Afterword:: Recompiling

Curiously, none of the articles in this issue of Criticism are about open source. For an issue boldly labeled “Open Source Culture and Aesthetics,” this might appear to be a problem. The claim is unfair, of course, but not inaccurate: everything depends on the scope of the variable. The local variable—very local—is a fairly mundane practice of software production and distribution (also called free software), diverse in itself to be sure, but really quite distinctive; and, in terms of the great swirl of cultural and technical production, not nearly as widespread or important as, say, standardized machine tools or spreadsheet accounting.

The global variable, however, is something more like a zeitgeist, a discourse, a social form, an aesthetic, and a political cipher. It is an unordered array of ideas, practices, capitalisms, technologies, moments, and movements, from the cravenly enthusiastic to the naively critical to the dismissive. Knowledge economies, distributed collaboration, Web 2.0, critical approaches to intellectual property law, crowdsourcing, fan culture, prosumption, peer production, new configurations of property and labor, changing conceptions of creativity, novelty and aesthetic norms, do-it-yourself (DIY) culture, and so on.

As the editors of this issue expertly explore in the introduction, over the last decade this local variable has been progressively redefined as a global one. Open source—the local, specific software development practice—has been modulated and transformed into something anyone can “call” (as it were) from within any function. Consider how open source was introduced on Wikipedia in 2001:

Open source computer software is nominally owned by one individual or entity and then licensed out according to an open source license; the license gives the user free use of the software as well access to the source code, so that the software can then be further developed by whoever is interested.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Open_source&oldid=271554)

And then consider the entry from 2011:

The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product’s source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology. Before the term open source became widely adopted, developers and producers used a variety of phrases to describe the concept; open source gained hold with the rise of the Internet, and the attendant need for massive retooling of the computing source code. Opening the source code enabled a self-enhancing diversity of production models, communication paths, and interactive communities. . . . Subsequently, the new phrase “open-source software” was born to describe the environment that the new copyright, licensing, domain, and consumer issues created.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Open_source&oldid=418767638)

Aside from demonstrating what happens to clarity of thought in the hands of Wikipedia, this change, which occurred sometime around the summer of 2005, represents a moment of historical forgetting, in which something concrete (a bunch of programmer geeks and their Silicon Valley admirers rewriting the once-beloved tools of university computer science departments and distributing them freely on the Internet by using a clever legal license) is replaced by something abstract (a philosophy or a pragmatic methodology of production in which access to the sources is promoted), and in the process the causal relation between the concrete and the abstract is reversed.

On the one hand, this is simple misrecognition (Marx is rolling in his grave, but probably not uninterested in how this change can be so clearly captured in the detailed revisions of Wikipedia—a veritable cinema of ideological formation). There are concrete, empirically specifiable, and material realities to open source and the rush to replace them with a label like peer production can only obscure that there is something called open source software production, that it consists of specific practices and technologies, and that it is, for the most part, an ongoing concern in the heart of the information technology industry. And what’s more, it is increasingly a practice with none of the glamour or historical grandiosity attributed to it early on but with real effects on how that industry operates as part of contemporary capitalism.

Indeed, whatever open...