production beyond production

Thu, Apr 17, 2008

it’s been exciting times since i started developing new ideas – but actually a whole new direction, parallel to (and intertwined with) the PhD one – while working on my “Whose Economy, Which Sustainability?” talk (transcript is here) for the ITM Grande Finale event at the BFI last November; and even more exciting with all the intense reading and thinking i am able to do in my current, great “research leave” at the ACT Lab.

it’s that kind of Tetris feeling – like when you stack all the bits and leave a side row for the long thin 4-by-1 piece, and suddenly three of them come in a row, and everything fits nicely and everything is cleaned up at once…

luckily, although my memory is not too reliable when i want (or need, for that matter) to remember something, it seems that everything gets “stored” somehow, ready to spring up when it makes sense (actually, i love the way my mind works, with all the recent lucid dreaming and the ability to consciously assemble oniric materials while half asleep, and even the occasional sleep paralysis and controlled pseudo-OOB experiences).

what sprung out tonight was a discussion i had with my friend G380 in the summer of 2003 on the coach that was bringing us to the Beauvais airport from Paris (not that the setting matters, but since i remembered it, why shouldn’t i write it down?), when i finally got convinced that i should try as hard as possible to commit completely to free software rather than temporarily accept to use (or let customers use) proprietary software if no free alternatives were readily available.

or even more importantly, another discussion we had while walking on the snow back from the Rifugio Palù towards the end of a short day trip to the Alps (this must have been when i went to Italy for the previous general elections in April 2006), when we ended up discussing (or rather ranting about) the widespread misconception of collaborative production, rather than freedom of use and distribution, as the core tenet of free software.

ok – a huge preamble for a very short core point. i stumbled upon an abstract of a talk given at a workshop recently, in which the researcher seems to critically discuss the subversive potential of collaborative practices and knowledge production modeled after FLOSS production but in other areas.

this is all well and good, and i’ll try to get the full text to understand the researcher’s points better – however, as in many other articles and talks i’ve stumbled upon in these years, only the non-central aspect of collaborative production is highlighted. so i started wondering what could be said in articles focusing instead on the freedom of use and distribution of knowledge. and i realised that this would be very much connected with my recent focus on the human enterprise, on knowledge as part of techné and on rights to use and to foster versus property ownership.

free software is good software also because it’s often designed and developed collaboratively, and peer involvement and production, interoperability of software applications, and openness of processes to public scrutiny are all excellent things, if done properly. however, freedom to use and to distribute are the essential freedom-granting freedoms, in free software as in other technai. excellent software can be developed within closed doors, excellent policy documents can be written without necessarily opening up the writing process to a wider community. and, i hope, privately owned companies can indeed do no harm or even do good, by putting ethics first in whatever they do, therefore not limiting unnecessarily freedom of people outside the enterprise.

this last example might seem not directly related to the freedom to use and distribute – but i think it actually is. i am actually thinking about the corporate structure, and wondering if privately owned companies can attain the same levels of social responsibility that we commonly tend to associate primarily with co-operatives.

production beyond production: if we focus on use and distribution rather than primarily production, can we achieve a better understanding of a more just techné, or co-production?

it’s an open question at the moment – but it makes more sense in the context of the discussions that sprung out from some dark corners of my memory tonight.

late tonight, while i was walking in the street looking up at the lit-up ski slopes on the mountains in the North Shore. thinking how important G380 has been in all this, especially his unrelenting commitment to freedom. and thinking how important D has been in all this, especially her unrelenting commitment to truth, love, and ethics without compromises.