CULTURE’S OPEN SOURCES The Political Agnosticism of Free and Open Source Software and the Inadvertent Politics of Contrast Gabriella Coleman University of Chicago F ree and open source software (FOSS), which is by now entrenched in the tech- nology sector, has recently traveled far beyond this sphere in the form ofarti- facts, licenses, and as a broader icon for openness and collaboration.1FOSS has attained a robust socio-political life as a touchstone for like-minded projects in art, law, journalism, and science—some examples being MIT’s OpenCourseWare project, School Forge, and the BBC’s decision to release all their archives under a Creative Commons license. One might suspect FOSS ofhaving a deliberate polit- ical agenda, but when asked, FOSS developers invariably offer a firm and unam- biguous “no”—usually followed by a precise lexicon for discussing the proper relationship between FOSS and politics. For example, while it is perfectly accept- able and encouraged to have a panel on free software at an anti-globalization conference, FOSS developers would suggest that it is unacceptable to claim that FOSS has as one ofits goals anti-globalization, or for that matter any political pro- gram—a subtle but vital difference, which captures the uncanny, visceral, and minute semiotic acts by which developers divorce FOSS from a guided political direction. FOSS, of course, beholds a complex political life despite the lack of political intention; nonetheless, I argue that the political agnosticism of FOSS shapes the expressive life and force ofits informal politics. 507 The Political Agnosticism of Free and Open Source Software and the Inadvertent Politics of Contrast FOSS gives palpable voice to the growing fault lines between expressive and intellectual property rights, especially in the context of digital technologies. While free speech and property rights are often imagined as linked and essen- tial parts of our American liberal heritage, the social life of FOSS complicates this connection while providing a window into how liberal values such as free speech take on specific forms through cultural-based technical practice: that of computer hacking.2 Whereas, traditionally, censorship and state interven- tion were seen as the primary threats against the realization of free speech, the social practices of free and open software raise the idea that forms prop- erty can be antithetical to the principles of free speech, “principles” that are constantly under social revision though they might appear as timeless and obvious. Source code, the blueprint for programs that most non-technical users rarely see, is becoming an object to construct claims about vocational rights and the appropriate scope ofFirst Amendment law;3FOSS has not only transformed the dynamics ofsoftware development but is also shifting under- standings ofthe appropriate use ofintellectual property instruments and the scope offree speech protections. I argue that the wedge placed by practitioners between FOSS and politics is significant to an anthropological assessment ofthe liberal underpinnings and reformulations of FOSS and the wider socio-political effect of its vast circula- tions. My thesis is that the denial of FOSS’ formal politics enacted through a particularized cultural exercise offree speech facilitates the broad mobility of FOSS as artifacts and metaphors and thus lays the groundwork for its informal political scope: its key role as a catalyst by which to rethink the assumptions ofintellectual property rights through its use and inversion. It works because it recalibrates some of the distinctions and associations between free speech and intellectual property—it revises intellectual property law and channels it toward the protection of free speech, instead of its “conventional use” of securing property rights. Christopher Kelty aptly describes this as “openness through privatization, which makes it the most powerful political movement on the Internet, even though most of its proponents spend all their extra energy denying that it is political” (2000:6). Political intent and subjectivity are indeed noticeably absent in the consti- tution of the free software and open source movement, which differs from more formal political endeavors and new social movements predicated on some political intentionality, direction, or reflexivity or a desire to transform wider social conditions. FOSS uniqueness as a “new social movement” stands precisely in the “extra energy” noted by Kelty to deny political associations of 508 GABRIELLA COLEMAN various kinds.4While technical or economic rationalities are often the native explanation for FOSS, a taken for granted form of cultural liberalism and the pragmatics of programming mutually inform and reinforce the hacker aes- thetic distaste for politics. In other words, political denial is culturally orches- trated through a rearticulation of free speech principles, a cultural position- ing that simultaneously is informed by the computing techniques and outwardly expresses and thus constitutes hacker values. It is this practice that I refer to here as “political agnosticism.” The purported political neutrality of FOSS, inscribed into its technological artifacts through licenses, has facilitated an unfettered circulation ofits tech- nologies. FOSS is made visible to wider publics through its extensive use and resignification. The witnessable set ofpractices, such as collaborative produc- tion and the creative deployment of licenses, has become a social point of contrast by which the assumptions of the American legal intellectual proper- ty system are partially destabilized. It thus conveys an implicit critique ofthe opaque logics enveloped in the neoliberal drive to make property out of everything and, at this historical conjunction, seemingly out ofvery little.5 As noted by Herman and Coombe in this journal, the persuasive force of neoliberal rhetorics ofproperty rights lie in their corporeality as an habituat- ed ethos that defines the proper, veritable, and, thus, supposedly singular relationship between consumers, objects, and corporations. Though they astutely assert that intellectual property regimes are bent toward the “incor- rigible” and are “resistant to revision,” FOSS has inadvertently performed with some degree ofsuccess against this habituated stance. FOSS provides another existing and transposable model for new legal possibilities composed of an aggregate of practices, licenses, social relationships, artifacts, and moral economies and, thus, enters a wider public debate on the limits ofintellectu- al property primarily though visible cultural praxis. Its “success” is that it transformed what is purported to be a “singular” field of intellectual proper- ty law into one that is now multiple, offering new instruments and justifica- tions for their use.6 Political Agnosticism To understand the logic ofpolitical denial, it is instructive to define the ration- ale for freedom formulated in the philosophical underpinnings ofFOSS licens- es. The moral and semiotic load of free software is a commitment to prevent limiting the freedom of others. This is done to realize a sphere for the unfet- 509 The Political Agnosticism of Free and Open Source Software and the Inadvertent Politics of Contrast tered circulation of thought, expression, and action for software develop- ment. This vision is clear in three key documents that guide the choice and creation of every free and open source license: the Free Software Definition, the Debian Free Software Guidelines, and the Open Source Definition. In these charters, freedom underscores an individual’s right to create, use, and distrib- ute software in a manner that will allow exactly the same for others, so long as license rules are followed—the goal ofwhich is to enact a universal sphere for the flourishing offree forms ofaction and thought. All provisions in these documents work through a logic of non-discrimination as to achieve univer- sality. Within this purview, source code, the line-by-line directions that pro- grammers write to make software applications, is treated implicitly and explicitly as a form of speech. Writing source code is thus akin to “speaking” while licenses establish the conditions that allow for the free and unrestricted expression ofspeech. A utilitarian ethic ofopenness is increasingly seen as obvious and indispensa- ble in order to develop the “state of the art.” FOSS developers also place an extremely high premium on open technical production as an avenue for expres- sive activity. While hackers see the spread of free software as socially beneficial because it allows a diverse range of “others” to deploy their software (like you, me, the Mexican school system, the government, and even “Big Brother”), the primary significance of FOSS is personal: it is something which protects the “food” for them to “hack on” so that they can exercise their right to learn from and create more speech (source code) for others to share and extend. According to hackers, the fact that anyone can use FOSS and that it can be directed towards economic, political, and personal ends is a positive side-effect ofopenness; they consider it a testament to the power ofa neutral political commitment. The “free” of free software rests on yet reposes a wider Anglo-European socio-cultural sensibility for expressive rights, which underscores ideas ofindi- vidual autonomy, self-development, and a value-free marketplace for the expression of ideas. As a number of critical scholars argue, forms of political neutrality are immanent to free speech doctrine (Brown 1995, Fish 1999, Marcuse 1965, MacKinnon 1993, Passavat 2002). These critiques treat decon- textualized neutrality primarily as ideological scaffolding that justifies a poli- tics of individual liberties over those of structural equality. While relevant in other ways, it is analytically deficient to analyze the free speech elements of free software as an example ofthese otherwise cogent analyses—that is, as an augmentation or verification of an already existing and mystified American liberal tradition. 510 GABRIELLA COLEMAN The hacker aesthetic distaste for politics and their free speech codes can only be meaningfully ascertained as “cultural practice” if placed within the scope oftheir lived practical and material actions, not just in relation to how their values express or map perfectly onto some existing regime ofvaluesuch as liberalism; If not, we construe their moral orders as vacuous and thus, decouple their values from a particular way of life and the historical condi- tions that enable and constrain what they do.7 Also to simply assert that the free speech character of FOSS is an expression of liberal values occludes key questions ofinvestigation, for example: why is a language ofexpressive rights compelling to programmers, and how does the local rearticulation ofexpres- sive rights shift the wider juridical and cultural face and expressions of liber- al values? Continuity of liberal traditions does not mean sameness. In other words, it reminds us that free speech, privacy, and property right have com- plex histories born from material and discursive struggles over meaning, even ifsuch principles are socially construed as beyond the turmoil ofhistory.8 The freedom offree software, while influenced by wider liberal sensibilities, is fundamentally shaped by the pragmatics of programming and the social context ofInternet use. My contention is that values for expressive rights as for- mulated in free software philosophy were and are compelling to programmers because they hold affinities with their technical habitusborne from “practical” (as in meaningful, embodied, and collective action) experiences formed around the pragmatics of programming and the aesthetics of technical archi- tectures. In addition, in recent times, it has afforded a wider cultural and polit- ical language by which to objectify to themselves and larger publics the nature oftheir technical life world, an objectification buttressed within a hacker pub- lic sphere and as a political vector to make claims against the aggressive appli- cation ofintellectual property restrictions.9 Programmers describe their craft as an activity that allows for personal unre- stricted forms ofcreativity, expression, learning, and action, enacted through a medium, the digital computer, and preferably interfaced through a transparent and flexible, technical environment (like UNIX). Passion that is understood to be the basis ofthe hacker ethic (Himanen 2001, Levy 1984) is fueled by a practice that allows programmers great flexibility and control in creation (Turkle 1984), creations which are put to use and hence seen as highly valuable. Programmers over decades ofintense interaction come to viscerally experience the computer as a general purpose machine that can be infinitely programmed to achieve any task through the medium ofsoftware written by humans with a computer lan- guage. The technological potential for unlimited programmable capabilities 511 The Political Agnosticism of Free and Open Source Software and the Inadvertent Politics of Contrast melds with what is seen as the expansive ability for programmers to create. For programmers, computing in a dual sense, as a technology and as an activity, becomes a total realm for the freedom of creation and expression. In essence, computing is understood and experienced (sometimes reflectively, other times implicitly) by FOSS hackers as the very micro-sphere for the unfettered circula- tion of thought, expression, and action that freedom within the macro-sphere FOSS seeks to achieve through licenses. Downloading music and watching movies, socializing in chat rooms, play- ing highly addictive mutli-player games, creating software libre, meeting future girlfriends and wives on chat channels, reading your news daily online—all these activities contribute to a strong practical orientation and embodied disposition that the activity of communicating on and creating through a computer is a space of freedom for entertainment, production, pedagogy, and sociality. More than ever, hackers actively and self-reflexively constitute these values within a type of public sphere where hackers discuss the corporate and legal practices that are seen to impinge on their ability to engage in such forms of “free” expressive making (Coleman and Hill 2004). The indiscriminate applica- tion ofpatents to software algorithms and other encryption and copyright laws, such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), are construed as threats to the free ability of programmers to write source code, which hackers and pro- grammers have only recently come to conceptualize as a form of communica- tion worthy ofthe broadest protections afforded by First Amendment law. Despite this incipient cognizance of the legal threats to free speech, what grows out of this particular life world of intense, lifelong programming and networked sociality is an overt aesthetic dislike for politics and a culturally embodied experience offreedom that conceptually shuns politics. Put simply, political claims outside of software subtract from, tarnish, and censor the sphere for the free circulation ofthought, action, and expression. It is felt that ifFOSS was directed towards a political end, it would sully the “purity” ofthe technical decision-making process. Political affiliation also might deter people from participating on development, thus creating an artificial barrier to entry into this sphere whose ideal and idealized form is a transparent meritocracy.10 A political tag is also perceived to curtail one’s personal freedom for deciding how to best interpret this domain of activity—a form of censorship and thus a highly polluted association to conjure. In addition, the pragmatics of computing is a means by which to typify political activity as distasteful, unappealing, and ineffective. While program- 512 GABRIELLA COLEMAN ming is considered a transparent, neutral, highly controllable realm for thought and expression where production results in immediate gratification and something useful, politics tend to be seen by programmers as buggy, mediated, and tainted action clouded by ideology that is not productive of much of anything while it insidiously works against true forms of free thought. You can’t tweak politics in an elegant and creative way to achieve something immediately gratifying, and thus it goes against everything pro- grammers think and love about computing. The Inadvertent Politics of Contrast I now shift my discussion to assess the political implications ofFOSS. The mul- tiple uses ofFOSS and its transposability and visibility are simultaneously con- ditions for what I call a cultural critique through contrast. To explain what I mean let’s visit our own field for a moment. Anthropology has historically unsettled our essentialist and universal assumptions about human behavior by contrasting them with those ofpeople from other places (cf. Benedict 1959, Mead 1928, Marcus and Fisher 1986, Mauss 1967, Sahlins 1976). The discipli- nary vehicle for this, it has been noted eloquently, is ethnography which “serves at once to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar” (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992:6). FOSS, among many other things, functions as a form of critical ethnography writ large. While a critical anthropology is based on a consciousness ofits politics, FOSS inadvertently has become a vehi- cle by which to rethink the naturalness of intellectual property law. It exem- plifies what Marcus and Fisher call “defamiliarization by cross cultural juxta- position” (1986), the difference being that juxtaposition arises out of an accidental cultural and not intentional anthropological practice. Its ability to conjure contrast, I argue, results from its marked visibility and transportabili- ty partially borne from its purported political neutrality. Free and open source hackers have been effective in coding FOSS as politi- cally removed—a “neutrality” made material and socially effective through licenses. The effect is that the freedom within FOSS exudes a similar productive ambiguity that Prakash (1999) locates in the sign of science in his study of Indian nationalists who directed the icon ofsciences as “the sign ofrationality and progress” towards justifying their anti-colonial liberation aspirations. Due to this productive ambiguity that resists political affiliation of left, right, and liberal, FOSS has circulated extensively, though the relevance of freedom and openness mutates along the way of its excursions, fueling economic, govern- 513 The Political Agnosticism of Free and Open Source Software and the Inadvertent Politics of Contrast mental, popular, and leftist articulations as justifications and alternatives. For example, I.B.M and other business that use FOSS emphasize it for its “market agility” and its ability to empower the consumer. I.B.M. adopts a neoliberal lan- guage to interpret the significance of FOSS to its consumer publics. On the opposite side of the spectrum, leftist media websites such as Indymedia.net run almost entirely on FOSS while its activists adore it for its subversive, anti- capitalist potentialities. The commons movement, centered on the idea ofcre- ating public goods to reinvigorate democratic principles, pragmatically built their licenses and justifications around the already existing practice of FOSS (Bollier 2002, Lessig 2001). Each group situates it in ways that empowers and legitimates their own aspirations, but through their particular efforts they extend FOSS to wider publics. And though there are distinct imaginaries graft- ed onto FOSS, certain implicit political messages within the labor and law of free and open source software also gain visible prominence. Through its visibility and use by multiple publics, FOSS makes apparent, and to some extent “strange,” the assumptions that dominate the social landscape ofintellectual property. It opens to critical scrutiny the liberal moral “habitua- tions” that stringent intellectual property instruments are indispensable to fos- ter innovation and creation. Thousands upon thousands ofdevelopers laboring to make software libre provides potent critiques and viable alternatives since it is realized by the social performance ofcollective labor and licenses that others can and now do use. Perhaps most significant is that FOSS enjoins others to become part ofits performance in various ways: use ofFOSS artifacts and licens- es, participation in projects, reflection of the larger meaning of collaboration, and the reuse (and reconfigurations) ofits licenses for other non-technological objects, such as college courseware, music, books, and movies. Actualized labor in practice undermines current theories of labor in the law whose nature is to pose singular models for the proper relationship between legal means and ends. Licenses like the copyleft rupture the natural- ized “form” of intellectual property by inverting its ossified and singular logic—through the very use of intellectual property—a move not unlike Marx’s inversion of Hegelian idealism, which retained Hegel’s dialectical method to repose history not as an expression of the “Absolute Idea” but as humanity’s collective creation through labor. Using copyright as its vehicle, the copyleft places copyright literally on its head and in the process demysti- fies copyright’s “absolute” theory ofeconomic incentive. The copyleft says, we are not the passive “subjects” of an almighty, unchangeable law, but actually can create the law to serve us for other ends: in the case of FOSS, that of free 514 GABRIELLA COLEMAN speech. While many hackers might think you can’t tweak politics in an elegant and creative way to achieve something immediate and useful, Richard Stallman, the mastermind behind the copyleft, showed through a clever legal hack that politics can be gratifying and indeed very productive. Conclusion Over the course of the last thirty years, anthropologists have increasingly left for the field by staying home. Research in medical clinics, scientific laborato- ries, online communities, city neighborhoods, and high schools, to name a few such locations, has shifted the meaning of anthropological practice, the implications of theoretical critique, and the identity of the ethnographer (Marcus 1999). The nature of this research makes more clear that normative and ubiquitous regimes ofvalues, such as those posed by liberalism, science, and capitalism, have a much more variegated expression when located in par- ticular institutions, social groups, or an assemblage between them. In other words, the local is as much here as it is “there” in foreign or small scale soci- eties, and part ofthe task ofa critical anthropology is to conjoin the exercise of anthropological critique with the cultural processes of “defamiliarization” and critique located in historical practice, not in theory. The source and the effect ofpolitical agnosticism has been the focus ofthis piece. FOSS, I have argued, is one local instantiation of liberal values, a rearticulation centered on reposing the relationship between intellectual property and free speech law by redirecting the use of licenses to protect expressive activity. FOSS sensibilities offreedom and the growing hacker asser- tion that source code is speech, largely regimented as politically neutral through liberal values, are also rooted in methodologies, values, and tech- niques constituted around the act of writing code and expressed visibly in a wider public social sphere ofhacking. Through FOSS’ visibility, circulation, and use, the juridical understanding of free speech is shifting while some of the ingrained assumptions ofintellectual property law have already been partial- ly destabilized, the wider effect of which has been to open up a social space for new legal possibilities. The feature ofcritique that arises through the cultural struggle to recreate and redefine meanings and associations, I have come to learn, is much more ephemeral than the supposed ephemera of virtual social spaces. It is a moment in time whose nature is to shock other “socially situated actors” into a process of cultural rethinking that shifts practices in other areas of social 515 The Political Agnosticism of Free and Open Source Software and the Inadvertent Politics of Contrast life. The nature of the shock is to lose its “shock value” so to speak and sink back into the natural state of affairs as soon as a set ofpractices are more or less stabilized. The journalistic, popular, and native narrative retelling of the rise and importance ofnew practices or political sensibilities often don’t inte- grate this moment of cultural defamiliarization, focusing instead on the rubric of great men and their ideas or explanation through unintended con- sequences that may not have been part ofits genesis. Thus, the task ofa crit- ical anthropology within complex multi-cultural societies is to keep a mindful orientation toward these powerful yet elusive processes of cultural contrast and defamiliarization so that its politics can be more effectively known, acknowledged, and directed. ENDNOTES 1This is a short piece with many large ideas. Most ofthem have congealed through conver- sations with friends and colleagues. I would like to thank dmh, ck, rex, hacim, and mako for their comments and suggestions. A special thanks to Patrice Riemens whose works and insights are largely responsible for getting me to think differently about the unique nature ofhacker politics. 2For an explicit defense and affirmation ofthe inseparability between strong property rights and civil liberties see Gray (1996) in his review ofliberal political thought and more recent- ly in Epstein (2003). However, legal scholars since at least the 1970s have perceptively ana- lyzed the ways in which IP and expressive rights exist in tension with each other (cfNimmer 1970, Benkler 1999). Copyright law limits access to and use ofcertain forms of“expressive content” and thus inherently curbs the deployment ofcopyrighted material in other expres- sive activity. However, the predominant legal rationale for the state sanction ofintellectual property instruments is that they are mechanisms by which to “harvest” a marketplace of ideas so that any negative consequences ofcensoring speech are far outweighed by this pur- ported public benefit. FOSS fundamentally challenges the rationale that censorship is a jus- tifiable means to induce a marketplace ofidea. 3It is important to appreciate that the links made between source code and free speech are historically recent. To my knowledge, it first appeared as a published argument in a paper among programmers in the early 1990s (Salin 1991). It increasingly became a prevalent association in the writings ofRichard Stallman, the founder ofFree Software Foundation. The “encryption wars”—the right to freely publish and use cryptography—also contributed to this consciousness. A notable case in these struggles was Bernstein vs. the Department of Justice, first filed in 1995. The Berkeley Professor Daniel Bernstein successfully argued that he had a First Amendment right to publish strong forms ofencryption despite government restrictions that treat strong cryptography as munitions. While these legal contexts were cru- cial, neither Salin or Bernstein questioned the validity of copyright law as a barrier to speech. What free software added to the story ofexpressive rights among programmers was a more fundamental challenge to the idea ofproperty for software. 4As many studies reveal, politics far exceeds activities formally designated as such. Healing rituals that integrate and reconfigure dominant signs (Comaroff1985), dance (Martin 1998), popular festivals and literary genres (Bakhtin 1984), and everyday forms ofworkplace resist- ance such as foot dragging and ritualized fainting (Ong 1987; Scott 1985) are a small sam- pling ofthe wide array ofphenomena treated as fundamentally political even though they 516