The idealization/practice nexus
posted by Biella Coleman
Inspired by Orin Kerr’s question (“is your work focused on the internal narratives and ideologies that people use to describe/justify what they do, or is it focused externally on the actual conduct of what people do?”) below I will give a sense of how I walk the line between what we might call idealism and practice among the geeks and hackers I study.
One of the toughest parts about working with the type of technologists I focus on— intelligent, opinionated, online a lot of the time—is that many will unabashedly dissect my every word, statement, and media appearance. This attribute of my research, unsurprisingly, has been the source of considerable anxiety, only made worse in recent times with Anonymous as I have to make “authoritative” statements about them in the midst studying them, in other words, in the midst of having incomplete information.
All of this is to say I am deliberate and diplomatic when it comes to word choice, framing, and arguments. But most of the time examining practice in light of or up against idealism does not take the somewhat noxious form of “exposing” secrets, the implication being that people are so mystified and deluded that you, the outsider, are there to inform the world of what is really going on (there is a a long standing tradition in the humanities and social sciences, loosely inspired by Karl Marx and especially Pierre Bourdieu, taking this stance, not my favorite strain of analysis unless done really when needed and very well).
Much of what I do is to unearth those dynamics which may not be natively theorized but are certainly in operation. Take for instance the following example at the nexus of law and politics: during fieldwork it was patently clear that many free software hackers were wholly uninterested in politics outside of software freedom and those aligned with open source explicitly disavowed even this narrowly defined political agenda. Many were also repelled by the law (as one developer put it, “writing an algorithm in legalese should be punished with death…. a horrible one, by preference”) and yet weeks into research it was obvious that many developers are nimble legal thinkers, which helps explain how they have built, in a relatively short time period, a robust alternative body of legal theory and laws. One reason for this facility is that the skills, mental dispositions, and forms of reasoning necessary to read and analyze a formal, rule-based system like the law parallel the operations necessary to code software. Both are logic-oriented, internally consistent textual practices that require great attention to detail. Small mistakes in both law and software—a missing comma in a contract or a missing semicolon in code—can jeopardize the integrity of the system and compromise the intention of the author of the text. Both lawyers and programmers develop mental habits for making, reading, and parsing what are primarily utilitarian texts and this makes a lot of free software hackers, who already must pay attention to the law in light of free software licenses, adept legal thinkers, although of course this does not necessarily mean they would make good lawyers.
One of the the important and often overlooked disjunctures between an ideal and practice concerns the hacker idealization of decentralization/individualism/horizontalism and the fact that many have built stable and intricate organizations. When free software developers (and many other hackers) collectively labor they often do as they idealize: they keep things open-ended, flexible, and decentralized. The love of individualism is also undeniable. But they have also been astoundingly adept builders of stable institutions with forms of vertical authority and in the case of free software were doing so back when the 20th became the 21st century, back when the web was in its so-called less mature, web 1.0 “pre-teen” years. But the reality of institution building and social collectivism was rarely addressed by those writing on the topic—although this has thankfully started to change in the last few years. Instead the most common story told about online collaboration is that knowledge, software, etc is being created by forces of mild disorganization whereby individuals, acting in very loose coordination with each other, led to novel forms of collaboration; this vision reaching prominence, I think, for the way it so perfectly meshes with with and thus supports dominant, widespread, (and idealized) understandings of freedom, agency, and individualism. There is no better example of this sentiment than the title of Clay Shirky’s widely read 2006 book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. Although many of his observations about digital dynamics are illuminating, and many of the examples he draws on, such as Meetup groups, remain informal, many others he also discusses, such as Wikipedia and Linux, were by 2006, organized, and thus, some type of organization.
The new institutions built by free software developers and other groups (Indymedia was remarkably well organized by 2001) are not the large slumbering bureaucracies most often associated with governments, the post office, or large corporations. Nor do they follow the wisdom of the crowd. In building what are new institutional forms, open source developers often seek to strike a balance between stability and open-ended flexibility and individualism and collectivism. In the process of doing so, many engender particular forms of social value that include mutual aid, transparency, and complex codes for collaboration and other ethical precepts that help guide technical production. In the case of Debian—the largest and perhaps most stunningly of organized of free and open source software projects—its policies, direction, and imperatives are decided by a collective who not only create software but also have innovated, quite successfully, in institution building and much of my work has focused on this side of their practical activity, which is not always part of their ideological repertoire (but sometimes it is).
Anonymous, which so far has steadfastly avoided institution building (not a surprise as it so flies in the face of their ideological commitments and there is not always much coherence there either), presents different sorts of issues and problems when a researcher like myself gauges how and when to reconcile between their idealizations and practice; I have never been accused of suffering Stockholm Syndrome with my work on free software, but this is routinely launched at me due to my work on Anonymous. And probably meaty enough of an accusation to warrant its own post.
January 15, 2012 at 11:52 am
Tags: Anonymous, Free Software, idealization, practice
Posted in: Philosophy of Social Science, Politics, Web 2.0
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Responses (4)
Orin Kerr - January 15, 2012 at 2:56 pm
I’m glad to have inspired the thinking here, Biella.
Can you give a few examples of how the group you have studied are “nimble legal thinkers”? And what are the “robust alternative body of legal theory and laws” that you mention? I think I can say I’ve been somewhat near this space for a few years and I wouldn’t reach that conclusion: I’ve encountered a lot of naive and self-serving legal claims over the years, but not a lot that I would call nimble or robust. Perhaps you could give us some examples to explain what you mean?
While I’m at it, I’ll also disagree with your view that there are such close similarities between how law works and how coding works. Coding is logical and rules-based, requiring internal consistency. But law is man-made, often standards based (rather than rule based), and often internally inconsistent. The two actually are quite different, I think, which in part explains why engineers and computer people often have such disgust for the legal system. For related thoughts, on the differences between studying engineering versus studying law, see here: http://volokh.com/posts/1170821171.shtml
PrometheeFeu - January 15, 2012 at 6:23 pm
@Orin Kerr:
I think that while your arguments apply very well to disciplines such as mechanical engineering, software engineering is quite different.
-The environment of software engineering is completely man-made: Humans design and implement programming languages, operating systems and computers.
-Programming languages often have ambiguities as the language designer not having foreseen your particular case did not both to specify a behavior for it.
-Programming languages are also often internally inconsistent though obviously ceterus paribus, we do strive for less inconsistency.
-Code often has unintended side-effects
-Whether you talk about languages, architecture or even formatting style, there are important normative debates which brought different languages and systems to where they are.
I think that the distaste for laws in software engineers is actually misplaced and really a distaste for law-makers. (Well that and contempt for people who don’t understand our discipline and therefore ask us to do things that are not possible or highly undesirable out of ignorance) The way standards and leaders are picked is often through a largely emergent process where people vote by adopting the technology themselves. Compared to that emergent largely meritocratic system, the process for passing legislation appears absolutely absurd.
I think the primary parallel though is that which Biella brought up: taking relatively vague imprecise notions and expressing them in a formal language to reduce some of the vagueness and imprecision.
Orin Kerr - January 15, 2012 at 6:57 pm
Interesting points, PrometheeFeu. Anyway, I’ll look forward to Biella’s thoughts on the first set of questions I raised.
Biella Coleman - January 15, 2012 at 9:33 pm
PrometheeFeu: as you covered part of what I was wanted to address, although in more detail and precision than I would have done, I will keep my comments about programming brief. Although I will still whip out one of my favorite though overused quotes by Frederik Brooks from The Mythical Man-Month that so nicely captures the human-fabricated nature of programing:
“He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination.”
Orin: in terms of your skepticism about whether geeks are nimble legal thinkers, I guess my own caveat that many would not necessarily make for good lawyers works to bolster your argument. But the point is that many have easily taken hold of the law and have, because of their reliance on free and open source licensing, made thinking about it part of their everyday technical activity, which has been facilitated by their craft. They may not always like doing so but rarely are frustrated by needing to learn basics and intricacies of legal matters and do so with remarkable frequency as well.
Many admittedly don’t like it—and I like PrometheeFeus distinction above (re: distaste for law makers)—and some are more sophisticated legal thinkers than others. In fact a category or type of geek/hacker that has recently interested me and seems to be growing are staff technologist types (Seth Schoen and Chris Soghoian are two prominent examples but the list is growing) who are hired and sought after because they have astute knowledge of technology, law, and politics. I suspect this category of technologist who is steeped in and familiar with the law will only become more important in coming years.
As to your claim that you have seen “naive and self-serving legal claims over the years,” let me ask for some clarification: do you mean to apply those terms in general to the case of free and open source software law or do you have something more narrow in mind? While FLOSS legal theory, being it is so new cannot be so easily compared to what is a rich and complicated 200 + year history of let’s say free speech jurisprudence in the United States, just to take one random example, “naïve” is not the word that springs to mind to characterize this body of law. In its short history, it has helped reshape the politics of IP law, and I think largely for good, providing a set of working alternatives with a philosophical base for what of a system that has had too much reach, breadth and power. FLOSS law is actively used not just in the context of free software projects but also in corporations and major tech firms often require legal counsel to help hammer out FLOSS licensing issues, which points to part of its complexity (though perhaps this is not such a great thing).
So perhaps before I go any further, do you mean that the body of law is naive and if yes, in what way? Or do you mean that claims made it is name are naive? Or perhaps a little bit of both?
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