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""Two Bits" describes the way those who work and play with Free Software themselves change in the process--engendering what Kelty calls 'recursive publics'--social configurations that realize the Internet's non-hierarchical, ever-evolving, and thus historically attuned logic, creatively updating the types of public spheres previously theorized by Habermas and Michael Warner, among others. "Two Bits" does something similar, pulling readers into an experimental (ethnographic) mode that draws out how Open Source movements have garnered the momentum and significance they have today. The book--on paper and online--quite literally shows how it is done, itself embodying the standards that make Free Software work. "Two Bits" is critical reading, in all senses."--Kim Fortun, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

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Two Bits

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Preface....................................................................ixAcknowledgments............................................................xiiiIntroduction...............................................................11. Geeks and Recursive Publics.............................................272. Protestant Reformers, Polymaths, Transhumanists.........................643. The Movement............................................................974. Sharing Source Code.....................................................1185. Conceiving Open Systems.................................................1436. Writing Copyright Licenses..............................................1797. Coordinating Collaborations.............................................2108. "If We Succeed, We Will Disappear"......................................2439. Reuse, Modification, and the Nonexistence of Norms......................269Conclusion: The Cultural Consequences of Free Software.....................301Notes......................................................................311Bibliography...............................................................349Index......................................................................367

Chapter One

Since about 1997, I have been living with geeks online and off. I have been drawn from Boston to Bangalore to Berlin to Houston to Palo Alto, from conferences and workshops to launch parties, pubs, and Internet Relay Chats (IRCs). All along the way in my research questions of commitment and practice, of ideology and imagination have arisen, even as the exact nature of the connections between these people and ideas remained obscure to me: what binds geeks together? As my fieldwork pulled me from a Boston start-up company that worked with radiological images to media labs in Berlin to young entrepreneurial elites in Bangalore, my logistical question eventually developed into an analytical concept: geeks are bound together as a recursive public.

How did I come to understand geeks as a public constituted around the technical and moral ideas of order that allow them to associate with one another? Through this question, one can start to understand the larger narrative of Two Bits: that of Free Software as an exemplary instance of a recursive public and as a set of practices that allow such publics to expand and spread. In this chapter I describe, ethnographically, the diverse, dispersed, and novel forms of entanglements that bind geeks together, and I construct the concept of a recursive public in order to explain these entanglements.

A recursive public is a public that is constituted by a shared concern for maintaining the means of association through which they come together as a public. Geeks find affinity with one another because they share an abiding moral imagination of the technical infrastructure, the Internet, that has allowed them to develop and maintain this affinity in the first place. I elaborate the concept of recursive public (which is not a term used by geeks) in relation to theories of ideology, publics, and public spheres and social imaginaries. I illustrate the concept through ethnographic stories and examples that highlight geeks' imaginations of the technical and moral order of the Internet. These stories include those of the fate of Amicas, a Boston-based healthcare start-up, between 1997 and 2003, of my participation with new media academics and activists in Berlin in 1999-2001, and of the activities of a group of largely Bangalore-based information technology (IT) professionals on and offline, especially concerning the events surrounding the peer-to-peer file sharing application Napster in 2000-2001.

The phrase "moral and technical order" signals both technology-principally software, hardware, networks, and protocols-and an imagination of the proper order of collective political and commercial action, that is, how economy and society should be ordered collectively. Recursive publics are just as concerned with the moral order of markets as they are with that of commons; they are not anticommercial or antigovernment. They exist independent of, and as a check on, constituted forms of power, which include markets and corporations. Unlike other concepts of a public or of a public sphere, "recursive public" captures the fact that geeks' principal mode of associating and acting is through the medium of the Internet, and it is through this medium that a recursive public can come into being in the first place. The Internet is not itself a public sphere, a public, or a recursive public, but a complex, heterogeneous infrastructure that constitutes and constrains geeks' everyday practical commitments, their ability to "become public" or to compose a common world. As such, their participation qua recursive publics structures their identity as creative and autonomous individuals. The fact that the geeks described here have been brought together by mailing lists and e-mail, bulletin-board services and Web sites, books and modems, air travel and academia, and cross-talking and cross-posting in ways that were not possible before the Internet is at the core of their own reasoning about why they associate with each other. They are the builders and imaginers of this space, and the space is what allows them to build and imagine it.

Why recursive? I call such publics recursive for two reasons: first, in order to signal that this kind of public includes the activities of making, maintaining, and modifying software and networks, as well as the more conventional discourse that is thereby enabled; and second, in order to suggest the recursive "depth" of the public, the series of technical and legal layers-from applications to protocols to the physical infrastructures of waves and wires-that are the subject of this making, maintaining, and modifying. The first of these characteristics is evident in the fact that geeks use technology as a kind of argument, for a specific kind of order: they argue about technology, but they also argue through it. They express ideas, but they also express infrastructures through which ideas can be expressed (and circulated) in new ways. The second of these characteristics-regarding layers-is reflected in the ability of geeks to immediately see connections between, for example, Napster (a user application) and TCP/IP (a network protocol) and to draw out implications for both of them. By connecting these layers, Napster comes to represent the Internet in miniature. The question of where these layers stop (hardware? laws and regulations? physical constants? etc.) circumscribes the limits of the imagination of technical and moral order shared by geeks.

Above all, "recursive public" is a concept-not a thing. It is intended to make distinctions, allow comparison, highlight salient features, and relate two diverse kinds of things (the Internet and Free Software) in a particular historical context of changing relations of power and knowledge. The stories in this chapter (and throughout the book) give some sense of how geeks interact and what they do technically and legally, but the concept of a recursive public provides a way of explaining why geeks (or people involved in Free Software or its derivatives) associate with one...