Are the Open Data Warriors Fighting for Robin Hood or the Sheriff?: Some Reflections on OKCon 2011 and the Emerging Data Divide (via Gurstein’s Community Informatics)
This is thoughtful posts in which Michael Gurstein contextualises his (much needed) critique of the Open Everything movement of – as he puts it – Ubergeeks. That is, the already empowered, highly technoliterate and most commonly white, Euro-males or their descendants or colonial favourites, to put it strongly and a bit exaggerated (in order to bring across the point).
Add to Gurstein’s critique the problem of materiality focused on in this blog, then we have a perfect means justifying the end (haha, only just realised this now, this is of course wrong) instance of the end justifying the means and a waiting around for the trickle-down effect scenario. I.e. “If you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows”.
Perhaps it is time to talk of tech-neo-colonialism. Recall, that many – obviously deluded and misled, yet enthusiastic – white men and women were convinced that they were saving savages from miserable, inhuman livelihoods and – importantly – closed down societies and introducing them to the right (democratic) path. The road to hell……
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Tagged Berlin, canada-digital-policy, Community informatics, community-informatics-policy, community-informatics-research, data-divide, Michael Gurstein, Neocolonialism, Open science data, open-access, open-data, tech-neo-colonialism, trickle-down effect, Western Europe
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All Ownership is Conditional (via Poor Richard’s Almanack 2010)
This is a good, informative piece revealing some important foundations of the jurisprudential (or legal and political philosophy) properties of property. All property relations are conditional – the concept of absolute ownership is an idea that serves a logical function in some liberal jurisprudence and a misleading rhetorical device for various uninformed libertarians with no social conscience.
Further details developed here:
Pedersen, J.M. (2010) “Properties of Property: A Jurisprudential Analysis“, The Commoner, Special Issue, Volume 14, Winter 2010, 137-210
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Misunderstanding the GNU General Public License: reciprocity in perpetuity
The GNU General Public License is a very interesting document from a jurisprudential point of view and from a commoning perspective. It gives structure to a software commons through its articulation of (conditional) reciprocity in perpetuity. Free Software is therefore not an open-access commons, but have in the GPL a boundary that is only permeable under certain conditions, which prevent the software pool from drying up. The culture of hackers sitting at home and in their work places coding while selling their labour for other purposes, however, is not protected from enclosure. The development of Free Software code – including the design of graphical user interfaces, which in effect shape most people’s (cognitive) relations/interactions with cyberspace – is no longer an emergent property of global civil society, no longer led by voluntary associations (Debian being one of the main exceptions to prove the rule), but is controlled in corporate environments, led by such corporate giants as IBM and Novell, as well as Red Hat. That is, guided as the usual business.
A critical analysis of the GPL constitutes the main section(s) in “Free Software as Property” and is pasted below without page numbers, illustrations and some formatting mangled. Get the excerpt in PDF or the full chapter, or read on without page numbers and illustrations:
….These organisational lessons provided by the example of Free Software have been the subject of a paper by cyberspace visionary Douglas Rushkoff, originally written for the London think tank Demos:
Property as social relations – not a thing!
There is a widespread misunderstanding that “property” – the term – refers to nouns, such as “house” or “car” or (piece of) “land”. That is not the case in law and philosophy, where property most commonly is understood as social relations with regard to things.
Here is an excerpt from ‘Properties of Property: A Jurisprudential Analysis‘ (pp: 160-165) that comes to terms with the basics of property as social relations. Get it with all formatting, footnotes, page numbers as intended in this PDF.
Property as social relations.
To begin with, then, we need to overcome the idea that property is a simple person-thing relation that implies an absolute (or even conditional) entitlement:
“We often think of property as some version of entitlement to things: I have a right to this thing or that. In a more sophisticated version of property, of course, we see property as a way of defining our relationships with other people. On such versions, my right to this thing or that isn’t about controlling the “thing” so much as it is about my relationship with you, and with everybody else in the world” (Rose 1993: 27-28)
Hohfeld’s matrix.
The more nuanced perspective can in great part be attributed to “a pivotal article” (ibid: 42, note 10) by Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld in which he outlined ‘Some Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning’ (1913). However, because the work of Hohfeld stands as a milestone in the liberal and legal positivist traditions, not much – if any – “politically radical” work has been built on his conceptions; indeed there is a general reluctance amongst anti-capitalists to engage with liberal jurisprudence, including structural analyses of property. This can be taken to reflect the conflation shared across the political spectrum and in the public imagination that property in general is seen as equal to the very particular social relations that exclusive, private property rights give rise to. Or, private property rights, particular to capitalism, are understood as property in general. Writing on property often does not unpack a given instance of property properly, but for instance merely states that “property is theft”. That is in itself a false reference, since Proudhon arguably was among the first to seriously analyse and unpack the idea of private property, which he did not simply write off as theft (Waldron 1988)1.
The Commoner / Call for Contributions: Property, Commoning and Commons
Two Volume Special Issue of The Commoner: Property, Commoning and Commons
Call for Contributions to Volume 2:
Download a PDF of the call.
Introduction.
In legal and philosophical terms the organisation of a commons is encoded into property protocols, which structure its use, access and decision-making rights and responsibilities. Property, then, is central to debates about commons and commoning: how do commoners relate to each other with regard to a given resource and how is a commons defined vis-a-vis the rest of the world?
As discussed in Volume 1, property relations are not only exclusive, private property rights as instantiated within capitalist democracy (a particular conception of property). As a jurisprudential concept, property can be used to understand, analyse, reflect upon and organise social relations with regard to things in any context (the general conception of property). The conflation of the general with the particular conceals the historical and anthropological fact that property can be and is understood (very) differently and hence consolidates existing property regimes.
The purpose of this two volume Special Issue is to instigate further debate about property, commoning and commons. The call for contributions to the second volume continues on page two, following details about the first volume. Continue reading
The distribution of care and the tragedy of the commons – Hardin’s misappropriation of Aristotle.
This is an excerpt that introduces Garrett Hardin’s influential fiction about a tragedy of commons and reveals its misappropriation of Aristotle’s concept of distribution of care. While there is little of philosophical interest in Hardin’s fiction, it has had a tremendous impact on policy – it is one of the most important gospels of privatisation in the early stages of neoliberalism. May it rest in peace…..
The excerpt is without page numbers and with the footnotes as endnotes and other bits of formatting (especially lost italics for emphases) mangled in the transition from OpenOffice.org to WordPress. If you want proper formatting, get this excerpted PDF (pages 143-152), or the full chapter or the entire essay. See also ‘Free Software as Property’ for an application of the critique.
The distribution of care and the tragedy of the commons.
The Tragedy of the Commons (Hardin 1968) is a story that has been much debated since its publication, but the terrain that it covers is not new. It can be traced back to the distribution of care, a philosophical concept first introduced by Aristotle. The distribution of care concerns who takes care of what and how with regard to goods and resources. For Aristotle, care would be most adequately administered if distributed to individuals, not managed in commons. He took note of “how immeasurably greater” the pleasure is, “when a man feels a thing to be his own” (Aristotle, Politics, Book 2, Part 5). Accordingly, he did not have great sympathy for commons:
Is copyright “policy” or “property”? A critique of the FSF’s position
In a discussion on the P2P Foundation’s mailing list the question concerning the Free Software Foundation’s view on property and how they see copyright in relation to property has come up. Below I reproduce a section from the essay, which comes to terms with this, but it is without page numbers and with the footnotes as endnotes and other bits of formatting (especially lost italics for emphases) mangled in the transition from OpenOffice.org to WordPress.
If you want footnotes etc. get this excerpted PDF (pages 92-107), or the full chapter or the entire essay. See also ‘Free Software as Property’ for an application of the critique.
Property and the tangible/intangible divide: a policy of what?
In this section I examine the reasoning behind the particular framing of the intangible realm that characterises information exceptionalism.
Siva Vaidhyanathan, prominent cultural environmentalist and professor of Media Studies and Law at the University of Virginia, writes that “[i]t is essential to understand that copyright in the American tradition was not meant to be a “property right” as the public generally understands property” (2001: 11) and “[c]opyright should be about policy, not property” (ibid: 15) and “[c]opyright is not property as commonly understood. It is a specific state-granted monopoly issued for particular policy reasons” (ibid: 253). Moreover “[c]opyright was a matter of policy, of a bargain among the state, its authors, and its citizens” (ibid: 23) and “Jefferson even explicitly dismissed a property model for copyright” (ibid.).
That copyright is a matter of policy, not property might sound strange to a lawyer or a philosopher trained to understand copyright as a particular instance of property relations with a temporal limit and who understands property as a matter of policy. Some things do not quite add up. Nevertheless, that copyright is a matter of policy, not property, is a point that the founder of the Free Software Foundation, Richard Stallman, together with other advocates of “Free Culture”, wants us to accept1.
Essentially, the Free Software and Free Culture movements reject the concept of property and instead choose to frame issues pertaining to ideas, information and knowledge – or the intangible realm – in terms of freedom, liberty, human rights, policy, intervention, and regulation. Anything but property, but preferably “policy”.
Two mediate questions arise from this position: (i) What is policy? (ii) Why should we choose to adopt one term instead of another? I will answer them in turn.
From the Conclusion: Property, Commoning and the Politics of Free Software
The concept of property is obviously central to the essay. Here is an excerpt from the conclusion that sheds some light on the position developed in the essay with respect to the relations between property and cyberspace, as well as land, its resources and the means of production:
Cyberspace is disembodied not only in the sense of being technologically mediated, or virtual, but also because it is continuously represented as if it were not highly dependent on the material realm for machines and minerals and energy. Understanding the dynamics of cyberspace in terms of property – the language of social relations with regard to things – is a good starting point for exploring the concept of property. It is a recursive process that generates a new understanding of property, which in turn might facilitate the emergence of further permutated relational modalities. If the world were a commons and property an open-ended toolbox for the self-articulation of value practices, then commons would probably blossom. Property seen through the lens of spontaneously emerging social relations – whether in cyberspace or landless movements in Brazil – opens the black box of property and reveals building blocks that can be recombined in very many ways. With an enriched understanding of property, private property might – in line with the anti-capitalist hopes that have animated this essay – be limited to (something like) personal possessions. Rights of commoning can then be substituted for private property in land, its resources, and the means of production and distribution (p. 290).
Pedersen, J.M. (2010) ‘Conclusion: Property and the Politics of Commoning‘, The Commoner, Special Issue, Volume 14, Winter 2010, 287-294.
Map of Essay: Property, Commoning and the Politics of Free Software
Another academic hoop to jump through is making very explicit the way in which a PhD thesis is going to unfold. This can be done in a variety of ways, but I chose a pretty standard, straightforward “map of the thesis” format, which I decided to keep in the essay version, since it does help the reader along and can indeed be used as a map to navigate the structure and arguments of the essay.
It is reproduced here (and also excerpted in a .PDF):
Map of the essay.
Chapter 1 – Free Culture in context – is a critical discussion of the way in which a number of key commentators are framing the politics of cyberspace. I argue that their framing of the debate is mistaken in two key ways. First, it conflates private property (a particular configuration of property) with the concept of property in general. Second, it relies on an untenable distinction between the tangible and intangible realm, which I examine in detail with reference to the commons of the land.
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