On Tuesday, October 14 2008, 14:44 (+0200), Geert Lovink wrote: > Jonathan Zittrain?s Future of the Internet is based on a myth. > Zittrain needs a foundational myth of the Internet in order to praise > it?s past openness and warn for a future lockdown of PCs and mobile > phones.
The problem is, not surprisingly, the term "openness". It is probably the biggest red herring of IT industry. Calling something "Open" is the most notorious newspeak for it no being open. (Random examples: OpenVMS, HP OpenCall, Apple OpenFirmware, Novell OpenDOS, SCO OpenServer, Microsoft Office Open XML, the web site OpenBC [now Xing], OpenID etc.etc.). Aside from that, we need to differentiate "openness" in an engineering sense of an openly documented technological standard from "openness" in a social sense, as you do in your own critique. But I think that the problem goes even deeper than that. It concerns the very equation of the two types of openness, "open technology = open society". In its core, this equation is a cybernetic proposition, flatly equating society and technology. It's a behaviorist and mechanist model which even critical media studies, at their very core, have yet to get rid of. In our field of network cultural studies, for example, we operate with the "network" as precisely such a cybernetic dispositive. While it seemingly proposes an "alternative" ("non-linear" etc.etc.) model that many European scholars render in Deleuzian (and thus, by implication, Bergsonian) terms, it is a cybernetics, and thus a behaviorist coupling nevertheless. Coming back to "openness", I see the cybernetic beliefs attached to it less rooted in libertarianism than in classical liberalism. The blueprint of the concept to be found in Karl Popper's "Open Society and Its Enemies", a book that might well be called an 'implicit cybernetics' in that it determines a systemic framework for methods of steering a.k.a. policies. A serious historical, critical discussion of "openness" would have to start with Popper and try to determine whether his "open society" is indeed the model which all or most players in the field of "open technology" and "open media" implicitly subscribe to. > looked geeky and painfully outdated. Back then, the advancement of the > ugly looking Internet was its interoperability. It was a network of > networks?but still a closed one. >From a classical technological perspective, "interoperability" equals "openness" - which throws us back to the above issues. > Apart from a single reference to FIDONET, nothing remains of this > early cyberculture in Zitttrain?s book. His scheme is simple: Internet > good, AOL and CompuServe bad, early Apple II good, iPhone bad, and so > on. The fact that millions of Americans for the first time experienced > the Internet through services like AOL (and continue to do so) is a > reality that Zittrain simply overlooks. But if one adopts, on the other extreme, a purely sociological perspective, then one could arrive at the not less problematic conclusion that AOL or Microsoft, through the inclusion of TCP/IP networking in Windows 95, were really the ones who "opened up the Internet for all". Without having read Zittrain myself, it could be that he intends to speak up against this common mainstream belief. And while that belief, or conclusion, would even make some empirical sense, as you point out, it is ultimately meaningless if notions of "openness" tactically blind out particular aspects: social access in the case of technologists, social control over the design and implementation in the case of the empiricists. > Concerning the closed nature of iPhone (a rather marginal type mobile > phone from a worldwide perspective), it would be more interesting to ask > why hackers have ignored these vital communication devices for so long > (I know, there are exceptions, but they are rare). The OpenMoko project is the most prominent and advanced one at this point: http://www.openmoko.com . However, you give the answer yourself: GSM/UMTS cell phone technology is - now speaking from the technological perspective - completely proprietary and locked down in every little detail. It's not merely a question of the chips in the phones, but more importantly of the networking protocols and routing technology that, unlike TCP/IP for the Internet, is completely sealed off. It's practically impossible to set up and operate non-corporate cell phone networks, at least on the basis of standard cell phone technology, and hacking it, as you propose, simply might not scale to human resources in hacker culture. So Zittrain doesn't seem to be completely off in juxtaposing Internet to cell phone technology, and the historical outcome that the former got "hacked" and the latter didn't, is not a question of Unix geek appeal versus unsexier populist technology, but of the kind of policies (and therefore politics) that created these systems. For the Internet, published and non-patented standards at least allowed the kind of gradual community adoption and improved accessibility that you describe, despite social access barriers. With cell phone networks, as with any proprietary technology, it's the exact opposite: The social entry barriers were and still are very low because of the core business interest of selling devices and subscriptions. But beyond that low access barrier, you hit the brick wall. The technology is strictly designed and controlled to keep consumers from becoming producers to the extent of tapping into the infrastructure. [That said, issue 21/2008 of the German computer magazine c't had an interesting article on cell phone culture in Africa and anti-corporate usage appropriations of the technology, such as cost-free calls where the phone does not get picked up and the number of rings has a previously agreed-upon meaning.] > The mobile phone sphere needs to be opened up, literary hacked, un > très grand projet compared to the Internet with its free software, in This has been desperately tried for years if not decades, as you describe in your own recollections of the CCC congress. It just might make more sense to develop inexpensive VOIP mobile phones using WLAN networking and push them as an alternative. > I would have expected Jonathan Zittrian to address these issues, and > somehow transcend the very US obsession with Apple products. Who cares > about iPhone and whether it can and cannot guarantee full access to > the Internet? This perhaps has to be seen from the background that cell phone technology and connectivity in the US stills lags behind many Asian, European and African regions. As a consequence, the concept of cell phone Internet access became synonymous with the iPhone while in Korea and Japan, for example, cell phones have been the most common Internet access devices for years. On top of that, Apple has a slightly different brand image in America than in Europe. It is still much more seen as a somehow "alternative" or "better" company, cynically speaking: the Ben & Jerry's of the computer industry, whereas in Europe, it's more commonly seen as an expensive lifestyle brand for graphic designers. (And never mind that Ben & Jerry's is a Unilever brand.) > Apple has always had its proprietary strategies and is > not known for it commitment to freedom in the Richard Stallman style. With two exceptions: the CUPS printing system, standard both on Linux and Mac OS X, and the WebKit HTML rendering engine, used by Safari and by a couple of Open Source browsers. Both are developed by Apple and distributed under the GPL/LGPL. The reasons for that, however, are rather historical than everything else because both began as independent free software projects and were later bought up, respectively forked, by Apple. Because of the copyleft provision and the contributions of outside developers, they had to remain under their original GNU licenses. > White House, to criticize Iran and China. There is a structural > unwillingness to take on the corporate world For sure. But if a network critique, or network activism, were rigorous in criticizing and taking on the corporate world, they would, at least for the time being, have to stop using computer technology altogether. When we discuss network openness and software freedom, it's too easy to forget to talk about hardware, but not in Heideggerian ontological terms like Kittler, but from an old-fashioned social materialist perspective. The ugly truth beneath all software and networks is that they wouldn't be common goods without the slave labor that created their underlying hardware. Virtually all computer boards, desktop and laptop computers are produced under under slave labor conditions in Chinese special economic zones, no matter whether they come with the Apple, HP, Dell or any other brand name. Speaking of "sweatshops" would even be a euphemism because laborers are exposed to toxic chemicals and typically have their health ruined within four or five years. Alex Weltz' documentary video "Digitale Handarbeit" gives excellent if devastating insight into these conditions. (I read, but can't find the reference any more, that computers would cost at least three times more if they were manufactured under fair conditions.) As my colleague Cal Selkirk pointed out, a project like "One Laptop per Child", which the Berkman Center featured in a keynote presentation, is ultimately cynical in meeting its low cost objective through slave labor of the very people it pretends to serve. > I do not believe in Thierer?s ?hybridity? proposal in which the > consumer decides what devices and application he or she uses will be > open or rather closed. Especially not with communication technology given that the popularity of any communication platform ultimately relies on peer pressure: If all your friends or, more importantly, your bosses and colleagues use a particular system, you have no choice but use it as well. Communication, in the literal Latin sense of "community building", does not just create, but also define community through social inclusion and exclusion. It is not a good thing by itself, unlike what liberal "open society" beliefs and the totalitarian cybernetic dogma that "you cannot not communicate" suggest. [Their coincidence is no surprise as they're both built on social-behaviorist entropy models.] > The larger problematic here is the lack of counter-hegemonic projects > that could function as an alternative to the quasi monopoly of > Berkman. The question ultimately is, with Thomas Pynchon, whether it's okay to be a Luddite. Or, differently put: If one still sees whatever value in computer networks and getting one's hands dirty with them in the one or other way - as opposed to seeing the whole field a lost cause -, one can't help but subscribing to some kind of Berkman Center ideology in one way or the other. Or, to phrase it still differently: > The beginnings of a critique that is formulated here bounces back on > the author, posing the question what is to be done on this side of the > Atlantic in the form of concrete alternatives. ...whether non-Luddite "concrete alternatives" can exist at all, in the sense of genuine alternatives that are in no complicity to what you describe as ... > the default Internet ideology that rules from San Jose to Berlin, > Nairobi and Bangalore Florian -- http://cramer.plaintext.cc:70 gopher://cramer.plaintext.cc # 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: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]