A broad cultural movement that is networked, open source, and collaborative is challenging, and sometimes replacing, key elements of the traditional nation state. The result could be characterized as a dispersed but coherent digital nation, a polity with its own rules, identity, origin myth, politics, currency, education system, and hierarchy. The established political order struggles to absorb…
In the early hours of 11 May, a volunteer somewhere wrote the millionth substantive page on the Russian-language edition of Wikipedia. Crossing the 1,000,000-page mark is mainly a symbolic one, an aesthetically and cognitively pleasing number for us ten-fingered mammals, but it seems as good a time as any to take stock of the importance…
The free and open source software (F/OSS) movement has influenced wider understanding of intellectual property rights by propagating three core sets of norms and practices: 1. The privileging of authorship over ownership, and the embrace of collective authorship. 2. The transformation of property law from an absolute imposition into a set of hackable rules which…
In the spirit of the movement it describes, I am “open sourcing” my reading notes on Gabriella Coleman’s excellent book Coding Freedom, an anthropological study of the Debian community and the wider software ecosystem in which it operates. I’ll also leave the Google Docs version open for anyone in case anyone might find it useful.…
Interpreting Baudrillard has always been tricky. He himself was critical of artists who incorporated his theories into their work. The nature of these theories, particularly simulation and simulacra, is such that to reproduce them seems to betray the spirit of the text. This is not a defect, but rather a distinctive irony that occurs in…
I’ve just read Umberto Eco’s “How to Travel with a Salmon”, officially because I wanted to delve back into the world of anthropology and semiotics, but really because I was staying with my parents, had some reading time, and the book was there on the shelf. The collection of essays has an enchanting, dated feel…