Re: Introduction
Dear Art,
4. Technology is NOT politics. Please stop mixing up and
conflating two distinct and separate issues around open
source: political/social philosophy vs. technical
superiority/production process. I am sick and tired of
people who seem to be unable to clearly lay out the
arguments for open source along those two axises, without
tripping over their tongue and throwing the two together.
I heard that the usual plural of 'axis' is 'axes'.
Perhaps you are only "sick and tired" of identity obsessed
individualists who insist only on representing themseleves within a worn
out process of maintaining the normal distinctions of yesterday. That
is, a false separation of everything into the so-called distinct spheres
of politics, economy, society, production, consumption, distribution,
knowledge, being, working, desiring, and so on.
The fact of the matter is that everything we do consitutes
desiring-consumptive-productive-distributive-political-social events.
Technology politicises. Politics desires. Desire consumes. Consumption
socialises. Society distributes. Distribution produces. Production
mechanises.
Particularly: Political thought is productive technology. Technical
thinking is politically productive. Philosophising is our means of
production, the pragmatic way to innovate when products are conceptual,
you can only philosophise if you are poor, in other words on the edge of
being, with an unmediated view onto the void.
Principal Consultant
Virtual Identity
I'm sick and tired of identities; virtual, possible, or imaginary.
They stop everything up; they propose a centre to an acentred network;
their affect is pure confusion.
The highly questionable question: "Are you an Open Source Person?"
Why didn't you propose clearly to map "the Open Source community" and
"the non-Open Source community"? Might we then be able to arrange pen
friendships, community exchanges, and so on?
The fact of the matter is that the line separating knowing and not
knowing (or having and not having) runs through us all.
Therefore, all singular identities are falsifications. The body provides
the causes. The techniques are the political.
Tell them the truth? Seeking the truth will require more daring yet;
perhaps we will require no daring greater.
Certainly, for me, your statements mostly form a rendezvous of questions
and question marks.
For example: "Free does NOT mean Free" ... ?
In the UK, health care is mostly free-of-charge at the point of
consumption. More often than not, it is USers, with heads well seated
within the insolent arsehole of global capitalism, who presume the
commodification of everything, where all value is exchange value, all
work is conducted by labour, all of the surplus is extracted as private
property, and where new ways of seeing, knowing, and feeling are all
dismissed as fanciful nothingness.
The political question of the day is whether to organise our production
of information as a public good, or as a private good. This is reaction
vs. progression. A discussion flows from the opposition between the
assertion by the rich that public production doesn't work justly for
them, and the assertion by the capable that private production of
information* *just doesn't work.
As we are all in a unclear, uncertain process of learning how to be more
desiring-consumptive-productive-distributive-political-economic-social,
in other words how to become more intense, it is productive to
encourage, but it isn't productive to invoke the sign of State
machinery: sieze and bind: "cease and desist".
Productivity has become the capacity of the common to become
increasingly common, where we understand the common not to be the
abstration of individual interests but rather the circulation of
singular needs.
So there is no productive traction anymore in referring to the 'molar'
aggregates, such as "the masses", "the open source developers and
advocates", "the community", "the server", "American Capitalism"
(capitalism doesn't belong to the US; also BTW the US isn't America),
"YOU", "the NON-TECHNICAL END-USER".
But did you mean here "the shouting non-technical end-user"? :-)
John.
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