One of my Skype contacts had this URL as their  status. I know there’s been talk in the non-profit/social change tech sector about building an open source social networking site like Facebook. I’m not sure (because I haven’t really been following along) how sites like Change.org fit into the picture. So I can’t really say what Facebook’s move to open source means for progressive change-making communities.  Any thoughts?

One of the tech activists participating in my dissertation research just told me about a project being run by Riseup called Summer Freedom of Code. This is a totally inspiring endeavour, one that reaffirms my decision to stick with my research topic, and assures me that social justice organizing and activism are not dead - not even dormant - but alive and well and taking direct aim at the miserable status quo.

Freedom Summer of Code is both a cheeky riff on Google’s Summer of Code and nod to Freedom Summer, making explicit the project’s historical link to radical progressive activism. The aim of FSoC is to develop software that supports social justice organizations and movements, and contests inequality and injustice under global capitalism. Instead of technologies of reproduction, the goal is technologies of revolution. By appropriating software technology and deploying it for free and open uses, this project stands in stark opposition to proprietary visions of a corporatized and closed Internet, nested within the broader notion that social injustice is unfortunate collateral damage from a system that is natural, and thus inevitable. FSoC reminds us that another world (or for starters, another Internet) is possible.

I will be attending the International Communication Association conference, which takes place later this week in Montreal. I am participating in a pre-conference workshop entitled Bridging the Scholar/Activist Divide in the Field of Communication - exactly up my alley. I wrote the abstract last fall sometime, and haven’t really looked at it since then. My basic premise is that it is only the public intellectual who can bridge this stark divide. I suggest a three-prong approach: 1. Participation in civic life; public dissemination of research/ideas; 2. Critical pedagogy as process; 3. Commitment to norms-based research.

The public intellectual, to my mind, is one who not only engages in civic life, but is motivated by a sense of responsibility and a shared humanity to “be of service.” Or, as my dad would say, to be useful. For the public intellectual, this requires the free sharing of her intellect, research, thoughts and ideas, with the broader community - through public lectures, media interviews, popular and academic articles and participation in various community events - especially those organized by students.

But being a public intellectual requires more than making one’s research and public persona accessible. It requires a focus on - and revisioning of - teaching; that is teaching as an ongoing process, rather than a finite action that we take up over and over again. Students are another link academics have to the “real world”; they go back to it as soon as they leave us. Sometimes - if our lectures or classes are particularly dull, they remain in their “real life” though their bodies be sitting before us. The classroom, then, is really a portal on the world and a terrain for the change-making we want to provoke.

So I’ve been doing some reading, and I’ve been doing some thinking in advance of this workshop (I think I’m supposed to write a paper on this, but in fact it’ll prolly just be a chapter in my diss, or at least a section). Of course open access to scholarly work figures prominently in any discussion I’d have on the topic, so John Willinsky’s book, The Access Principle, will come in handy. I’m in the middle of Ken Bain’s book, What the Best College Teachers Do. But what’s really burning my brain right now is the 1969 book, Teaching as a Subversive Activity, by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner. This is an awesome book, and it reminds me (yet again) that much of the social critique we pile upon contemporary society has already been written - in the ’60s, during the countercultural revolution, and the first half of the 20th century generally.

Postman and Weingartner’s radical assertion is that teaching should be useful; according to them, the most useful teaching is teaching for survival. The essential survival strategy in the nuclear space age (and not much has changed, except that it’s mostly gotten worse - pick your area) and thus the essential goal of teachers, is to cultivate “crap-detection.” The argument is strongly influenced by medium theory - Marshall McLuhan’s idea that the medium or container affects perspective, rather than the content transmitted by that medium. But a medium is not merely the technical form - a television, a newspaper, the Internet - but the symbolic environment of a communicative act.

Medium theory focuses on the medium characteristics itself (like in media richness theory) rather than on what it conveys or how information is received. In medium theory, a medium is not simply a newspaper, the Internet, a digital camera and so forth. Rather, it is the symbolic environment of any communicative act; it is a process. Media, apart from whatever content is transmitted, impact individuals and society. McLuhan’s thesis is that people adapt to their environment through a certain balance or ratio of the senses, and the primary medium of the age brings out a particular sense ratio, thereby affecting perception.

So it is the form of education, less than its content, that is problematic for Postman and Weingartner. It’s outcome: the “intellectual paraplegic.” They go on to tear down, plank by plank, the structure of modern education, in a very convincing demolition, calling upon the likes of McLuhan, Wiener, Dewey, and Huxley.

The renovation the authors propose is founded on the “inquiry method” whereby students direct their own learning, beginning from what they know, and working toward what they want or need to know to be independent, autonomous members of a community. The “new education” is therefore relevant - to students - and rests on the view of education as a process, not an end product or finite goal. By learning to ask questions, and learning to distinguish the important questions, students learn how to learn. And thus they are equipped not just to go out into this world, but to engage in it and - goddess forbid - change it.

Postman and Weingartner identify several concepts that derive from the old canons of education - canons originating from the ancient Greeks. These concepts include: absolute and fixed truth; certainty; isolated identity; fixed states and “things; simple causality; knowledge as “given”. Writing in the late 60s, the authors bemoan the fact that that these concepts were still being “taught”. It’s hard to say that things have changed much another 50 years later: “The schools stare fixedly into the past as we hurtle pell-mell into the future” (p. 216).

New concepts that need to be learned are those that shape technological change and derive from it: “they are characteristics of the spirit, mood, language and process of science. They are operative wherever evidence of social change…can be found” (217).

Intellectual strategies for survival in the nuclear space age are the polar opposite of what seems to comprise contemporary education: relativity, probability, contingency, uncertainty, function, structure as process, multiple causality, incongruity. I have learned, in my short time as a university instructor, that students don’t want - or like- any of these. They want to know what will be on the exam. But that is not a strategy for survival in the world; for creating what Mark Battersby calls a “competent layperson”. Given the precariousness of the future - I’m thinking here of growing environmental and geopolitical crises - it remains as important now as it was then to develop “a new kind of person, one who…is an actively inquiring, flexible, creative, innovative, tolerant, liberal personality who can face uncertainty and ambiguity without disorientation, who can formulate viable new meanings to meet changes in the environment which threaten individual and mutual survival” (218).

Our schools - from kindergarten to undergraduate - are not doing this. That the majority of educators (and likely all of the administrators) would disagree with this is hardly damning. Indeed, as the authors point out, the most subversive intellectual instrument is the anthropological perspective, which allows a critical distancing from one’s own culture. Such a perspective, they admit, is very difficult to acquire and demands great courage; in essence, it requires freedom from the intellectual and social constraints created by societal or cultural norms. And this, as I’ve long known, is very difficult to achieve.

I am the technology editor for this journal and also the blog book review editor… Check out the CFP and submit if you’ve got anything…

Stream: Culture/Politics/Technology is an open-access, peer-reviewed
graduate e-journal for students in communication studies and cognate fields
encompassing three over-overlapping ‘streams’ of concentration: culture,
politics, and technology. It is published by the Communication Graduate
Caucus at Simon Fraser University. Papers are blind reviewed by graduate
students, making Stream a unique contribution to the flourishing and
productive field of Communication in Canada. In employing open-source
software and Creative Commons licensing, Stream is exceptional in the field
of academic publishing and contributes to the public dissemination and
sharing of knowledge. We hope that this initiative will become a space for
graduate students to publish new work and expand upon new ideas,
contributing to a thriving intellectual culture.

Stream is currently accepting papers and book reviews. In addition, if you
would like to be a reviewer for the journal, please sign up at the website.

Submission Guidelines:
Papers
Papers must be submitted electronically at www.streamjournal.org. Authors
must sign up for a user name and password.

Papers should be 15-20 double-spaced pages in length and fit into one of
three broad areas of culture, technology or politics, but we invite
contributors to challenge their conceptions of these subjects with
innovative interpretations of these disciplinary boundaries. Papers
submitted prior to August 31, 2008 will be considered for the winter issue.

Papers must be copy edited and formatted according to author guidelines
found in the submission section of the website. Papers that have not been
thoroughly edited and properly formatted will not be sent out for review.

Book Reviews
Book reviews should be 750-1000 words in length, and should follow the style guide for paper submissions. Reviews should give an overview of the content of the book, state its strengths and weaknesses, and assess its significance and contribution to the field. Book reviews will not be peer-reviewed but will be assessed by the book review editor for their relevance, readability and contribution.

I received my copy of Reconstructing biotechnologies: Critical social analyses in the mail today. It is from Wageningnen, an academic publisher out of The Netherlands. It is a lovely book, replete with all sorts of fascinating articles about the appropriation and reconstruction of biotechnologies for sustainable rural development. My little essay on wikis fits - as far as I can tell - under the theoretical framework of the book, which is a recombination of STS, social constructivism, critical theory and political economy.

The book is not available online, and seems to carry the regular copyright protections - though I can’t recall signing any copyright waiver or anything. I have recently made the decision not to publish in non-open access journals - despite the heavy weight given to “real” publishing in the academic world (disproportionate to teaching and service to community, that is). I’m not sure if or how I can carry this decision over to any publishing I do in edited collections. It goes without saying that any book of my own that I should ever publish will incorporate copyleft/creative commons/open access values and principles. I copylefted my masters’ thesis before there was a non-code version of Stallman’s General Public License (Good ol’ Larry Lessig fixed that one with Creative Commons - thank goodness). I have made my unpublished graduate work available online as I go along. As an editorial team member, I proposed that SFUs Communication online grad journal, Stream, be open-access and promote CC licensing.

Now it’s time to apply the same (self-imposed) rule as I build my academic publishing record. This is made pretty easy by the Directory of Open Access Journals, a (mostly searchable) database of free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals. Mackenzie Wark, at a talk last year in Montreal, said (in response to my question) that one way to battle copyright (or restrictive IP regimes) was just to ignore it. Post copyrighted material online and to heck with it. I know lots of profs do it - just check their homepages. The term for this in the Open Access lingo is “self-archiving”, and many scholarly journals already support the practice. But I think I’ll try to avoid that altogether and just publish with folks who support open access to public knowledge.

Now that I have finished all the pesky non-dissertation requirements of my degree, I’m settling in to the research/fieldwork phase. This is the phase directly before the writing of my dissertation. While completing my comps and writing my thesis proposal, I did not have much time to keep up with nor dig deep into the current literature relevant to my research topic. It’s great to have more solid foundations - the purpose as I see it of the comprehensive exams - but one of my streams of research - open source/copyleft - keeps developing at an alarming pace. You know how that Internet operates - no sooner is something released/discovered/innovated than it is obsolete, yesterday’s news, oh so passé.

So one of  my current objectives is to catch up on what I’ve missed this last year-and-a-half. And also to shore up my historical knowledge of the topic. Today I finished reading John Walker’s lengthy essay, The Digital Imprimatur: How Big Brother and Big Media can put the Internet Genie Back in the Bottle, which I chased with Richard Stallman’s except, The Right to Read.

Walker lays out all the current and developing technologies for the “consumer internet”, all of which, when combined, will lead to an ominous, closed internet. He begins by offering a brief summary of the early Internet, which promised the chance to “roll back government and corporate encroachment on individual freedom by allowing information to flow past the barriers erected by totalitarian or authoritarian governments and around the gatekeepers of the mainstream media.” Walker goes on to discuss the current scenario (well, in 2003) wherein the internet where been segmented into 2 unequal categories of users: consumers and producers. This distinction, Walker argues, has eroded the equalitiy of users by undermining the true peer-to-peer architecture of the internet. The technologies he outlines - certificates (for people - incl. minors and employees, companies, computers, and content), micropayment, digital rights management - are all wrapped up in the interlinked concepts of Trusted Computing and the Secure Internet.

The implications are foreboding: “Just as a Trusted Computing system will load neither programs nor data files without a validated certificate whose signature matches their contents, neither will the Secure Internet transfer any document, in any standard protocol without such a certificate accompanying it.” Any number of social ills will be prevented or drastically reduced by this: copyright violation; identity theft and fraud; scams and securities fraud; spam; worms and viruses; plagiarism; child pornography/exploitation; terrorist activity; employee abuse (!).

You can see what an easy sell these technologies could be, if correctly propagandized. And some of their objectives are valid and valuable. But at what expense? This, I think, is the question that guides Walker. His answer is clearly, at the expense of certain liberties that we today take for granted. Withholding or constraining these liberties will be the digital imprimatur - the authority that decides who has the right to publish.

In the old days, before the emergence of copyright, this right was granted by church or state: “A document’s certificate, its imprimatur, identifies the person (individual or legal entity) responsible for its publication, provides a signature which permits verifying its contents have not been corrupted or subsequently modified, and identifies the document registry which granted the imprimatur and which, on demand, will validate it and confirm that it has not been revoked.” In the (near?) future Trusted Computing systems and the Secure Internet will perform these functions automatically.

If internet users don’t become aware of the potential threat of the convergence of all these technologies in the hands of powerful actors (mostly of the corporate or government flavour), the result will be a radically different internet from the one we enjoy (despite its social problems) today.

“More than any innovation in the last century, the internet empowers individuals to spontaneously teach, learn, explore, communicate, form communities and collaborate. Measured relatively, this individual empowerment comes at the expense of the power of governments and large commercial enterprises, thereby reversing a trend toward concentration of power more than a century old which has acted to reduce free citizens and productive individuals to mere subjects and consumers.”

Stallman’s essay, The Right to Read, proved a nice companion to The Digital Imprimatur. Essentially a parable, it presents a dystopic future where basic freedoms have been eliminated via digital rights management and electronic surveillance. Higher education is priced out of reach for all but the upper classes. All those less financially robust are doomed to excessive debt in order to learn. Reading is restricted - laughable perhaps in 1997 when this essay was published - in much the same way as certain online copyrighted material is today (e.g. music, academic journal articles). “Like everyone, he had been taught since elementary school that sharing books was nasty and wrong - something that only pirates would do.”

It seems fine (to some) to restrict the sharing of music, and to demonize music file-sharing online. But books? Isn’t that what the public library movement was all about - making ideas freely accessible? In Stallman’s tale, people have to pay to read - they cannot graduate otherwise. More than sharing books is illegal. Debugging tools to skip over the copyright monitor code is outlawed, as is installing modified system kernals (never mind it is impossible without knowing the computer’s root password - controlled, naturally, by the FBI and Microsoft).

In the author’s note that follows (updated 2007), Stallman asserts that the right to read is a very real battle being waged today - though it might take half a century for it to be settled. The Digital Millelnium Copyright Act legally established the basis to restrict the reading and lending of e-books (and other works too) in 1998. Other world jurisdictions have followed similar suit. Trusted Computing - the idea that users won’t have control over their machines - but companies will - didn’t emerge until 2002. This concept has been implemented in Microsoft’s Vista, where Microsoft retains a signature and encryption key to make a DRM that users cannot overcome.

So put all that in your pipe and smoke it.

Things are wrapping up here at Open Web Vancouver 2008. It’s been an informative (dare I say fun-filled) couple of days here on Raincity’s beautiful corporate waterfront. No one’s commodified the breath-taking view yet, so that’s something…

I have to say, any misgivings I had about speaking to a hardcore geek audience have been dispelled. I received nothing but a warm welcome, despite being asked, right off the bat, on what authority I was giving a talk on open source if I wasn’t a programmer. I think I’m one of the very few academics here. Tim Bray, in his keynote, sorted the audience into (basically) two categories: programmer and “civilian”. At least 80% of the audience identified with the former category. I was among a handful of “communicators”.

Tim Bray is a character… I’ve seen him about town (he lives here though he works for Sun) - somewhere in the tech scene, no doubt. It was his trademark hat that I recognized. Anyhoo, his keynote was entertaining, engaging and elicited the odd guffaw from the audience - pretty good for a conference talk. Though he was speaking to a room full of developers, he seemed ot talk a lot about social media, blogging and the value and meaning of blogging in a Web 2.0 world. One of the insights from Tim was that blogs or websites shouldn’t be “sticky” - they shouldn’t lock people in and isolate them from the web (hey Facebook), but serve as a rest stop and a navigational tool to help visitors on their way to finding what they need. This was helpful and reassuring for me. One of my objectives for this blog is to collect a bunch of great links that will be useful for people, and keep them coming back. For more, check out Miss 604’s synopsis here.

I really enjoyed Zak Greant’s talk - The Age of Literate Machines: A Visionary Look at Open Source - as I knew I would. Though he’s quite diplomatic about it, Zak is a Free Software advocate - quite a rarity outside the activist/anarchogeek set. I always appreciate people who go out on a limb and take a political position - whether they announce it (like I do) or whether they let peeps figure it out for themselves - a more effective approach, no doubt. He led us through a history of technology - beginning with accounting systems, then language and on up to modern communication technologies form the printing press on up. This was all in the context of how critical free/open source software is to the future of free societies. Loved it.

I also got a lot from Joe Bowser’s walk through the birth and evolution of FreeTheNet in Vancouver. I’ve been following emergent movement this since last fall. I had a Meraki unit tacked to the window in my office till yesterday. What I learned at Joe’s session is that I could trade in my Meraki, whose hardware has been retroactively locked down, for an Open Mesh unit, which is the device now being used to build Vancouver’s mesh. (Which I did today - so if you live in my hood and have been hopping on the net via my FTN node - it’s down till tonight!) I was also reminded that the FTN movement is not just about free wifi - that it originated as an action in support of Net Neutrality in Canada.

I arrived bright and early this morning to hear Darren Barefoot’s talk, 1100 Stacies. Now here’s a bright guy - a creative guy (he writes plays), a well known blogger (his blog is in the top 10,000 in a blogosphere of over a billion) - and he gives a talk about caring. About not why we should care about the fate of the world and its inhabitant, but that we should care. That for some unclear yet obvious reason, we human beings should look out for one another. And Darren counts our karma earned, our necessary good deeds done, in Stacies. You can find out more about this intriguing currency here.

I’ve come to the point of my talk, which went well, and was fun, but I’ve already breeched one of Tim Bray’s golden rules for Web 2.0: Be brief. Arrgghh. My talk was entitled From Free Software to Open Knowledge: Open Source as a Method for Social Change. It was a mashup of my last academic presentation and one of my comprehensive exams in the combined style of my CMNS 253 lectures and my unconference talks. The challenge was to adapt my recent academic work for a non-academic crowd, and at the same time discuss open source with some sort of credibility.

I managed to get through most of my talk without tripping over my words and Molly from Vancouver Cooperative Radio said she’s going to broadcast it on Wednesday from 8-9pm. There was a funny moment - which I only realized after the fact. I was discussing unconferences and I asked who had heard of BarCamp, not realizing Chris Messina was in the audience. During his session which was next and standing room only, he mentioned my talk and I have to say I was chuffed.

I’m writing this post in Duane Nickull’s talk, Web 2.0, Design Patterns, Models and Analysis. This is a ridiculous session for me to be in; he’s saying things like “first order of logic” and other equally impenetrable phrases, interspersed with references to beer and Jack Daniels. Duane is senior technical evangelist for Adobe; his abstract says the talk is about how successful companies use design patterns. He’s apologizing right now, and admitting this is a “deep subject”. Still, it might just be me. What I’m mainly taking away from this talk is that Duane is dressed like a rock star (e.g. Billy Idol hair, leather trench, studded belt, black jeans) but sounds (and sorta looks) like Owen Wilson. Which is why I can be in this session.

I think that about does it for me and Open Web. The day is waning and the few remaining sessions are just too technical for me. It’s been a great conference and I’ve met some really cool people, and made some excellent contacts for my research too. Now back to the grind.

The other day, Andrew Feenberg, gave a brown bag lunch talk at the School of Communication. Feenberg, aside from being my supervisor, is a Canada Research Chair and heads up the ACT Lab at SFU Harbour Centre. Peter Chow-White organized the year-long brown bag lunch series where various faculty members presented their current work. I typically go for the free sandwiches, but it’s also nice to see what the profs are up to.

Feenberg’s talk was entitled Marxism and the Critique of Rationality: From Surplus Value to the Politics of Technology. I’m the type to get excited just by a title like this, but I have to say, even if you weren’t particularly geeked about it, the talk itself was engaging and accessible. Now I wouldn’t call Andrew a comedian, but he cracks the odd joke or two, usually in his genial, self-depracating style. He began by informing us that he wouldn’t be reading his presentation, as we were trying to eat lunch. Indeed, the conversational approach to his delivery helped make what might have seemed a dry and complex topic quite digestible after all.

In brief, Feenberg’s intent was to respond to the silencing of critique by invoking rationality. He asks: “When an action is rationally justified, how can reason deny its legitimacy?” If it’s rational to receive a good in exchange for money, how could there be anything wrong with our capitalist society? Never mind that within that seeming equivalence of exchange, one class is continually enriched, while the other barely holds its ground.

Feenberg finds a way around this silencing of critique in Marx’s method (clearly distinguished from the content of his theory), which anticipates Foucault’s power/knowledge formulation. The nascent concept of underdetermination in Marx emerged more fully in contemporary science and technology studies, despite its apolitical aspect. According to Feenberg, “this revision of the academic understanding of technology contributes to weakening technocratic rationales for public policy. A new era of technical politics has begun.”

For another small write up, and audio of the talk, check here.

Virishi wrote an interesting post about Meraki, the company that commercialized MIT’s roofnet technology. Back in October, I wrote about Vancouver’s Free The Net initiative, which is fueled by the idea that neighbourhoods can connect up and to the internet for free. With mesh networking, the need for base stations is eliminated as short P2P connections evolve into a network. I still have my Meraki unit - it’s tacked to the side of the window in my office. But it seems like the company’s days might be numbered; they may have sealed their own demise with (among other things) an automatic (and silent) software update that locked down hardware that was originally open, and violating GPL in the process. Now the open source firmware that hackers in Vancouver had been adapting for their Meraki nodes no longer works. So that was dumb. But there seem to be some alternatives out there, like this plug n play open source mesh, so I guess it’s Meraki’s funeral…

I just read the galley proof of my first book chapter. The book, Reconstructing biotechnologies: Critical social analyses, is due out in April. My chapter is the result of one of my open source experiments, and more proof (to me) that keeping things open, rather than closing them down, is more productive, more socially useful. It began as a term paper for Richard Smith’s grad course, The Social Construction of Technology. As part of the assignment, Richard made us think about how and where we would publish our essays. Immediately, I posted it on Indymedia’s
Documentation Project wiki, on the IMC Essay Collection page alongside my master’s thesis, and promptly forgot about it. Some time later, I got an email from Joost Jongerden, one of the editors at a new(ish) journal out of the Netherlands called Tailoring Biotechnologies. He’d found my essay on the Indymedia wiki, and wanted to publish it. I was thrilled. And after some revision, my essay was transformed into an article, and published. Another small notch in the mandatory publication record. More time passed. Then I received another email from Joost to say they were publishing a book and wanted to reproduce my article as a book chapter. I could not have been more pleased. The final editing phase is coming to a close, and in a month or so, there will be a new book in the world, with a chapter by me inside. Hopefully it will be the first of many in a long and illustrious publishing career, but right now, I’ll savor the novelty.