Electric Dreams: Computers in American Culture

10: Linux and Utopia

Linux and Utopia On March 10, 2000, the NASDAQ stock index, which tracked many of the companies riding the dot-com boom, stood at an alltime high of 5,133. By April 14 the NASDAQ had fallen to 3,321, a loss of more than 35%. The dot-com boom was over.1 In the aftermath of the crash, many of the promises of the cybertopians have begun to ring hollow. A new wave of public skepticism toward the official rhetoric of cyberlibertarianism and technological determinism has emerged. Relying on Moore’s Law, the unhampered free market, and the logic of the stock exchanges hadn’t turned out to be a guarantee of the “twenty-five years of prosperity, freedom and a better environment for the whole world” predicted in “The Long Boom,” an infamous Wired cover story of 1997.2 The rise of the internet hadn’t repealed the business cycle after all. Having passed through the hothouse environment of the late 1990s, in which any new internet-based business model could quickly command ludicrous levels of financing and hype, we are in a position to take stock of what computers have come to mean to us, and to evaluate the promise they still hold. The danger of this moment is that it may easily turn to pessimism ; many of the hopes for new technology died in the spring of 2000. But the failure of overhyped attempts to exploit irrational investment does not discredit those plans and projects that were more than get-richquick schemes. Out of the ashes of the dot-com boom are emerging new cybercultural visions, new models for economic life in the twenty-first century. Of these visions, one of the most compelling and influential is the open-source movement, an attempt to develop cheap, freely distributed, easily adaptable alternatives to the Microsoft Windows operating system. The open-source alternative to Windows is known as Linux. Linux had its moment in the dot-com sun, when developers Red Hat Systems went 10 198 199 Cover of Wired, July 1997. public and produced many instant open-source millionaires. But now that the hype has passed, we’re in a position to more clearly see the promises—and limitations—of open source as an alternate model for software development, intellectual property, and perhaps more general distribution of wealth in an information society. What Is Linux? Linux is a computer operating system, like Microsoft’s Windows and Apple’s Macintosh OS. An operating system is more than just another program. It’s the software beneath the software—the underlying code that turns a piece of hardware into a functioning computer. What makes Linux different from other operating systems is that it’s “open source.” This means that it can’t be “copyrighted” in the traditional sense—rather, it is distributed under a General Public License, which “allows free use, modification and distribution of the software and any changes to it, restricted only by the stipulation that those who received the software pass it with identical freedoms to obtain the source code, modify it, and redistribute it.”3 Rather than a copyright, the GPL is often referred to as a “copyleft,” and open-source software is sometimes called “freeware.” Linux software is developed collaboratively, among a large group of volunteer hackers around the world, communicating via the internet. Several for-profit companies, such as Red Hat and Caldera, sell packaged versions of Linux along with documentation and product support, but the same software is also available for free online. What interests me about Linux, and open source in general, isn’t the technical specifics, but how it’s emerged as a space in which to experiment with economic and social relations outside the bounds of what we normally think of as capitalism. The development of open-source software, of course, is specialized work, which has emerged in the context of a speci fic, distinct community. But what has captured the imaginations of so many developers and users of Linux is its broader utopian promise—the way it seems to point to a future organized around a very different set of social relations than those of late capitalism. I don’t assume that opensource development, as a distinct practice, could necessarily serve as a template for a broad range of economic relations. Not every product needs to be debugged; not every worker has...