From the Introduction: “The hopes of past generations of hackers weigh like a delirium on the brains of the newbies. Back in the days when Bulletin Board Systems metamorphosed into the Internet, the world’s digital communications networks – hitherto confined to military, corporate and elite academic institutions – were at grasping reach of ordinary individuals. To declare the independence of the Internet from nation states and the corporate world seemed like no more than stating the bare facts. Even encrypted communication – the brainchild of military research – had leaked into the public’s hands and had become a tool wielded against state power. Collectives of all stripes could make use of the new possibilities offered by the Web to bypass traditional media, broadcast their own voice and assemble in new ways in this new public sphere. For some time, at least, the Internet as a whole embodied ‘alternativeness’. ”

Contents of JOPP# 9

Special Issue Editors’ Introduction

• Alt. vs. Ctrl.: Editorial notes for the JoPP issue on Alternative Internets – Félix Tréguer, Panayotis Antoniadis and Johan Söderberg

Peer Reviewed Academic Papers

• In Defense of the Digital Craftsperson – James Losey and Sascha D. Meinrath
• Hacktivism, Infrastructures and Legal Frameworks in Community Networks: The Italian Case of Ninux.org – Stefano Crabu, Federica Giovanella, Leonardo Maccari and Paolo Magaudda
• Enmeshed Lives? Examining the Potentials and the Limits in the Provision of Wireless Networks. The Case of Réseau Libre – Christina Haralanova and Evan Light
• Going Off-the-Cloud: The Role of Art in the Development of a User-Owned & Controlled Connected World – Daphne Dragona and Dimitris Charitos
• Gesturing Towards “Anti-Colonial Hacking” and its Infrastructure – Sophie Toupin
• The Interplay Between Decentralization and Privacy: The Case of Blockchain Technologies – Primavera De Filippi
• Finding an Alternate Route: Towards Open, Eco-cyclical, and Distributed Production – Stephen Quilley, Jason Hawreliak and Kaitlin Kish

Experimental Format

• Alternative Policies for Alternative Internets – Melanie Dulong de Rosnay

The issue is available for free here.

All content by JoPP is in the public domain and is available here.

Photo by HarcoRutgers

The post New Special Issue at JoPP: “Alternative Internets” appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Hacker communities are no different. From the social and techno justice conglomerate known as Anonymous to the state-sponsored espionage groups, to the ransom-ware syndicates, hackers exhibit a broad range of ethics.

But combine the hacker ethic with the ideal of the commons and it is easy to envision a creating society. Technic, aka Technologia Incognita, is such a society.  Their collective embraces a hacker ethic complementary to the emerging commons ideal.

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Extracted from: http://techinc.nl/node/1

About Techinc

Technologia Incognita is a hackerspace in Amsterdam.

We are a collective of people who creates a space where people can meet each other, exchange ideas, learn learn, work and have fun together, we try to run and organise this space as a collective from a DIY-perspective.

Our group at the moment consists mostly of IT profesionals, freelancers, consultants, artists, students with some overlap other fields aswell. “Hacking” for us is a passion, a hobby and a dream. Our current interests seem to focus on computer hard-&software, fabrics&clothing, electronics, security&privacy, hacktivism, physical production such as 3d-printing and DIY in general. Most projects get documented on our here: Projects Wikipage

We have a vereniging as a legal body with a small board of around 7 members who handle the regular bureaucracy and around 80-90 members who organise, run and pay for the space in general.

Extracted from: http://techinc.nl/

A hackerspace is a place where people with a technically creative spirit gather to work on projects or to talk. During this open day, it is possible to see some examples of hacking projects and see what happens in a hackerspace.

Some examples of activities are:
* Learning how websites, networks and other computer-based systems can be vulnerable to attackers and what can be done about this.
* Programming electronics and microcontrollers like the Arduino and the Raspberry Pi microcomputer. Hackers can show you how these can be used to build CNC milling, laser cutters, 3D printers, home automation, clocks, pick&place machines or autonomous robots.
* The use of 3D printers, for example to develop a jaw prosthesis, keys to copied from a picture, or a broken part to replace a household appliance.
* Discuss the use of personal data by companies or the government and the effects of this on our privacy and other aspects of society.
* There are also different presentations in hackerspaces of individual projects carried out in there.

Hackers find ethics an important subject, and distinguish themselves from cyber criminals by a strong sense of ethical behavior. During the open-hackerspaces-day it will be explained how hackers contribute to a better world by looking with fresh eyes to society, technology and organizations, and how they share their knowledge with the community. Additionally hackerspaces are also places where people are welcome who just make beautiful things and can find common space, tools, like-minded and can find inspiration. This can be in many forms from jigsaws to artisan smiths, to biohacking, or to molecular cooking.

Photo by Jaime_GC

The post Project Of The Day: Technologia Incognita appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Proclaiming the public nature of science has become something as commonplace as it is controversial. At times, the consensus is overwhelming: more science and more research funding are universally in demand, taking it as given that science is not only economically necessary but also morally irreplaceable. However, the agreement was never absolute. There have always been those who are willing to blame a democratic deficit for so little discussion on the type of science we want, or for the fact that we still treat the environmental and health damages produced by the deployment of techno-science as externalities. The truth is that science isn’t only public, it’s also private, and the crossbreeding between academia, government and business is old, deep, and sometimes murky.

Science isn’t only semi-public: it couldn’t survive without the publics [a]. There is an extensive body of work that insists upon the social, urban, and collective nature of science. Within it we are shown how science has always maintained a complex, vibrant and dynamic relationship with the people: amateurs and artisans, witnesses and spectators, activists and consumers. Yes, it’s true that, for better or worse, the citizenry owes a lot to science; equally correct is the thesis that science owes much to the citizenry. A lot of what contributes to the knowledge we find so hard to accept is anonymous, invisible and tacit; our narratives insist upon scorning that knowledge. Consequently, it seems as if the entire world is complicit in creating this absurd and biased image of science.

To build our argument, we’ve divided this text into three parts. In the first we’ll explore the historical origins of science’s capacity as a public good. In the second we will highlight the problems derived from treating Commons science and open science as analogous, which is to say that the exigencies of the open access or open data movements, while necessary, are not sufficient. The third section argues that the condition of being a common good comes not from its being provided for all, but rather stems from being created among all. This opens the capacity of being a common good by virtue of belonging to a third sector, alongside the public and the private.

The truth is that science isn’t only public, it’s also private, and the crossbreeding between academia, government and business is old, deep, and sometimes murky. For decades, perhaps centuries, we’ve told the history of science as if it were akin to the planetary expansion of an oil stain, or the transmission of an epidemic. But there is nothing natural about the transmission of knowledge.

Science understood as a commons would not then be simply a public science seeking an outlet via open access, nor would it be an extramural non-commercialized science, or a formal science (as always) including the citizenry in the design and evaluation of projects and results. Science understood as a commons wouldn’t be the same old science in a democratic or post-modernist guise. Science doesn’t become a commons by being more functional, open or militant; instead it results from the application of contrasted, collective and recursive epistemic practices. The Commons would then be another approach, historically distinguished for producing knowledge, community, and commitment. Thus, in the third part, rather than discussing science as a commons, we will discuss the Commons as a science.

Science Commons as a Public Good

The notion of science being a public good is relatively recent. Philip Mirowski (2011) has devoted much effort to explaining this idea. In order to understand it, we must unavoidably admit that the pressures imposed upon scientists by the Church, Empires, and States bear a striking resemblance to those which today’s industrial corporations seek to impose. We know that by the 19th-century, university laboratories were being scrupulously combed by industrialists probing between test tubes and coils for some discovery upon which new monopolies could be built. It all seems to point to the communitarian nature of science earning credit by somehow finding ways to legitimize corporate-financed industrial laboratories claiming discoveries as their own. In this way, if the discovery was assumed to be collective, no one except the owner of the space where the knowledge was produced could claim the patent.

The Second World War drastically changed this panorama. During the second third of the 20th century, the state gave itself the right to manage science and create the necessary conditions for advancing innovation. The war economy brought about a techno-military complex where the public sector invested in basic sciences, in order to guarantee the free circulation of knowledge among entrepreneurs playing a game whose rules, fixed by the Army, served the national interest. Its condition as public goods meant the militarization and nationalization of so-called Big Science. Everything changed in a hurry from the 1980s on, creating conditions which were favorable for launching an accelerated process of knowledge privatization. Not just inventions but discoveries could be subjected to intellectual property rights and, consequently, be treated as assets circulating in the stock exchange to attract venture capital. In this new regime of academic capitalism the boundaries between the public and the private dissolve.

The transition, however, wasn’t without resistance. What by now is obvious to all was only anticipated by some, and their arguments are still relevant. Paul A. David (2008) explains how, since the dawn of modern science, a perception emerged of scientists as unmanageable people, owing to the sophisticated nature of their knowledge. The truth is that the court, given that nobody could act as a counterweight, elected to open knowledge so that they themselves could preside over the quality of scientific work. This would be the origin of the awards, academia, and the periodic journals. The autonomy of science imbued its organization with the qualities of a meritocratic, open and cosmopolitan enterprise. Distinguishing between sages and charlatans required the concurrence of new spaces, different actors and different mediations that, as a whole, lead us to treat what is known as the Scientific Revolution not as an epistemic revolution but as an open science revolution. Michael Polanyi also wanted to join the club of those who opposed the treatment of knowledge as information to eventually, after disenfranchising it from its places of production, turn it into a profitable resource. The commodification of science is impossible when the only knowledge that can be patented is non-tacit. The aforementioned positions argue that science only prospers when it is kept as a collective enterprise whose products are not reduced to codified information, and whose organization won’t overwhelm the attempts to confine it within a protected environment. The history of ideas, the anthropology of organizations and the economy of innovation coincided in the necessity of demanding an active role from the state in the preservation of science as public goods. And this is the tradition assumed and inherited by Michel Callon (1994) in his provocative vision of science.

Callon’s reasoning begins by obliging his readers to accept that knowledge was always the most mundane of enterprises, never isolated from the surrounding interests. To say otherwise was tantamount to ignoring the ample work previously undertaken in the field of the study of science. For decades, perhaps centuries, we’ve told the history of science as if it were akin to the planetary expansion of an oil stain, or the transmission of an epidemic. But there is nothing natural about the transmission of knowledge. What STS has taught us is that verifying any natural law or testing the relevance of a scientific concept necessitates a plethora of machines, technicians and reagents, as well as the time and resources to produce, select, contrast, discuss, standardize and communicate the results. As such, the desire to have science as a commons is a utopian undertaking which obliges us to examine whether we can truly assume the potentially untenable cost of transmission.

We must sign the peace treaty: we need a lasting agreement that doesn’t insist upon dividing the world between those who know and those who don’t; an armistice to liberate the world from the arrogance of experts. Stating that we need science to guarantee a prosperous future is a message that is as certain as it is exhausted. Moreover, it is the carrier of a plan that legitimizes exclusion while guaranteeing new wars for science.

Michel Callon has shown us that a robust science should promote the necessary Freedom of Association to operate different forms of organization; he also calls for a Freedom of Extension to prevent the network from allowing the obstruction or imposition of any type of orthodoxy or canon. Finally, it invites all participants to a Struggle against Irreversibility to prevent monopolies from creating standards that block innovation. The notion of public goods is explicitly related to the notion of diversity and not of open access. The importance lies not in the equitable distribution of knowledge, but rather in creating conditions that prevent interruptions in the process of knowledge production and diversification. The resource in need of protection isn’t knowledge itself, but the plurality of forms of socialization it facilitates. We don’t need the state to protect knowledge itself, but the networks it circulates within. It isn’t about protecting ideas that are published or deserve a Nobel Prize, but the infrastructures supporting them, which are often as inscrutable as they are contrary to the Commons.

Image by Peter Miller

Science Commons as Open Science

Imagining science as a commons requires that we stop thinking of it as something separable from the market. We also have to disentail the aforementioned claim from notions of open access. Elinor Ostrom (1990) argued for this with memorable aplomb: there is nothing more contrary to the Commons that an open access system absent any form of governance. Confusing both concepts is in fact what led Garrett Hardin to proclaim the tragedy of the Commons and to demand, as a survival strategy, the public or private patrimonial appropriation of those resources that really matter. The Commons, Ostrom remarked, are not a thing, but a management process that collapses when the community that sustains and is sustained by them doesn’t incorporate efficient rules to protect itself from, among other threats, free riders.

Over the last decade we’ve witnessed the birth of various movements which demand that science be awarded the condition of open enterprise. Though not all of their proponents use the same arguments, nor emphasize the same concepts, it seems reasonable to mention two central sets of motivations. On the one hand, there are those who question the generalized practice of externalizing the process of communication. They all share the critique of the current system as both profligate and paradoxical, as it assumes huge expenses to produce papers that we are later obliged to buy back from those who’d previously received them from us gratis.

The second motivation for demanding open access to scientific information has to do with the desideratum for well-informed politics, belief in free choice, and the strengthening of democracy. Debates on energy options, consumption of GMOs, air quality, food labeling, and the treatment of chronic diseases prompt processes that should be discussed openly. No less important is the fact that the exaggerated costs of scientific information or pharmaceuticals exclude poor institutions and countries from their use. This adds science to the list of factors contributing to the widening inequalities in the world.

Extravagance, careerism, and opacity are justified criticisms that validate an orientation towards open access. The quality of our democracies and global justice are neither minor, nor likely deferrable, objectives. But it’s an absolutely insufficient debate. While the politics of open science do correct some of the most heinous shortcomings of the current system, it is no less true that open, online and free distribution requires a set of conditions that, ultimately, benefit big corporations foremost – or, in other words, those able to capitalize on the information. Furthermore, it’s not clear that accessibility corrects the role of science in our world in any decisive way. Making the information freely available is not tantamount to being able to use or do something with it, as it will remain invariably tied to the technologies and values through which it was produced.

Those who’ve studied open science invite us to consider cases such as SETI [1] or all the crowd-sourced projects related to the pioneering BOINC [2] platform. Voluntary computation has shown itself to be a powerful mechanism for solving problems that demand enormous calculating capacity. Wikipedia and Fold.it [3] are two very different projects that authoritatively demonstrate the emergent power available to interconnected multitudes. We are speaking of colossal mechanisms connecting millions of humans; we’re also referring to new ways of producing and validating knowledge. Examples that allow us to imagine an empowered citizenry capable of producing facts to counter official data do exist. We could be talking about environmental or food crises, or the production of new cartographies, different patterns, or different institutions. If that were the case, we would witness the birth of different systems of knowledge gestated through pioneering forms of coding, communicating, archiving, and validating the knowledge. Laboratory space, formerly reserved for experts, is turning into disputed territory. The experts have good reason to feel uneasy. It all indicates that their consolidated hegemony could be in danger. It wouldn’t be the first time that the needs of the disgruntled have provoked a broadening of the space where knowledge resides, including new agents and different questions. We must sign the peace treaty: we need a lasting agreement that doesn’t insist upon dividing the world between those who know and those who don’t, an armistice to liberate the world from the arrogance of experts. Stating that we need science to guarantee a prosperous future is a message that is as certain as it is exhausted. Moreover, it is the carrier of a plan that legitimizes exclusion while guaranteeing new wars for science.

If we had to put the term “citizen science” on the scale, we would have to acknowledge that it tips more heavily toward science, despite extending beyond academia. Effectively, citizen science is independent science, knowledge developed by virtuous communities who, radical in their political rhetoric, are more conservative than we imagine in scientific practice. But citizen science isn’t monolithic and we could stand to evoke that diversity in the plural. All the citizen sciences share a resistentialist gesture. Some have also highlighted the existence of alternative means of relating to political, economic, scientific and environmental realities. Having reached this point, it’s imperative to mention hacker culture. The truth is, we owe much to Pekka Himannen and his notion of hacker ethics as the expression of technological non-conformism, negating the idea that things can only be that for which they were designed. But the most radical of hacker gestures, as shown by McKenzie Wark, not only implies a questioning of functionalities but also a confrontation with their properties. Hacking the world, beyond the invention of new possibilities for inhabiting and transforming it, could return to the Commons all that has been abusively relegated to state and market patrimony. The first hackers, from the 60s onwards, invented the squaring of the circle: to be an author doesn’t demand that you be a proprietor. Achieving the condition of author happens the moment the author gives away the thing that was authored. Thus, accreditation functions as an admirable way of opening knowledge.

Commons as a Science

None have been as radical in their approaches as the hacker movement. No one has managed to attain a better set of practical and sustainable protocols for a culture that is open, experimental, inalienable, horizontal and distributed. Moreover, as an abstract culture adept at generating new futures and imbued with a curiosity that generates hope, hacker culture has made its mark on other domains. It is no longer restricted to geeks, nor is it the domain of maladapted computer scientists. Nowadays we talk of hacking museums, academia and the city. We have hundreds of projects daring to examine the arts as ventures to be reformed according to non-mercantile principles, fighting to rescue music, painting or architecture from the clutches of the culture, tourism, or housing speculation industries. The city itself, its squares and abandoned lots, can be inhabited in other ways. From 2011 on, the Occupy movement has been the most visible manifestation of something that has been going on for decades all over the world. The city has been occupied, it must be occupied [b]; we must wrest it away from the entertainment, security and housing corporations (Harvey 2012). This is the origin of the open source urbanism that looks to and is inspired by free software hackers.

There is no city where citizens aren’t gathering in the squares and open lots; where, fed up with bowing to the ideal of individual consumerism, people aren’t stretching themselves a bit and getting reacquainted with the pleasures of group dances, sharing food, holding bazaars, fairs and other kinds of popular festivals. They’d almost convinced us that we’d do well to forget the old ways of socializing, to toss them out as old-fashioned and fossilized. However, now we see these things as our cultural patrimony, bringing out the best in us; that is to say, what we share and create among ourselves. This new urbanism is not new construction, but rather new relationships to one another experienced through material intervention in our own city. Madrid is an example of what we’re talking about right now in the second decade of our new century, but we also see it in Berlin, San Francisco, Buenos Aires, Cape Town and Mumbai. A city re-urbanization shooting up from the abandoned lots, urban gardens, collective bike routes, self-guided walking tours, neighbourhood assemblies, local markets, rescued festivals, recovered collective memory, and finally, in the thousand and one ways of redesigning the city and gathering where our common links are weakest, most sporadic, tentative, intermittent – yet still apparent and solid, in place and functional (Corsín Jiménez 2014).

People are learning to experience and experiment with their city in new ways, with or without architects, with or without designers, with or without anthropologists. The experiment has been granted new life beyond the confines of the lab, setting in motion a process where the places, parties and infrastructures needed to turn the city into both an object and a place for experimentation are being re-imagined. There’s no scarcity of the credentialed in many of these projects, but theirs is not an expert role, recognizing themselves as part of a collective experiment to problematize established forms of authority. They all feel the importance of these communities of learning. Everyone experiments, everyone investigates, everyone interprets, everyone contrasts, everyone consents, everyone learns and everyone creates new knowledge: a commons science, to create a city of the Commons.

It’s not hard to find references from hacker culture in these projects, as they often invoke the free software community as a source of inspiration. In them, we find some of the characteristics that make free software a singular mode of production, knowledge, and sociability, among them rapid prototyping, recursive in its organization and granular in the distribution of its efforts (Kelty 2008). Rapid prototyping means that designs, objects and proposals are circulated before they are even finished. This is a vulnerable and precarious state of affairs that, nonetheless, compels others to partake in an effort that aspires to be collective. In this way, the widening of the design object is paralleled by the growth of the community surrounding it. But this ongoing beta state also allows for forking at any stage, the possibility of opting for another alternative, and separating from the dominant criteria. Free software, then, is always open to all its potential, always functions as a beta design, a prototype manifested in a non-niche community, a project that is always more than many and less than one.

The community both serves and is created by this cognitive activity. Let’s summarize its nature: experimental, open, relational, distributed, horizontal, collaborative, inalienable and recursive. As conversationalists, they are producing a relational body based on the experiential, in all that the academic laboratory qualifies as collateral, irrelevant or useless. It’s the same experience we’ve previously described when referring to urbanism.

Projects that learn from their errors are recursive, something that children do systematically and which, at times, also lies within the reach of adults. But in this context, our interest in recursive notions lies in their application to systems rather to persons or simple projects. In such circumstances we detect a recursive nature when not only is the functionality of the mechanism is preserved, but also its moral integrity — in other words, when the protocols and the code are responsible for the preservation of the values that sustain the project, that is to say the community. What makes free software community vibrant isn’t the intention of producing for everyone, but of involving everyone in its construction. Here is the reason why the distribution of its efforts is granular; anyone can contribute with his or her knowledge and available time and effort.

The Commons that hackers are working towards isn’t guaranteed by free access, but by a willingness to not exclude any form of collaboration that improves the result. This is, obviously, not a product, but a way of understanding our relationship with technology and other humans based on the principle that the language used by machines for communication must be open and communities must be peer-based in order to dissolve the artificial, imaginary boundaries society imposes between nationals and aliens, experts and amateurs, communicating and sharing — and between free as in “open”, and free as in “free of charge”. As we’ve mentioned, we are speaking of cosmopolitan, informal communities based in the gift economy.

Just as the city is reinvented, the body is also involved in a process of reconfiguration. The accelerated expansion of chronic ailments — coupled with the growing number of persons with severe conduct, nutritional, mental or addictive disorders, along with numerous collectives of victims assailed by allergies or intolerances — marks incurable ills as a new and disquieting phenomenon within our world. We’ve been educated in the conviction that every ill has a technical, scientific, and therefore, political solution. We weren’t ready to confront the obvious and admit that not all bodies are equal and that all react in different ways to the same therapies. Generalized solutions always produce minorities of sufferers. Many people — it’s hard to know if they’re the most lucid or the most disheartened — seriously doubt whether institutionalized wisdom can offer adequate consolation. And there are answers for everything, from those who’ve fallen into the arms of disciplines as alternative as they are hazy, and from those who’ve opened the floor to talk about what’s going on with them (and us).

Putting the pieces back together is difficult and very costly. But Internet allows it at zero cost, as in the case of the mentally ill who communicate amongst themselves in Brain Talk Communities, or those affected by electro-hypersensitivity who don’t even possess the words to describe their ailment. Dissatisfied with available diagnostics and treatments, they take on the task of identifying traits that might be recognized as symptoms, compelling them to manufacture a shared and contrasted language. These projects constitute a gigantic real-time clinical study, where the affected themselves have decided to take the reins of their own bodies. There are none more interested in finding a good answer than those who are risking their own lives searching for it. They know that they can only aspire to enhancing their quality of life: for them at least, the healing paradigm has been left behind.

The experiment is proven when they agree that they feel better, even though this recovery, as with drug addicts, is etched in words. It is an effect of a commitment held between all, not an individual solution. If participants get taken seriously by formal scientific institutions, or experience an improvement, there is no other choice but to admit that we’re speaking of knowledge constructed by all. The community that sustains it is recognized — diagnosed, even — in light of the fact that the knowledge it produces is validated by virtue of being functional. The community both serves and is created by this cognitive activity. Let’s summarize its nature: experimental, open, relational, distributed, horizontal, collaborative, inalienable and recursive. As conversationalists, they are producing a relational body based on the experiential, in all that the academic laboratory qualifies as collateral, irrelevant or useless (Lafuente e Ibáñez-Martín s/d). It’s the same experience we’ve previously described when referring to urbanism. From abandoned lots, from social practices long ignored for belonging to the poor, ignorant or marginal, we are reinventing the city. In the same way, we are creating a common body from all that’s left, that which was discarded as irrelevant by formal scientists.

We now have all we need to reach a conclusion. The Commons science that has determined to achieve a reinvention of the body and the city is a knowledge enacted from the experiential, where, consequently, none can be excluded. Commons science is not an alternative to academic science. Both have a mutual need of each other, although we’ll occasionally see them contending public space, and ever more frequently, the publics.

Image by Praktyczny Przewodnik

References

• Callon, M. (1994) “Is Science a Public Good? Fifth Mullins Lecture, Virginia Polytechnic Institute, 23 March 1993”, Science, Technology & Human Values, Vol.19/n.4: 395-424.
• Corsín Jimenez, A. (2014) “The right to infrastructure: a prototype for open source urbanism”, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space advance online, Vol.32.
• David, P. A. (2008) “The Historical Origins of ‘Open Science’. An Essay on Patronage, Reputation and Common Agency Contracting in the Scientific Revolution”, Capitalism and Society, Vol.3/n.2.
• Harvey, D. (2012) Rebel Cities. From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution, London, New York: Verso.
• Kelty, C. (2008) Two Bits. The Cultural Significance of Free Software, Durham: Duke University Press.
• Lafuente, A. and Ibáñez-Martín, R. (s/d) “Cuerpo común, y cuerpos colaterales”, manuscript.
• Mirowski, P. (2011) Science-Mart. Privatizing American Science, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Ostrom, E. (1990) Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Footnotes

[1] http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/

[2] http://boinc.berkeley.edu/

[3] http://fold.it/portal/

Translator’s notes

[a] We’ve elected to use “the publics” instead of “the public” in reference to Callon’s own nomenclature.

[b] “Okupar” in the original. “Okupar”, an alteration of the Spanish “Ocupar”, makes reference to the squatter movement, as well as the Occupy Movement.

Produced by Guerrilla Translation under a Peer Production License.

Article translated by Stacco Troncoso and Anne Marie Utratel – Guerrilla Translation

Originally published in Guerrilla Translation

Lead Image by Alison

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We are all hackers now, apparently—or are trying to be. Guilty as charged. I am writing these words, as I write most things, not with a pen and paper, or a commercial word processor, but on Emacs, a command-line text editor first developed in the 1970s for that early generation of free-software hackers. I had to hack it, so to speak, with a few crude lines of scripting code in order that it would properly serve my purposes as a writer. And it does so extremely well, with only simple text files, an integrated interpreter for the Markdown markup language, and as many split screens as I want. I get to feel clever and devious every time I sit down to use it.

Thus it seemed fitting that when I was asked to join a “philosophy incubator” with a few fellow restless young souls, I was told the group’s name—and that of the book we’d be publishing w?ith an internet startup—was Wisdom Hackers. Hacking is what this generation does, after all, or at least what we aspire to. The hacker archetype both celebrates the mythology of the dominant high-tech class and nods toward the specter of an unsettling and shifty subculture lurking in the dark. Edward Snowden is a hacker hero, but so is Bill Gates. The criminals and the CEOs occupied the same rungs on the high school social ladder, lurked in the same listservs, and now share our adulation.

To hack is to approach a problem as an outsider, to be unconfined by law or decorum, to find whatever back doors might lead the way to a solution or a fix. To hack is to seek simplicity, elegance, and coherence, but also to display one’s non-attachment—by way of gratuitous lulz, if necessary. Wisdom is not normally a feature of the hacker’s arsenal (they prefer cleverness), but evidently some of us have come to sense that even this generation of hackers will need to pick up some wisdom along the way.

But why hack in the first place? That is, why we should always need to use a back door?

For me this line of questioning began in 2011, the year of leaderless uprisings, starting with Tunis and Cairo and ending with police raids on Occupy camps, a civil war in Syria and a seemingly endless series of revelations spawned by Wikileaks. I followed these happenings as much as I could. I happened to be the first reporter allowed to? cover the planning meetings that led to Occupy Wall Street, and I stayed close to those early organizers as their illicit occupation became a global media fixation, then long after the fixation passed. Through them—and their sudden and surprising success—I tried to obtain some grasp of the spirit of 2011, which was elusive enough that it couldn’t be organized in some simple list of demands, but also intuitive enough that protesters around the world, in hugely different kinds of societies, found themselves saying and doing a lot of the same things.

I keep coming back to the slogan of Spain’s homegrown occupation movement of that year: “Real democracy now!” This had uncanny explanatory power from Tahrir Square to Zuccotti Park. Whether under Mubarak or Bush and Obama, young people around the world have grown up in societies they were always told were democracies despite repeated and undeniable signals that it was not: police brutality as a fact of life (whether by secret police or militarized regular ones), an unrelenting state of exception (whether by emergency law or the war on terror), and corruption (whether by outright graft or the mechanisms of campaign financing). When a system is broken, we resort to improvised solutions, jury-rigged workarounds, hacks. No wonder, then, that the mask of the amorphous hacktivist collective Anonymous became a symbol of the uprisings.

For 2011’s movements, however, the initial virality and the rhetoric of direct democracy turned out to mask a generation unprepared to deal with power—either wielding it or confronting it effectively. The young liberals in Tahrir may have created Facebook pages, but it was the Muslim Brotherhood’s decades of dangerous, underground, person-to-person organizing that won the country’s first fair elections. Even the Brotherhood would soon be massacred after a coup unseated them in favor of the military. “The army and the people are one hand,” Egyptians had chanted in Tahrir. With similar historical irony, the same might have been chanted about the internet.

In the Arab world, the 2011 endgame has included the rise of the Islamic State. Hacking every bit of social media it can get its hands on, the militants formerly known as ISIS emerged as a potent remix of al Qaeda’s guerrilla anti-colonialism and Tahrir Square’s utopian confidence, of Saudi-funded fundamentalism and hardened generals left over from Saddam’s secular regime. These disparate apps have been hacked together into one thanks to hashtags, an elusive leader, a black flag, and gruesome vigilantism.

I reject the often-uttered claim that the 2011 movements lacked purpose, or reason, or demands. Their fascination with hacking, and the vital fecundity that enchanted them, attest to the widely felt longing for a deeper, somehow realer global democracy. But what they share also had a hand in bringing them down. The allure of certain hacker delusions, I believe, played a part in keeping the noble aspirations of that year from taking hold, from meaningfully confronting the powers that now pretend to rule the world.

Ours is a generation of hackers because we sense that we aren’t being allowed in the front door. Most of us have never had the feeling that our supposed democracies are really listening to us; we spend our lives working for organizations that gobble up most of the value we produce for those at the top. We have to hack to get by. Maybe we can at least hack better than whoever is in charge—though that is increasingly doubtful. We become so used to hacking our way into the back door that we forget that there could be any other way.

I don’t want to hack forever. I want to open up the front door—to a society where “democracy” actually means democracy and technology does its part to help, where we can spend less time hacking and hustling and more time getting better at being human. Tech won’t do it for us, because it can’t. Hacking isn’t an end in itself—wisdom is.

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Originally published in Transrural Initiatives – a collaborative magazine on the rural world – and republished in Bastamag – an independent media site that focuses on social and environmental issues – the realities this interview explores are a good example of what we can accomplish when we work together – and how much fun we can have in the process! The article was translated by Travis Shearer and edited by Jane Loes Lipton.

“As artists, engineers, researchers, hackers and farmers we all asked ourselves how digital technologies could be merged with nature, heritage and agriculture. Our urban hackerspaces, including their philosophy and practices, can be seamlessly transposed onto rural areas.”

They open up areas struck by digital exclusion. They develop autonomous Internet networks in mountainous areas, install organic solar panels and let local Internet radio emerge. They can even transform abandoned water troughs into eco-jacuzzis. “Hackerspaces,” user-friendly spaces where technological tools are crafted, are spreading throughout the rural environment. Interview with Philippe Langlois, one of the founding members of the first French hackerspace.

Could you define what hackerspaces are?

Philippe Langlois: A hackerspace is a physical, autonomous place where people gather around tech-related projects. We often hear about “the evil computer pirates” in the media, but hackerspaces have nothing to do with any of that: we’re simply people who reclaim technology in a cheerful, independent and creative way. The goal is to create tools that can be reappropriated and replicated by everyone, freely distributed, and which can be modified and improved upon.

Hackerspaces originated in Germany in the 1990s, but didn’t truly develop until 2005. Since then, more than 500 have appeared throughout the world, bringing together nearly 40,000 people. These are people who originally came from the world of open source and free software ¹ and transposed their methods onto the physical world, while making their technological know-how accessible.

What kind of projects do you work on? How do they fit into your broader relationship with technology?

There are projects dealing with energy self-sufficiency, collaborative mapping and digital art, as well as local plastic recycling or even site cleanup. Our relationship with technology revolves around several ideas, the first of which is to enjoy the positive process of creation. The second one is the belief that what we create shouldn’t only benefit a restricted group of people, but rather the whole of society. Finally, we don’t want to embark on overly conceptual projects: we are, above all, about doing things. The ethics that can be found in hackerspaces are based on practice, tinkering, the right to be wrong, and an all-encompassing, non-dogmatic approach.

How did hackerspaces end up in rural areas?

First of all, because it’s hard to maintain such places in the city: it’s expensive, and one needs big and stable spaces to create in. In 2010, there were some one-off events in hackerspaces (see below) like Péone in the Alpes-Maritimes, for instance. The goal, among others, was to find out whether we could create a 100% autonomous space out of nothing, in a totally natural setting. Several of these ephemeral rural gatherings ended up leading to the creation of permanent sites – “hackerlands”. There are dozens of them in France, such as the Vallé à Conques project (in Cher) or ZAP1 in Allier.

As artists, engineers, researchers, hackers and farmers we all asked ourselves how digital technologies could be merged with nature, heritage and agriculture. Our urban hackerspaces, including their philosophy and practices, can be seamlessly transposed onto rural areas. We realized that many people living in the countryside either already fiddle with digital technology, or came from that culture in the first place.

How do these hackerspaces integrate on a local level? What can they contribute to rural areas?

Rural towns often suffer abuses motivated by engineering consultancies and large corporations’ financial interests. Certain hackerlands arise as an alternative to these structures, turning into local, non-profit consultants of sorts. They meet some of the rural area’s needs – particularly digital de-isolation – by creating independent Internet networks that work in mountainous or isolated areas, setting up local, democratic servers, regional Internet radios, etc. Many of these hackerlands work on agricultural or energetic practices. They’re open spaces, where one is welcomed with no prejudice, in the spirit of working together. Some of them create reproducible, self-building modules, organic solar panels, automated greenhouses. Even jacuzzis from abandoned water troughs! Sometimes there are more temporary initiatives like experiments in agroforestry, for which sensors are built that analyse fungal activity around trees. In short, we could define these places as open, local research labs.

“A Pado loup,” an ephemeral hackerspace amidst the mountains.

Mathilde Leriche: “We want to encourage people to take action, to do things that make them more self-sufficient…A Pado Loup’s main goal was the development and democratisation of technological know-how in a rural setting”, explains Ursula Gastfall, one of the organisers of this self-managed festival, which took place for the first time from the 12th to the 22nd of August 2012, in Breuil (Alpes-Maritimes). At more than 1,500 metres above sea level, around a hundred people from various origins (Spain, Brittany, Nord-Pas-de-Calais, Canada…) gathered to set up this rural, ephemeral hackerspace, after a call for proposals was broadcasted by the urban hackerspace “/tmp/lab/” in Vitry-sur-Seine (in the department of Val-de-Marne).

In the hamlet of Pado, near the village of Beuil, festival-goers swapped and discussed amidst artistic performances and workshops on electronics and experimental ecology, inspirited by the “Do It Yourself” culture. On the event’s program: building wind turbines, solar ovens and 3D printers, making free software and doing research on fermentation, as well as concerts and lighting and analog photography laboratories…all of this, right in the heart of the Alpine mountains.

“If we take a look at the etymology of the word ‘hacker’, it refers to hacking wood”, comments Ursula Gastfall. “Being self-sufficient means looking for practical solutions that meet our needs in a specific context”. In Pado, there is no water or electricity. Festival-goers put together a rain-water collection system that filtered the water before consumption, and set up solar panels – wired to batteries – to supply the electricity to the electronic equipment used for the event. “I hope that A Pado Loup will have offspring”, wishes Ursula Gastfall, “and that others will be motivated to organize events on different kinds of terrains, a challenge that will bring out the creativity and inventiveness in everyone involved”.

^{1. Open source designates a software development practice whereby the basic code is accessible (but not necessarily free) and therefore transformable. The free software movement promotes principles such as free access to information, mutualisation or keeping things free (of charge).back}

Proposals collected by Mickaël Correia – Transrural Initiatives

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