy, contains so many cultural
assumptions that people who don't share the same background find it
hard to relate. Mongrel's solution was to leave the system
completely open at the start, without any categorisation, and let the
relations between different chunks of content on the server emerge
slowly, through the usage. Graphically and conceptually, the system
is an open and potentially (almost) infinite plane of nine-by-nine
squares which can be squatted by individuals or groups and filled
with content, linked beneath the surface by a sophisticated software
that compares textual 'natural language' descriptions by users and
tracks how people navigate this world.

SPECULATIVE SOFTWARE
====================

I'm in a constant state of trying to find wings that lust after the experience of transportation while being firmly rooted to the
ground. I want to see people fly from present situations to other
states of pleasure and pain. Out of the gutters and into the
stratosphere of the imaginary. [32]

After launching Nine9 in 2002, and using it in many workshops, Graham
Harwood moved on to write what he calls 'speculative software',
programmes that are highly political from the very point of their
conception. Each programme is like a thesis, a rendering visible of
relations or truths that are normally hidden. One such software, Net
Monster, sends out software search robots, a.k.a. 'spiders' or
'bots', that search the net for related combinations of two search
terms (like 'Osama bin Laden' and 'George W. Bush'), download
pictures and texts found through the search, and auto-assemble a
picture collage out of this material. The results are aesthetically
stunning, which is probably due to the fact that Harwood has always
been a very good graphic artist and has now acquired considerable
programming skills.

Rastaman Programmer
===================
The art of listening has also been cultivated by Jaromil, a.k.a.
Denis Rojo, a young Italian programmer with long dreadlocks, and the
creator of the bootable Linux distribution Dyne:bolic. For a long
time GNU/Linux was said to be very difficult to install, and this was
a serious deterrent to its adoption by less technologically
accomplished users. For quite a while now, there have existed
graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for GNU/Linux or other Unixstyle
operating systems. Once the operating system is installed on a
machine, the GUI enables users who had previously only worked with
Macs or Microsoft Windows systems to use a machine running GNU/Linux intuitively, without encountering many problems or having to learn
how to use the command shell. The concept of the bootable Linux
distribution was created to allow non-programmers to use GNU/Linux,
get a taste of it and maybe discover that it really is something for
them. A boot CD is a complete operating system plus applications on
a CD ROM. If the computer is started or restarted with the CD
inside, it boots into Linux, automatically detecting the hardware
configuration and initialising the right drivers for sound and video
card, and other components.

Jaromil gave the bootable Linux system a specific twist. His
version, called Dyne:bolic, contains a lot of software he has written
himself, that allow people to publish their own content on the Net.
His applications, the most important ones being MuSe, FreeJ and
Hascicam, put special emphasis on live multimedia content, live
mixing and streaming of audio and video.

While the promise of the Internet revolution, that everybody can
launch their own radio or TV station on the Net, might in principle
be true, it is seriously impaired by the fact that most programmes
that allow you to do so are proprietary. Here the standard litany
about the perils of proprietary software could be spelled out again,
but I will try to sum it up briefly. To obtain a licence to use
proprietary software costs money. To enable live streaming, the
source material of the software has to be encoded in the proprietary
format. The codecs are proprietary, so the dissemination of material
relies on the company strategy for future developments. It is almost
as if the content is 'owned' by the software company, or at least is
in danger of being enclosed by it. Because the source code is not
released to the public, it might contain backdoors and Trojan
functions. In short, multiple dependencies are created. Once a
self-styled Net radio maker decides on a particular software,
archives will be created in the associated format, which makes it
harder to switch later. Also, because commercial software companies
usually pay little tribute to the needs of users who are financially
less privileged, they optimise their programmes for high-bandwidth
connections and follow the rapid update cycles of the high-tech
industries.

Jaromil's Dyne:bolic boot CD and the applications on it respond to
these problems in various ways. Dyne:bolic is free software in the
Stallman sense; everything on it is in accordance with the GPL. It
runs on basically anything that has a CPU, doing particularly well on
older computers. The source code is made available. MuSe, the main
audio streaming tool, recognises the quality of a net connection and
throttles the bit rate of data transmissions accordingly. Thus, on a high-bandwidth connection, it streams out top quality audio, while on
a dodgy dial-up phone line connection, something, at least, is
guaranteed to come out at the other end.

All these decisions did not come overnight and were not made
automatically. Like Mongrel, Jaromil spends a lot of time listening
to users or potential users. In 2002, he travelled to Palestine to
find out what the people there might need or want. One of the
results of this journey was that he implemented non-Latin font sets
so that Dyne:bolic can be run using Arab, Chinese, Thai and many
other character sets in the menus. His journey to Palestine was not
out of character. Jaromil almost constantly travels. He takes his
laptop with him, but he does not lead a life normally associated with
software development. Sometimes he is offline for weeks, hanging out
in Eastern Europe or southern Italy, socialising with squatters or
music-making gipsies, sleeping on floors or outdoors. This maybe
viewed as romantic, and it probably is, but the point is that it
informs his practice. Jaromil writes:

The roots of Rasta culture can be found in resistance to slavery.
This software is not a business. This software is free as of
speech and is one step in the struggle for Redemption and Freedom.
This software is dedicated to the memory of Patrice Lumumba, Marcus
Garvey, Martin Luther King, Walter Rodney, Malcom X, Mumia Abu
Jamal, Shaka Zulu, Steve Biko and all those who still resist to
slavery, racism and oppression, who still fight imperialism and
seek an alternative to the hegemony of capitalism in our world. [33]

Digital Culture Making Good on Its Promise ==========================================
The vibrations of reggae music and a culture of resistance slowly
begin to infiltrate the clean white space of hegemonic computer and
Net discourse. The work that is done by free software developers
such as Harwood/Mongrel, Jaromil and many others is in
re-establishing the cultural roots of knowledge. This work is
carried forward by a rebellious spirit, but in a very kind and civic
way. No grand gestures, no big words, no sensationalism, no false
promises, no shouting around, and therefore, by implication, not
really having 'a career' and money to spend. This softly spoken
rebellion is carried by value systems that are non-traditional, not
imposed from above, non-ideological. As Raqs Media Collective put it
quite beautifully, one of the major aspects of free software culture
is that people 'take care', they nurse code collectively, bring
software development projects to fruition by tending towards shared
code that is almost like a poem, a writing of an Odyssey in software.
[34] People involved in large free software projects don't share code
because the GPL forces them to do so, but because they want to do it.
This investment, however it might be motivated, mongrelises
technologies and connects emotion and passion with the 'cold' logic
of computers.

The developments that are being made are not coming out of some
mysterious, anonymous techno-scientific progress but are based on
conscious choices made by users. They develop something that they
might want to use themselves, or that they see as an enriching
addition to what exists. The decision what to do, in which area to
make an investment, is a crucial one.

I'm not sure I choose a project to code/maintain--it rather chooses
me--I talk to the bloke who's fixing my boiler who's life is run by
computer timings or I talk to my mum who's worried by too many
phone calls trying to sell her things--I see stuff gaps in my
imagination or ability to think articulately about the experience
of information and guess other people feel that as well... [35]

There are other significant projects under way in many places. One
of them is the digital signal processing platform Pure Data, a
software with a graphical programming interface used by many artists.
Each programme can be stored as a 'batch' and reused by others.
Real communities of users institute themselves around such projects.
Their choices are expressions of cultural values. But those values
are not really abstract or immaterial. They are embedded in the
lived reality of the people who are involved. And so is the
technology that they create. The cultural vibe of the group gives
the development its meaning, its significance. Similar things could
be said about individuals and groups developing free networks. For
instance, at a place called c-base in Berlin, dozens of people meet
each Wednesday to build antennas, optimise routing protocols or
discuss strategies for connecting housing blocks and city boroughs.
The place is alive with activity because it provides a sense of
belonging, of identity, of direction. Work is mixed with pleasure
and fun.

Digital culture is full of promises of revolutions, but usually the
content of these revolutions is not specified. Discovering the roots
of their cultures can help free software developers discover new
meanings in the 'free' of free software, and engage with society
through their work, and not just with the abstract reality of code.
The language of revolution, of roots reggae and dub science, is
surely not the only possible inspiration but can serve as an example
for many other 'roots' still to be discovered.

NOTES
=====
[1]

'Free software' is a matter of liberty, not price.

<http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html>

[2]
Gilroy, Paul. There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack (Routledge,
1997, London) p. 251.

[3]
African ways of living were kept alive in Jamaica by the Maroons,
people who escaped from the slave plantations and survived under
harsh conditions in the hills in an agricultural subsistence economy
based on collective land ownership. Like the Maroons, religious
Rastas are vegetarians and cultivate the smoking of ganja – or the
herb of God – as a religious practice.

[4]
Gilroy, p. 251.

[5]
For instance, a few years ago a Raggastani movement emerged, young
Asians identifying themselves as Rastas.

[6]
I use the term radical social imaginary in the sense of Cornelius
Castoriadis. The term is quite central to his philosophy. It can be
defined as the source of thoughts and ideas that society has of
certain things. Used in this sense, the 'imaginary' is more than
what we conventionally associate with 'imagination'. It overlaps to
some degree with the collective subconscious but is not identical
with it. The understanding of the term also depends heavily on
Castoriadis' understanding of the 'social' and of history. He
writes: "History is creation: the creation of total forms of human
life. Social-historical forms are not 'determined' by natural or
historical 'laws'. Society is self-creation. 'That which' creates
society and history is the instituting society, as opposed to the
instituted society. The instituting society is the social imaginary
in the radical sense. The self-institution of society is the
creation of a human world: of 'things', 'reality', language, norms,
values, ways of life and death, objects for which we live and objects
for which we die..." In other words, the social imaginary
significations are what hold a society together. The social
imaginary is the source, or as Castoriadis would say, the magma of
the creation of meaning/significations/objectives. A 'radical social imaginary' is then, (and this is my interpretation) a source of new significations which overturn the already existing 'instituted'
society. Cornelius Castoriadis, "The Greek Polis and the Creation of Democracy". In Castoriadis Reader, (ed.) David Ames Curtis (London,
1997) p. 269.

[7]
See for instance, Rastafari Women: Subordination in the Midst of
Liberation Theology by Obiagele Lake (Carolina Academic Press, 1998,
Durham).

[8]
Humble Lion in an interview with the Get Underground online magazine <http://www.getunderground.com/underground/features/ article.cfm?Article_ID=785>

[9]
I am not claiming here that all AI research in the 1980s was
sponsored by the military but that AI-related research in the US was
given a second boost, after its original heyday in the 1950s and
1960s, through Reagan's Star Wars programme. See Paul N. Edwards,
The Closed World: Computers And The Politics Of Discourse in Cold-War
America (MIT Press, 1996, Cambridge).

[10]
See the book Underground about the 'war against hacking' in its early
stages; Underground is published online:
<http://www.underground-book.com/>

[11]
A more in-depth account of the differences between 'ethical' or
'real' hackers, crackers and 'script kiddies' can be found in
Medosch, Armin and Janko Röttgers (eds.), Netzpiraten, Die Kultur des Elektronischen Verbrechens (Heise, 2001, Hanover).

[12]
Graham Harwood, "Ethnical Bleaching". See: <http://www.scotoma.org/notes/index.cgi?EthnicBleaching>
, last accessed 24/09/2004.

[13]
I would be careful not to blame Descartes for Cartesianism, just as
Marx cannot be blamed for Marxism. His writing is more original and entertaining than the school of thought he has initiated. See for
instance Descartes' tract on light in Le Monde ou Traité de la
Lumière (Akademie Verlag, 1989, Berlin).

[14]
Donna Haraway. Modest-Witness, Second-Millennium: FemaleMan Meets
OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience (Routledge, 1997, London)
pp. 2-3.

[15]
Edwards, Paul N. Closed Worlds (MIT Press, 1996, Boston/London).

[16]
See for instance Richard Barbrook's polemical "The Sacred Cyborg", in
Telepolis (1996);
<http://www.heise.de/tp/english/special/vag/6063/1.html>
; downloaded 24/09/2004. For a proper critique of the claims of
'strong' AI, see Roger Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind (Oxford
University Press, 1989).

[17]
Graham Harwood, email to the author, 31/08/2004.

[18]
It must be noted that there exist serious pockets of resistance to
this mainstream version of Internet discourse, from the Marxist
discourse of Arthur and Marie-Louise Kroker in their online magazine
CTheory, to the publications of the Sarai group from Delhi, the Sarai
Readers, and some of the writings published on mailing lists like
Nettime. Afro-Futurism, Cyberfeminism and a whole school of writers
inspired by Donna Haraway create a growing body of work that corrects
the colour-blind Western-centric vision of the Net.

[19]
Admittedly I have sometimes said things that sounded pretty similar
to mainstream FLOSS discourse. See for instance the article
"Piratology" in DIVE, edited by <Kingdom of Piracy> and produced by
FACT, London/Liverpool, 2004; or the article "The Construction of the
Network Commons", Ars Electronica Catalogue, Linz, 2004.

[20]
I am not against abstractions per se; abstractions can be meaningful,
useful and beautiful, like some abstract art or minimalistic
electronic music. I am only speaking against an abstract absolutism.

[21]
See in this regard the remarks made by Cornelius Castoriadis in
"Culture in a Democratic Society", Castoriadis Reader, pp. 338-48.

[22]
See for instance Maurice Merleau-Ponty's The Phenomenology of
Perception (1945), which asserts that perception cannot be separated
into a merely mechanical receptive organ (e.g., the eye), a
transmitter (nerves), and an information processing unit (the brain).
Artificial Intelligence had to learn this the hard way through 50
years of research conducted after the publication of Merleau-Ponty's
book..

[23]
I am referring particularly to Adorno's wholesale dismissal of all
products of the culture industry, based on his preference for high
culture. The significance or quality of a cultural representation is
not necessarily determined by the economic circumstances of its
production.

[24]
I am keeping the critique of this process short because I assume that
in the year 2004 the various frontlines of this struggle, e.g., the
music industry v. file-sharing, proprietary v. free software and the
role of patents etc., are highly publicised and now common knowledge.

[25]
The absurd dimensions of this effort to enclose popular cultural
knowledge is best illustrated by the attempt of some US lawmakers to
apply patent laws to fairy tales, so that grandmothers could not
narrate these stories to children without obtaining a licence from
Disney.

[26]
"Aid", by Jean Breeze. See:
<http://www.nald.ca/fulltext/caribb/page63.htm>
; downloaded 28/08/2004.

[27]
There is a growing body of work on the Rasta use of language in
cultural studies and English literature studies.

[28]
Erik Davis compared the experience of aural 'dub space' to William
Gibson's 'cyberspace', and referred to acoustical space as especially
relevant for the "organization of subjectivity and hence for the
organization of collectives", in his lecture "Acoustic Cyberspace"
(1997);
<http://www.techgnosis.com/acoustic.html>

[29]
Lee 'Scratch' Perry; on
<http://www.upsetter.net/scratch/words/index.html>

[30]
From "Reggae Sound" by Linton Kwesi Johnson. See: <http://hjem.get2net.dk/sbn/lkj/reggae_sound.txt>

[31]
Jaromil, a.k.a Denis Rojo, Dyne:bolic software documentation. See: <http://dyne.org/~jaromil/dynebolic-new-man/html/dynebolic-x44.en.html>

[32]
Graham Harwood, email to the author, 31/08/2004.

[33]
Jaromil, Dyne:bolic manual,
<http://dynebolic.org/manual>
; downloaded 24/09/2004.

[34]
"Value and Its Other in Electronic Culture: Slave Ships and Pirate
Galleons" by Raqs Media Collective (2003). In "DIVE", a Kingdom of
Piracy project, produced by FACT (Liverpool), supported by virtualmediacentre.net and Culture 2000.

[35]
Graham Harwood, email to the author, 31/08/2004.

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