Interview with Warren Sack on New-Media Art Education by Trebor Scholz TS: In a recent interview members of kuda (new media center, Novi Sad) addressed the lack of non-proprietary software in the corporate world. But nevertheless, kuda strongly opts for open source / free software in education as:
"The cadre of designers and programmers that relies on proprietary software to find a job, is no different than the Fordist proletarian subject but without proletarian consciousness. We can link the ideas around software to Marx=B9 notions of the necessity for the proletariat to own the tools it uses= . As of now, software and hardware tools are in not in our hands." There are examples of universities in the U.S. that are in the process of entirely switching to open source software. How do you see possibilities fo= r open source in an American academic context? WS: As implied by Kuda, this is both a question of consciousness-raising an= d also of functionality. There are specific marketing and litigation strategies of disinformation that are actively undermining the necessary consciousness raising. These strategies of disinformation are similar to th= e ones big media and big industry have been using for at least a century: the= y are strategies of "seamlessness." By this I mean that powerful interests want you, the consumer and citizen, to ignore the seams that articulate the parts of computers and networks together. A perfect example of this, right now (December 2004), is AOL's current marketing campaign. AOL assures us, in television ads, that they can create "a better Internet." This is willful obfuscation. The Internet -- as a net of nets -- is, by definition= , outside of the control of a single entity: AOL can't change the Internet even if it wants to. But, what AOL wants people to believe is that AOL is the Internet. And, from personally experience, I can tell you that many lay people think this is the case. When, for example, I've demonstrated to novice users who have AOL accounts that they can "see the Internet" from a standard browser that is not the AOL technology, they have been rather shocked. To them it is seamless: there is no difference between AOL and th= e Internet. This serves AOL's interests because people are then led to believe that there are no other alternatives. Another good example of this was Microsoft's -- legal claim of a few years ago -- that their Windows operating system and the Internet explorer web browser were inseparable: that one could not be shipped without the other. (Or, Microsoft's current run-in with the EC courts contending that its Windows Media Player is integral to the Windows operating system.) This turned out to be technically trival to prove to be false -- the application and the operatin= g system can be separated -- but the U.S. Justice Department must have spent = a pretty penny to convince the judge in charge of the case. So, my point is this: to propose open source as an alternative within any given work contex= t requires some amount of consciousness raising that is being actively worked against by large concerns that would like the public to believe -- not just that their products are "better" -- but that no alternatives exists. But, then there is also the issue of functionality: open source software is frequently designed and implemented by experts who have little or no insigh= t into what non-programmers might need or want. Setting up and maintaining a Linux server, installing an open source database system like Mysql, using open source alternative's to commercial software (e.g., Open Office), etc. can be a hassle even for those of us who are experts. In fact i do not hav= e anything against non-open source software by companies that build solid tools and do not engage in disinformation campaigns. Unfortunately, it is usually the companies engaged in disinformation that also build lousy software. There is a crafty business rationale for doing this, for making your customers your alpha testers: the company saves on quality control personnel and also gets customers to check in with them frequently. "Staying in touch" with your customers by having them check in with you every week to patch the lousy software is unethical, but effective for fostering a relation of dependence. Any strategy to adapt open source software should take into account the fact that some commercial software is a nice complement to open source software. For example, working with Apple= , Macromedia and Adobe software is usually a pleasure: they write solid, easy-to-use software that doesn't need to be patched every second day. These are good complements because (1) They do something better than open source. For example, one could use Gimp to edit digital photos, but Gimp is ultimately a good but imperfect attempt to mimic Adobe Photoshop. (2) Such software comes from companies that build on top of open source software, work in coalitions to establish common, non-proprietary standards= , and who work hard to provide alternatives -- rather than fighting for absolute dominance and the elimination of alternatives. One must also keep in mind that open source is not anti-corporate. When Richard Stallman's notion of free software gained a wider interest, the principles and "open source" corporation-friendly moniker was established to differentiate it from Stallman's more radical idea of "free software." IBM and other large companies are now heavily invested in, develop and critically depend upon open source software. So, my answer is yes, universities have a lot to gain by moving some of their business to open source software. But, I don't think there are good open source alternatives for all categories of software. Actually it is good to remember, conversely, that there are non-commercial alternatives to several crucial categories of open source software, categories that are the foundations, the very "backbone" of the software layers of network technologies (e.g., DNS-BIND, OpenSSL, sendmail, and, arguably, the Apache web server). So, the commercial vs. open source distinction is a false dichotomy and the more important criterium to remember when one does choose to work with commercial software is to ask whether or not the company producing the software is an ethical company. An "ethical company" might be an oxymoron in a conventional Marxist's lexicon, but I think this is a crucial problematic to address if one hopes to understand our current circumstances of post-industrialization. TS: How does your writing of media philosophy enter into your teaching? Which books or essays do you find most helpful in your teaching? WS: I believe that its important to understand that technologies incorporat= e frozen -- i.e., reified -- social, economic and political relations. For example, if you have DSL in your home, you almost certainly have more bandwidth coming into your house than you have going out of your house. In other words, structured into the network wiring is the assumption that you are a consumer, not a producer of information because the engineering has been done to make it easier for you to download information from the Internet rather than to upload information. Information technologies contain many forms of catachresis (frozen metaphor) that more often than no= t started life as quirky philosophy projects and are now "frozen", but workin= g as silicon and gold components. For example, the 19th century philosopher, George Boole, had a project (An investigation into the Laws of Thought) to try to algebraically deduce truths that is now literally printed into the very foundations of computers: we know these foundations in contemporary technology as "Boolean Circuits." I try to teach my students that each of these frozen decisions could in fact be undone and replaced with something else. What would result might be an entirely different technology. This sor= t of investigation/thought experiment is also the basis for my own research and scholarship: I am interested in challenging and finding alternatives to the foundations of computer science and network architectures by locating the presuppositions built into contemporary, new media technologies. An example of this kind of work is the "Translation Map" that Sawad Brooks and I did (translationmap.walkerart.org) in which we re-read the founding essay of the field of machine translation, a text written by Warren Weaver in 1949. Weaver proposes to understand translation as a problem of coding and decoding. We show the absurdity of Weaver's proposal -- and the 50 years o= f work in machine translation that has been done based on Weaver's proposal -= - and we illustrate a possible alternative by prototyping a network technolog= y for collaborative editing in which translation is understood to be a form o= f collaborative work between people, rather than as a de/coding problem to be handled exclusively by a machine. To impart this perspective to my students, I like to have them read original documents from the history of technology (e.g., like the texts included in Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort's "New Media Reader" (MITPress)) and also to read work from scienc= e studies and critical theory that describes technologies as assemblages of socio-technical relations. Bruno Latour's book, "Science in Action" is on= e thing students in my "Introduction to Digital Media" course are asked to read. TS: In a recent interview Ralf Homann, faculty at Bauhaus University, told me that Walter Gropius demanded an educational practice in the arts that focused students on economics from very early on-- Gropius thought of the artist as a polished, perfected craftsman. He claimed that academies separate art from life, from the "industry." Today, there is no such thing as "the industry" for which students could be prepared. It's not like in other areas where a predictable skill set secures a job. In new media the skill sets are drastically changing and what was justifiable and useful yesterday may be irrelevant and dated tomorrow. How do you address this dilemma? WS: On the one hand I disagree: I think there are very specific "craft" skills that are relatively stable and that can be taught to students of digital media. For example, programming is a general skill that is essential to the construction of all digital media. Even if one does not know a particular programming language, if one knows how to program it is really not a big challenge to learn another language. On the other hand, I agree: there is no one industry for which students are being prepared. Digital media of today is like writing was to Plato's Athens: it is a "solvent" being incorporated everywhere and it threatens to dissolve and rearrange disciplinary boundaries as well as industry differences. Every department in the university must today wrangle with the questions of new media. Some of the oldest departments, e.g., departments of classics, have been the most innovative in addressing the possibilities and problems of ne= w media. A lot of what computers and networks do in industry and government i= s to automate processes that had previously been done by hand: forms of production, like bureaucratic procedures are being automated. Bureaucracy -= - which means literally "rule by the bureau, or the office" -- is being replaced by "computercracy" -- rule by computational methods. Larry Lessig and other legal scholars have been very articulate in pointing out the legal ramifications of this kind of transformation. But, if people don't think too deeply, computercracy ends up looking a lot like bureaucracy. For instance, the so-called "desktop metaphor" that structures the interface most of us use when we operate a computer, is a relatively direct borrowing from the technology of the office -- files, folders, trashcans, desks, etc. So, the crucial challenge is to teach fundamentals -- that may in fact be "crafts" -- so that graduates can rethink computerization where ever they find themselves. about Warren Sack http://hybrid.ucsc.edu/SocialComputingLab/ # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
