The Two Bit Processor Project: Introduction
This sharp-looking dude is Chris Kelty — Anthropologist. Artist. Hero. Enormously Famous Academic.
His recent book “Two Bits,” an ethnographic study of Free Software geeks and their cultural significance, was recently released. Beyond being an unprecedented study in many ways, Kelty is encouraging readers to get out there and remix his scholarship in a series of “modulations.”
Hence the launch of the Two-Bit Processor Project — every Friday/Saturday, The US Bureau of Fabulous Bitches will be teaming up with the good folks at ComPromise, DianaKimball.com, Quotidianity, and Machinations to read a successive chapter of the book and respond, debate, discuss and all that other good stuff that blogs are good for. The general idea is that at the end of it they’ll be a dynamic chapter-by-chapter commentary/dialogue/l”static backchannel” transcript that can be read along with the book itself. This week we’re checking out the introduction, freely available here. Feel free to join in! Drop a line at fabulous.btchs@gmail.com
True to academic style, Kelty is marshalling his forces and laying out the plan of attack in fierce detail throughout much of the introduction — there’s a bunch of content worth talking about, but I’m thinking it’ll be wise to hold off until we actually get to those chapters and the book starts doing its think in earnest.
One overarching issue that I think was particularly interesting in the intro is the question of “Two Bits” as an anthropological work as such. As he points out, Free Software and the Internet throw two monkey wrenches into the practice of cultural study, both of which bring up some cool points:
1) Free Software is not a localized phenomenon: “Free Software and the Internet are objects that do not have a single geographic site at which they can be studied…It was conducted among particular people, projects, and companies, and at conferences and online gatherings too numerous to list, but it has not been a study of a single Free Software project distributed around the globe.” (19)
Though Kelty’s mission is to bring the conceptual pieces that are common between different groups together, I wonder the extent to which Free Software actually varies from place to place. It’s been noted by Dean and some others that socially and in practice, the Harvard and MIT Free Culture groups are very distinct (though not opposed) groups. Though the general philosophy is the same, one wonders about the extent to which these different practice fundamentally make “free” mean different things to different people.
2) Studies of Free Software differ in that all (or nearly all) information is archived in one form or another: “The Attentive Reader will note that there are very few fragments of conventional ethnoraphic material…Conventional wisdom in both anthropology and history has it that what makes a study interesting, in part, is the work a research has put into gathering that which is not already available…In some cases I provide that primary access…but in many others it is not literally impossible: nearly everything is archived” (21)
Clay Shirkey notes in Here Comes Everybody that professions are groups of specialists designed to resolve a particular problem. “A profession exists to solve a hard problem, one that requires some sort of specialzation…Most profesisons exist because there is a scare resource that requires ongoing management” (57) It seems to be a fair characterization that anthropologists, at least in their function as ethnographers, serve to bring information about one culture into another while attempting to make it cognizable. But, in the same way that point-and-click content access on the internet raises questions about the role of the music industry’s traditional role in media distribution, I wonder what massively archived information does to the future of anthropology as a sustainable “industry.” In some sense, the way that the internet makes everyone a potential mini-record company, so does the internet make everyone a potential anthropologist. Also like music companies, the key will be to evolve to meet a new problem to stay viable. Two Bits, in dealing with that as a subject, seems to be a kind of attempt to answer that question.
Parallel to this is the sense of the provisionality of his subject, as Kelty writes of his construction of the five practices that form Free Software, these “do not define Free Software once and for all; they define it with respect to its consitution in the contemporary…Free Software is a machine for charting the (re)emergence of a problematic of power and knowledge as it is filtered through the technical realities of the Internet and the political and economic configuration of the contemporary” (16).
That is to say that Free Software as we understand it is designed to resolve/respond to a particular provisional issue, an “experimental system.” Which I think leads to a great question: what happens if and when Free Software (as a technical, but also a more general epistemological/political movement) wins? After all, beyond being a recursive public, it’s also largely one that defines itself by opposition as well. I can’t imagine the social capital being built around Free Software dissolving, but that it would take new social and organizational form seems likely.
(photo courtesy: Brennan Moore, CC BY SA)