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Experimental Futures
Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software
In Two Bits, Christopher M. Kelty investigates the history and cultural significance of Free Software, revealing the people and practices that have transformed not only software but also music, film, science, and education. Free Software is a set of practices devoted to the collaborative creation of software source code that is made openly and freely available through an unconventional use of copyright law. Kelty explains how these specific practices have reoriented the relations of power around the creation, dissemination, and authorization of all kinds of knowledge. He also makes an important contribution to discussions of public spheres and social imaginaries by demonstrating how Free Software is a “recursive public”—a public organized around the ability to build, modify, and maintain the very infrastructure that gives it life in the first place.
Drawing on ethnographic research that took him from an Internet healthcare start-up company in Boston to media labs in Berlin to young entrepreneurs in Bangalore, Kelty describes the technologies and the moral vision that bind together hackers, geeks, lawyers, and other Free Software advocates. In each case, he shows how their practices and way of life include not only the sharing of software source code but also ways of conceptualizing openness, writing copyright licenses, coordinating collaboration, and proselytizing. By exploring in detail how these practices came together as the Free Software movement from the 1970s to the 1990s, Kelty also considers how it is possible to understand the new movements emerging from Free Software: projects such as Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that creates copyright licenses, and Connexions, a project to create an online scholarly textbook commons.
Drawing on ethnographic research that took him from an Internet healthcare start-up company in Boston to media labs in Berlin to young entrepreneurs in Bangalore, Kelty describes the technologies and the moral vision that bind together hackers, geeks, lawyers, and other Free Software advocates. In each case, he shows how their practices and way of life include not only the sharing of software source code but also ways of conceptualizing openness, writing copyright licenses, coordinating collaboration, and proselytizing. By exploring in detail how these practices came together as the Free Software movement from the 1970s to the 1990s, Kelty also considers how it is possible to understand the new movements emerging from Free Software: projects such as Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that creates copyright licenses, and Connexions, a project to create an online scholarly textbook commons.
400 pages, Paperback
First published May 19, 2008
11 people are currently reading
247 people want to read
About the author
Christopher M. Kelty
8 books4 followersChristopher M. Kelty is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Rice University.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
April 28, 2013
Kelty's book is brilliant, inspiring, and relevant. It's one of the best academic books I've read in a long time. Having just read Michael Warner's book about publics, I had a number of complaints about a lack of concern with technical media (which you can read about here). Kelty took them all up, and answered them (though he did so in a very gracious way with respect to Warner...reading Kelty you might think that he got his idea about the importance of medial variety from Warner, but that's not at all the case. Warner merely gestures at this, without really taking it up as centrally important).
In Two Bits Kelty introduces the idea of a "recursive public," or one that is "concerned with the ability to build, control, modify, and maintain the infrastructure that allows them to come into being in the first place and which, in turn, constitutes their everyday practical commitments and the identities of the participants as creative and autonomous individuals (7)." A recursive public, then, is different from Warner's "public" because it requires more than mere attention at a distance. Rather, it requires iterative participation in the means of communication. Kelty insists at the end of the book that he doesn't wish the term to replace the more abstract "public" concept, but I can't help but feel that this term could learn something from Kelty, in that publics need a means of interacting, and if those means fall into corporate control the public comes under threat (since a feature of a public is to stand outside of state and corporate control).
To the subject matter. Kelty looks at the history of the "free software movement" or, as sometimes alternatively named, the "open source movement." Kelty calls his subjects "geeks" and looks at their activities all around the world (though it's a primarily US story that Kelty tells). Methodologically, Kelty makes sure that we understand how free software only became a movement after the community of practitioners were established. He does this to show how an analysis of free software based on the ideology of its practitioners would not reveal much about their real concerns and activities; rather, free software encompassed a wide variety of ideologies (Kelty discusses polymathy and transhumanism) despite the fact that the members were all involved in the same practical activities, seeking to defend the nature of free software and the internet more generally as as a recursive public (this is Kelty's term, not theirs).
According to Kelty, free software most generally had to figure out 1) ways to share source code, 2) ways of conceptualizing and creating open systems, 3) writing licenses, and 4) coordinating collaborations. To illustrate these points, Kelty talks about the Mozilla/Netscape Navigator controversy and its competition with the "evil" Internet Explorer as well as UNIX and its relationship to AT&T, among others. In the final section, Kelty consider the "cultural significance" of free software by examining Creative Commons and an online textbook project called Connexions. Kelty compares the procedures of 1-4 of the free software movement to these daughter projects, in order to see if they fit his notion of a recursive public. In making this analysis, Kelty takes on the norms of authorship and publishing in academia, and the extent to which collaborative/endlessly experimental projects like Connexions challenge the importance of a "finished" knowledge product. Moreover, he shows how the very structure of Creative Commons uses minimal legal restrictions in order to "punt to culture"- that is, in order to allow broader communities to determine the norms of acceptable use.
At the heart of this book, Kelty argues that the free software movement fundamentally shaped the internet as we see it today (for example, we have ONE internet, as opposed to many corporate owned internets). In turn, he wants to suggest that the procedures and ideals of this movements will shape future negotiations of knowledge and power, representing one lasting way that publics can participate in restructuring the space of communications, and preserve it from corporate control. It also, for the project-oriented, suggests ways of attempting to create new publics with these features, and gives us a vocabulary for thinking about what's happening with tools like Facebook and YouTube, conceived of as "collaborative" but increasingly controlled by private parties. The website for his current project is worth checking out if you're interested in this sort of thing: http://recursivepublic.net/.
That's pretty awesome.
In Two Bits Kelty introduces the idea of a "recursive public," or one that is "concerned with the ability to build, control, modify, and maintain the infrastructure that allows them to come into being in the first place and which, in turn, constitutes their everyday practical commitments and the identities of the participants as creative and autonomous individuals (7)." A recursive public, then, is different from Warner's "public" because it requires more than mere attention at a distance. Rather, it requires iterative participation in the means of communication. Kelty insists at the end of the book that he doesn't wish the term to replace the more abstract "public" concept, but I can't help but feel that this term could learn something from Kelty, in that publics need a means of interacting, and if those means fall into corporate control the public comes under threat (since a feature of a public is to stand outside of state and corporate control).
To the subject matter. Kelty looks at the history of the "free software movement" or, as sometimes alternatively named, the "open source movement." Kelty calls his subjects "geeks" and looks at their activities all around the world (though it's a primarily US story that Kelty tells). Methodologically, Kelty makes sure that we understand how free software only became a movement after the community of practitioners were established. He does this to show how an analysis of free software based on the ideology of its practitioners would not reveal much about their real concerns and activities; rather, free software encompassed a wide variety of ideologies (Kelty discusses polymathy and transhumanism) despite the fact that the members were all involved in the same practical activities, seeking to defend the nature of free software and the internet more generally as as a recursive public (this is Kelty's term, not theirs).
According to Kelty, free software most generally had to figure out 1) ways to share source code, 2) ways of conceptualizing and creating open systems, 3) writing licenses, and 4) coordinating collaborations. To illustrate these points, Kelty talks about the Mozilla/Netscape Navigator controversy and its competition with the "evil" Internet Explorer as well as UNIX and its relationship to AT&T, among others. In the final section, Kelty consider the "cultural significance" of free software by examining Creative Commons and an online textbook project called Connexions. Kelty compares the procedures of 1-4 of the free software movement to these daughter projects, in order to see if they fit his notion of a recursive public. In making this analysis, Kelty takes on the norms of authorship and publishing in academia, and the extent to which collaborative/endlessly experimental projects like Connexions challenge the importance of a "finished" knowledge product. Moreover, he shows how the very structure of Creative Commons uses minimal legal restrictions in order to "punt to culture"- that is, in order to allow broader communities to determine the norms of acceptable use.
At the heart of this book, Kelty argues that the free software movement fundamentally shaped the internet as we see it today (for example, we have ONE internet, as opposed to many corporate owned internets). In turn, he wants to suggest that the procedures and ideals of this movements will shape future negotiations of knowledge and power, representing one lasting way that publics can participate in restructuring the space of communications, and preserve it from corporate control. It also, for the project-oriented, suggests ways of attempting to create new publics with these features, and gives us a vocabulary for thinking about what's happening with tools like Facebook and YouTube, conceived of as "collaborative" but increasingly controlled by private parties. The website for his current project is worth checking out if you're interested in this sort of thing: http://recursivepublic.net/.
That's pretty awesome.
September 11, 2021
Very full, engaging prose, if a little unfocused at times. The author jumps from his personal experiences to his larger view of the matter without warning the reader, but his enthusiasm for the subject is so intoxicating that I was happy to go along with him. However, I do think I would have absorbed more of the material if the book's paragraphs had been more structured.
I nitpick, but my goodness is this writing pleasurable to read. This book is something I could easily see myself finding in a Barnes and Nobles, rather than just on a professor's CV.
It took me nearly the entire book to figure out what a 'recursive public' was--the definition at the start didn't help--but once it clicked, it became strikingly beautiful. The community of Free Software is this self-perpetuating, humming creature, constantly changing without any preordained destination. I wonder what the author would think of the increasingly consolidated nature of software? Many people live their technological lives within the happy bubble of Apple and Google, a place which is controlled by large corporations, not by anonymous, independently operating geeks. What would he think of governments around the world which have been increasingly pressing their feet against the freeness of Free Software, with censorship and other things?
I nitpick, but my goodness is this writing pleasurable to read. This book is something I could easily see myself finding in a Barnes and Nobles, rather than just on a professor's CV.
It took me nearly the entire book to figure out what a 'recursive public' was--the definition at the start didn't help--but once it clicked, it became strikingly beautiful. The community of Free Software is this self-perpetuating, humming creature, constantly changing without any preordained destination. I wonder what the author would think of the increasingly consolidated nature of software? Many people live their technological lives within the happy bubble of Apple and Google, a place which is controlled by large corporations, not by anonymous, independently operating geeks. What would he think of governments around the world which have been increasingly pressing their feet against the freeness of Free Software, with censorship and other things?
April 13, 2009
Nice to read, but the concept of Recursive Public does not seem so useful at the defining level - the economic aspects connecting all the different 'Free' movements are more basic and more suitable for definition.
Read
August 25, 2010I'm reading this for my thesis on the culture of virtual teams. My research 'field' is the Ubuntu documentation team, so Kelty's work is highly relevant, but I've been mostly intrigued by his notion of recursive publics and the way open source communities set about defining their own identities.
December 4, 2008
My review can be found here: http://eskar.dk/andreas/blog/2008/11/...
November 6, 2008
ada yang mau tau isu cultural industries dalam konteks lebih spesifik, isu tentang recursive public cocok buat mengkaji masyarakat kontemporer seperti sekarang.
March 16, 2014
Some of the best academic writing on free software/open source I've encountered so far. The "recursive public" idea is brilliant.
science
September 11, 2017 Keltyy brings an anthropologist´s methods to software developers -- specifically the people behind ¨open source¨, ¨gnu¨ and the ¨free software foundation¨ -- to define what cultural features this group subscribes to and how that can enrich the broader society. He views the uniqueness of their work as a process involving several elements: sharing source code, conceptualizing ¨open systems¨, writing licenses, coordinating collaboration and fomenting a movement. Far from a group of eccentric libertarians, the people emerge as very committed individuals who take the ´singularity´ of the internet seriously and seek to ´figure out´ how to adapt their practices to guard people´s property and rights in a bottom-up approach and to resist the attempts of outside government regulation to undo their work.
Much of the rest involves sotires about EMACS, Linux, TCP/IP, the GPL and Creative Commons and finally the authorś own work on Connexions, a collaborative textbook-writing and -publishing experiment at Rice University.
The main social scientific constructs he uses (or introduces) are the social imaginary (a sort of narrated explication of how power is expressed within a group) and the recursive public (a set of individuals defining their interactions while at the same time working out the ´infrastructure´ that allows them to coordinate.) With geeks, this is software and the internet´s protocols themselves, while for Connexions participants it is the rules by which contributions can be incorporated, modified, and stored.
Much of the rest involves sotires about EMACS, Linux, TCP/IP, the GPL and Creative Commons and finally the authorś own work on Connexions, a collaborative textbook-writing and -publishing experiment at Rice University.
The main social scientific constructs he uses (or introduces) are the social imaginary (a sort of narrated explication of how power is expressed within a group) and the recursive public (a set of individuals defining their interactions while at the same time working out the ´infrastructure´ that allows them to coordinate.) With geeks, this is software and the internet´s protocols themselves, while for Connexions participants it is the rules by which contributions can be incorporated, modified, and stored.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews