 More or less any invitation to come to Media Lab Prado now, especially that they have this amazing building and to the Libra graphics conference into the Libra graphics research unit for inviting me. It's a great Opportunity I used to do field work at conferences like this. I was a observer Sometimes a participant sometimes someone just coming to learn more and so it's very flattering to be asked to actually speak in front of an audience of people who have provided for a lot of my Research career the material on which I've tried to make sense of free software in different ways So this is as they say and now for something completely different from what we've been seeing today I want to take a position tonight on free software and free culture Open-source free software free culture open access all of things that I work on Which is that I think it should become more parasitic And I'll try and give you a couple reasons why I think that's an interesting direction to take this One is that I think we actually misunderstand How central and powerful and downright awesome parasites actually are and biologists I think are only really beginning to to realize this And so I'm going to give you something to think with in that respect And the second is that I feel in some ways that we need a way for free software to save itself And free culture and open source from itself Because it's my sense that it's trapped in a certain kind of Narrative about what it is and where it's going and what it does that might need some reconfiguring I'm Unfortunately, not in the position where I get to stand up here and show you something I've made and ask you to help me make it better Although I get that and I try to do that in my own practice as an academic And so in some ways that is what I'm doing here tonight with this talk is to try and offer something Which hopefully will be provocative make you think a little and maybe allow you to To help contribute to it So I will start then with an idea so it's It's to me a kind of clear and unambiguous case That free software involves people implementing Expressing and trying to spread ideas concepts and this relationship Has to somehow be built into expressed in circulated through Technologies and it's this relationship that's really at the heart of my Intellectual practice at this point trying to figure out exactly how the ideas that we care about get embedded in the technologies We make and what happens to them when we do that Now this is obviously free software Open source free culture is not the first time humans have tried to do such a thing But it's one way that people all over the world are doing it today And it's changing the way we'll do it in the future But I also do not think that free culture free software peer production open source etc are inevitable and This is particularly true from my perspective in Los Angeles down the street from Hollywood And down the coast from Silicon Valley and living amongst academics It sometimes feels to me that the community of people who work on free software and open source and open access is increasingly marginal And misunderstood And it's associated for better or worse with piracy and hacking On the one side and on the other with unsustainable business models on bad capitalism both unjustly I think I worry that the focus on for instance community and motivation and Cooperation which has taken up a lot of what people who are academics thinking about free software have focused on might actually be Unhelpful at some level. I don't think That the people who care about free software or open source or free culture are a special kind of community with special ideas separate from the mainstream They are as we know part of the 99 percent, right? So when I talk about parasites tonight, it's because I'm in some ways trying to propose a Way to think that does not separate out the community And and individualized it is something separate from from other communities But tries to think about integrating it without assimilating or destroying it in the process So let's start with some parasites So this good-looking fellow on the screen here is Toxoplasma gondii and Toxoplasma gondii is an amazing little microorganism in this picture. It is dividing Which it does really really well It can also reproduce sexually and asexually both of which it also does really really well And to gondii has a life cycle as all parasites to so here's a sketch I found that I really like of this. It's a microorganism that's found in a range of animals often It ends up in shit as many parasites do And often that shit often cat shit ends up in rats as cat shit often does And then sometimes those rats end up in cats because cats like mice and rats and Sometimes it also ends up in humans who eat for instance undercooked meat And sometimes when they change for instance kitty litter Which is why you're sometimes told not to change the kitty litter if you're pregnant because Toxoplasma gondii can be fatal in infants, but it's often present in adults Asymptomatically meaning it doesn't do anything. Well, I shouldn't say that it's not fatal in adults It might actually be here in the room with us. I don't know that for sure But this story gets more interesting I think because the parasite isn't just a stowaway Right. It isn't just a long for the ride in a conveniently richly stocked larder that is a rat or a cat T gondii is also a hacker of sorts Some of these bacteria when they enter into their part of their life cycle in the rat Head off into the brains of those rats where they cause changes in the behavior of their host Those rats for instance might stop avoiding cats Indeed There's evidence they might actually become attracted to cat odor as a result of this infection in their brain Instead of as they normally are repelled by it. That's increasing the chances of being eaten by a cat So this goes under the label of Host manipulation by parasites. This is a gift from my wife who's also really interested in parasite manipulation being the important part of the story here because it is the Life cycle of the parasite in which hosts become a kind of vehicle for Extending the phenotype of the hope of the of the parasite itself right in extending its ability to live in other places So here's nine one percent cat We're not really clear yet on what the behavior changes in the bacterium Might induce in cats, but this is also part of the study And we also know that there's some evidence that it induces behavior changes in humans as well humans are who are infected And the hypotheses include everything from schizophrenia to aggressive behavior to aggressive driving there's a study on aggressive driving So that must be only in America, right Behaviors that may or may not have something to do with the survival of this organism or perhaps even benefits For some of those who harbor it So this raises the question who's parasitizing whom? Now we tend to think of parasites in in that that language the language of parasites always reduces them to Predators those who are feeding on others, right? Literally the word is nice. It means the the the person who eats at another's table, right? So it's a it's about communal feasting as it were But I'm thinking of parasites here as something which have a much richer Life cycle and Expression of their own power and why do I tell you this story? Well parasites like this are everywhere and they cover the spectrum from purely predatory to miraculously Mutualistic fig trees and wasps bacteria that make crickets commit suicide Fish and squid who've developed light organs that have glowing bacteria inside them that allow them to see underwater and even make themselves invisible But of course, I'm not here to give you a biology lesson though if I had my way I would have proposed an interactivo session entirely on Parasites and we would have spent two weeks on it, but that made to provide everyone's patience But I'm not here to give you a biology lesson It's I like the story because as we say in anthropology. It's good to think with Because it demonstrates a kind of relation and life cycle that I think is good for thinking about our own social and collective relations The parasite's not a freeloader a freerider or a leech such images of parasites confuse an action Feeding or predation with a relationship Dependency manipulation advantage or disadvantage obligation reciprocity mutualism Now there are other reasons I think to like the figure of the parasite as well And maybe some of these will come up as I talk through the rest of this parasites or lurkers not predators or alpha males or lead designers no offense to lead designers or It's a story about Superorganisms rather than individuals and collectives which is very useful especially for people in sociology because we tend to tell our stories Almost entirely in terms of individuals and collectives. So the idea of a superorganism is useful It's about the life cycle not just the free living stage I think that when people think of parasites they think about them primarily in their free what what the biologists call free living stage That is when they're not inside another Host this is actually a story of a life cycle and not a dream of escaping all relations And it's also a story about being careful about who you associate with right choosing your parasites and who you parasite Not yet, but there will be don't worry You're imagine everyone in here is imagining their own parasite And right now in five four three two Tonight I Want you to think about three kinds of parasitism and their relationship to free software and free culture One of these might be familiar to many people who've probably read it And that's a famous 1960 article by JCR liquid are called man computer symbiosis in which he actually proposed that the kind of Relationship we should have with our computers should be that of the fig tree and the wasp the faint one of the most famous Mutualistic parasites the fig tree and the wasp literally cannot live with each other Live without each other the fig produces wasps and it produces seeds the wasp pollinates the fig and produces more wasps Right, but they have to live together and and this approach to Man computer symbiosis was was lick-litters way of saying Computers are here. We need to figure out how to live with them in this mutualistic relationship and not in the relationship that We imagine artificial intelligence to be creating i.e. That's why Skynet has mentioned here right the the computer That will eventually replace humans right so it's a different approach to understanding that but I also want you to think about Concepts that will that will make up the bulk of what I'm going to talk about today as parasites on technology or maybe vice versa How what is this relationship between concepts and technologies? And then maybe a more specific version of this which I'll come back to at the end Which is free software as parasitic on proprietary software or vice versa Now when I talk about concepts, I mean something big right not just your regular everyday concept of dog or Media lab or whatever, but these political concepts that play an a very important role in communities like this one in free software communities in free culture in Open source open accesses especially And these abstract political and philosophical concepts are frequently much more troubled than these prosaic ones like cat or rat or Parasite they're shared heterogeneous objects. They have a lot of literature associated with them a lot of debate They connect up logic and experience etc And we tend to rely on them a lot whether or not we are philosophers or professional academics right freedom being the most obvious in that That's what I will talk about freedom and participation today And the good thing about them though is that if you're willing to look a little these concepts have been really Worked on right they have been thought rethought Transformed and tested in all kinds of ways like really good technologies right there's actually a ton of literature on most of these concepts And that makes them very valuable for thinking carefully about what they can do in the world now technology is Equally hard to define and no one should try but there are some things you can say about it that I think are useful They're independent of us we can trade them gift them buy them sell them rent them They do things we can't do on our own and sometimes didn't know we needed to do And sometimes that we don't want to do They need to be maintained. They can't survive on their own right Even the best free software in the world will not survive unless there's even the best proprietary software in the world Will not survive unless there's a community of people maintaining it and making it better all the time But most importantly they're made by us so to a certain extent concepts share These qualities these qualities of technologies But not all of them and not completely we tend not to think of ideas like freedom or participation in the same way We do technologies like TCP IP or iPads or fuel cells, right? However, we do tend to talk about technologies that create Enhance or restrict freedom or privacy or responsibility And so intuitively we seem to think that these concepts somehow work themselves into the technologies The question for me is how? Now, I think there's a set of ways in which we Generally tend to talk about this and these are not mutually exclusive or exhaustive But here's just a handful of what I think one of those is to think about Concepts kind of like ideological frosting right the idea that they're not real They're just concepts They're not real in the way technologies are an extreme version of this is show me the code right nothing will Nothing else matters right as an as a idealized engineer might say demonstrate it prove it can be done That's one way of thinking about the relationship another is that technology is a kind of mystification that concepts are Unconscious ideologies that we carry with us and they somehow work themselves into the technologies and failure to accurately understand the Concepts leads to bad technologies All technology is politics is a standard way of approaching things in Science studies science technology studies, which is one of the fields that I come out of Often there are ways of of saying Technologies are The the new concepts that have displaced the old ones and politics sort of encodes these these these technologies and then of course there's a kind of pessimistic approach to which is to say that the Relationship of concepts and technologies as old as humanity. We've always had this problem Writing is an example of a relationship between concepts and technologies right there's some truth to all of these and they're not mutually exclusive But what they all seem to miss is that? Concepts themselves are malleable right not just technologies and the more we implement freedom The more we change it the more we think what we're doing with our technologies is enhancing or spreading or changing it The more we actually have an effect on what that concept is What it reveals to us freedom can be and what kinds of freedom it creates in the world right? So I'm just gonna very quickly because I don't like doing this in such context very quickly quote quote one philosopher And that's to lose here who has a very nice way of saying that to change a concept would mean to explore it Basically, he says it's never interesting to criticize a concept in philosophy it's better to build new functions and discover the new fields which make it useless or inadequate which is a very Programmers language way of describing what concepts are right that it has something built into it But we haven't figured out what all those functions and fields are and that that's one of the reasons we might explore this now As Femke mentioned I have tried to think through this a bit and and that notion of the concept helped me think about this Question of how to describe what it was free software programmers were doing and came up with this idea of recursive publics Which I won't go into in detail here But the point is that it as a practice in the way I described it in the book has a Set of internal components things like the shareability of software code legal hacking the GPL Openness a definition of openness and how it functions participation certain kinds of participation or collaborations specifically things like software versioning Etc, but there are also a set of external variables that have been changing So when I did my fieldwork on free software, which was basically 1995 to 2003 It was a different beast than it is today and that's not because free software itself was different But because the context the external things around it were much different It was the world of the desktop PC and not cloud computing It was the very early days of mobile devices, etc. The topology of the internet was much different The cultural status of remixing was still Very new and very untested as opposed to now being tested and to some extent not having produced quite as much as was predicted Ten years ago, so those external things have changed around free software And one of the things that I want to do now then is to is to sort of quickly take you through two concepts that I think have been very important to that history of free software and how they've changed over time how the concepts have changed over time with implementations with Moments in the history of computing as it were so we'll start with freedom then let's start here and one of the things about freedom is that I Would try to convince you that we generally talk about all kinds of technologies in terms of freedom But it's actually true that we talk about everything in terms of freedom, which is very frustrating Here's a screenshot from Google image search for all of the things that freedom is associated with and we associate it with everything Although there's a certain visual consistency to this language Images of upheld arms liberated birds broken chains are nearly ubiquitous When a logo emphasizes a flag a gun or an eagle It's usually conservative or right-wing freedom when it uses a sans serif font a color green or a raised fist It's usually left version of freedom and so on so we associate it with everything But it's very clear that we definitely associate it with small and large operations that brand themselves with freedom imagery So here's two examples of freedom computers The most obvious case we'll come back to this right. This is a 1992 Apple power book ad Microsoft degrees though they recognize the irony and so they're much more subtle about it here There are serious examples of Academics and professionals and politicians concerned Edward Felton that Princeton's freedom to tinker blog for instance or the computers freedom and privacy Group of course There's the specific concern with freedom of speech on the internet Which is often confused with freedom of the internet itself and this association between the freedom of the internet has been strongest in the case of net neutrality which Invokes a related set of concepts, especially equality and fairness And then of course There's free software perhaps the most zealously promoted association between freedom and computers in software and perpetually struggling to disambiguate itself As free beer from free speech right in English at least and I'll come back to that Then of course there are things that free software has inspired that have have taken off since then things like the freedom box Aben Mowgliens Project the freedom phone all these technologies that deal with the nexus of freedom Privacy control intellectual property. Of course, there's also an interest in freedom from computers Exemplified by this ingenious piece of software called freedom, of course Which just shuts down your access to the internet for however long you actually want to work They also make software called antisocial which shuts off your access to social networks for however long you want to work It's either the best $10 you'll ever spend or a profound confirmation that there's a sucker born every minute right and Then of course lately internet freedom has begun to be associated throughout the media with the internet generally Often in North Africa and the Middle East And freedom as a kind of imperial power or freedom of the internet as statecraft right my favorite example of this actually comes from France where there were these wonderful posters for a Television show about the revolutions in North Africa Bringing together Twitter The revolutions and horror in one nice package So all these examples then are meant to pose the question What kind of freedom right organized out these clearly can't all be the same kinds of freedom? Anybody who spent long enough in the free software community will recognize some versions of this as merely jingoistic use of freedom as opposed to an honest approach to the problem of what it is But it turns out if you study Political philosophy or if you're an amateur political philosopher like me There's a number a very large number of versions of what freedom can mean and it turns out some of them are actually very useful for Trying to narrate the changes that have been happening over the last I would say 60 years of computing And we'll just talk a little bit about a few of them since it can mean so many things Isaiah Berlin once said the concept is so porous there is little interpretation it seems able to resist which is a quote like But perhaps the most obvious Association for a lot of people is with libertarianism. Here's I'm Rand And this is unfortunately a kind of nearly default mode of critique especially on the left Which is to associate Silicon Valley with Liberty libertarianism and especially to associate libertarianism with I'm Rand This is not unreasonable. There is definitely some truth to this especially in Silicon Valley But it's actually not really correct and it's certainly not correct of free software So one might then turn to some classic definitions Most everyone's been forced to read it in philosophy or pretend to read at some point Isaiah Berlin's famous short article two concepts of Liberty in which he rehearsed for a new generation This sort of epic struggle between what's known as negative Liberty and positive Liberty Negative Liberty, which is often wrongly associated with libertarianism is about the zone of coercion individual coercion Right. Are you being coerced or prevented from doing something where Liberty is narrowly defined as the absence of of Liberty? I'm free only in so far as I'm not directly restrained or coerced And and Berlin says the answer to the question who governs me is logically distinct from the question How far does government interfere with me? He's very interested in The nature of coercion or interference in proposing the idea of negative Liberty and it's a very important concept for anyone in political philosophy It's opposite positive Liberty is in Berlin, especially associated with the tradition that sees Liberty that something that the individual must attain right not freedom from But freedom to freedom to do something enabling yourself to be able to do something I mean it might be surprising that Berlin suggests that positive Liberty is No better than a specious disguise for brutal tyranny Why does he not like positive Liberty? Well, what makes positive Liberty dangerous is not its visions of autonomy or a self-actualization per se But the attempt by any organization or state to impose this particular form of freedom on others It's evil by most definitions of freedom to restrict freedom in the name of freedom You can't do that So this is one definition of freedom and I actually think it's kind of interesting that this tension between positive and negative Liberty Is something we can see clearly in certain key moments in the liberation of computing from the 1960s forward So for instance, if you've read Fred Turner's book or Thomas Streeter's book on the history of computing both Excellent books on this history that I recommend The computer was once identified with bureaucratic centralized and standardized corporations Computers exemplified instrumental reason and the separation of means and ends they were associated with Organization man with the military industrial complex with the closed world of destructive military power in Vietnam in the Cold War They were emblems for protesters in the 1960s who wore punch cards around their necks Here's organization man by William White with a punch card on its cover I'm not a human being do not fold spindle or mutilate, right? And and this approach to understanding computers is bureaucratic and repressive was shared just as much by people in the industry as people outside of the industry, right? there were those who saw the kind of mainframe culture of the mid-1960s as the problem that needed to be rebelled against and Thomas Streeter and Fred Turner in both of their books single out a series of people who are responsible for this transformation and one of the most Famous of them who I've already mentioned is JCR lick litter here. He is And and he was an early program director at ARPA Responsible for the first version of the first let's say Prototype idea of the internet which he called the galactic net And his vision of what computers conceived was quite radical by the expectations of the day He had unparalleled interactive interaction with a computer which very few people at the time had right and could experience That interactivity as something which was freeing Right which allowed him to think thoughts that he could not think before and he wanted to bring that power to other people He wanted other people to experience this sense of being able to really literally sit in front of a computer Tell it to do something have it do that and then tell it to do something else, right? Rather than having to wait or be prevented by a hierarchy or a bureaucracy that controlled access to these machines This version of Interactive computing was brought to fruition in a very famous case by Douglas Engelbart in the online system in 1968 and a famous demonstration between his headquarters at the Stanford Research Institute and an auditorium in San Francisco and Included all of the elements that we were now familiar feel familiar with in computing the mouse word processing File structures cut and paste and many other things that are easily recognizable, but only in hindsight And Engelbart much more than lick litter saw the goal of a more personal computer in terms of positive liberty Which literally augmented human intelligence allowing them to achieve things. They could not before This version of positive liberty the freedom to think to do more than humans could by themselves It was clearly present in the work of people like Seymour Papert and Alan Kay as well Both of whom clearly associated personal freedom with Education and childhood and a desire to bring computers to them to make it possible for all humans to augment their intelligence and their freedom And here is whether might be an objection whether they wanted to or not Right, so the question being how do positive and negative freedom play together in this? Enabling of liberty, but the most famous example of this association has surely got to be Ted Nelson's computer lib slash dream machines booklet from 1974 explicitly modeled on the whole earth catalogue and bearing the exhortation You can and must learn computers now the books surveyed the whole computer culture of 1974 including legal copyright and other issues introduced the idea of hypertext writing and explained in a distinctive counter cultural style all kinds of engineering and computer science Lingo and ideas liberally sprinkled with illustrations from our crumb and the Wizard of Oz books which were out of copyright Now The enemy in this parable of the personal computer was often The very large corporation like IBM and later AT&T. Here's a famous image of AT&T as the death star for instance But there were always others like deck or PDP for instance Makers of many computers who represented a resistance from within right the people who were going to bring Freedom bring liberation to the world of computing from within the computing industry And more generally I would say the enemy was was not the large corporation, but it was the technological innovation system itself right Nelson's book for instance Ted Nelson's book is replete with anxiety that the course of innovation as it exists will restrict rather than enhance freedom And he's telling constantly telling people to do things differently Engelbart had a notion of a different way Of designing which he called bootstrapping Which would lead us out of this wrong form of engineering this wrong wrong form of technological engineering associated with people like IBM or AT&T And and eventually this would allow us to create art and beauty with a computer Steven Levy would put it in his book on hackers later And of course if this sounds like Steve Jobs, it should because the purest example of this surely has to be 1984 Commercial for the Apple Macintosh And they were the first company really Apple was the first company to make good on this particular promise of positive freedom To offer to restrict users freedoms in the name of freedom Right to offer convenience ease of use simplicity as a route towards the dream of computer Live imagined by Alan K. Seymour Papert and Ted Nelson and to explicitly give it to everyone Right a kind of populist corporate paternalism a war for freedom thought against endlessly renewed enemies like engineers and bureaucrats and bean counters And against the forces, especially in Steve Jobs case of ugliness Right now. I think this is a totally fascinating way of thinking about what Apple achieved because they were obviously very successful My apologies And it is one of the ways we can think about how Making careful distinctions between positive and negative freedom can help us rethink What this concept has brought us and what it might bring us in the future, right? But this way is only one way of thinking about freedom There are others that are not so focused for instance on the role of the individual or of individual choice Debates about collective freedom for instance have focused on things like the time-shared operating system which emerged right around the same time as this famous book of political philosophy which also dealt with problems of Equality and fairness And freedom here in this context is less positive or negative than a question of how to Configure a collective resource how to design a system that would equitably allow everyone a chance at freedom without harming others And this of course expresses itself through the idea of time-sharing Which was perceived as a freedom promising innovation from batch processing And would bring computing to everyone eventually it would bring computing to everyone It was dreamed of in the 1960s as a computer utility, which is a dream that has come back I would say about once every five years since 1965 or so and is currently with us in the form of cloud computing a Remarkably similar problem of freedom was at the heart of the ARPA nets design and in particular the design of the tcp IP protocols that still structure most of the internet and that this was a way to solve the problem of Administratively bounded networks to allow different networks to share resources without interfering with one another explicitly figured here by David Clark and one of the famous sort of reflections on the design philosophy of the DARPA internet protocols as a as a problem of Freedom Similarly the Unix operating system implemented freedom as a time-shared operating system as a portable one as one that could be Transferred from place to place and as ultimately a philosophy of how to do things that would implement a particular understanding of freedom There's also another tradition of freedom in our culture however and one that periodically reappears and goes by the name of Republican or civic Republican Freedom and this tradition is associated with Machiavelli Rousseau de Tocqueville the founders of the United States, etc Has a strong tradition here in Spain And this in freedom and Republican is freedom from domination and there's a particular kind of paradox that civic Republicans love Which is the paradox of the contented slave? Republicans for the most part reject any attempt at Positive liberty just as partisans of negative liberty do but they also reject negative liberty because it leads to the possibility that one could be a Slave with a particularly benevolent master right one who never actually interferes with the slave But who doesn't actually give the slave his freedom? So the idea of a contented slave a slave who's always subject to the arbitrary whim of the master is one that most people find to be a simple contradiction and it's a this notion of freedom that I think is at the heart of What people in the IT industry mean when they talk about vendor lock-in for instance right or proprietary lock-in or Switching costs or the problems of antitrust and monopoly. This is the idea that well, yes IBM and then Microsoft and then Apple and then Google may not actually interfere with my freedom may not really actually be doing it right now But they have the arbitrary power to do so and that is freedom as non domination There they are. I'm not gonna say anything about that. This is obviously something which We have associated in the free software community with the advantages of free software right that leads out of lock-in and again is associated with this problem with cloud computing which We might say the same of today is about problems of a civic republican liberty Especially as we learn more about its insecurity its tendency towards monopoly and ultimately towards lock-in One might also reflect a little bit about this problem, which we come back to over and over again of the difference between free and free in English Libra and gratis The nice distinction that everybody else in the world gets to draw but those of us who speak English do not But I think it's actually important because there's a good reason for this confusion in English in American English I would say and that's because to pay for something is to assert autonomy and anonymity It bears the marks of a certain understanding of freedom, but to be given something is to submit to an obligation Often to be saved by someone else's generosity free soft fraught free software often offers to save people and Some people don't want to be saved especially if they're not told about it So that's freedom how much time do I have left? Five more minutes, okay Well, I'll go quickly through participation because it's there's less to say about it in some ways and it's less well understood but I I'd like to differentiate it actually from a number of other terms which are much more often used in this concept of Collaboration and cooperation and altruism. We heard a bit about that last night And it's obvious that participation is central to all kinds of things that have been happening over the last decade Crowds sourcing crowdfunding peer production user-generated content, etc What I think makes participation interestingly different from this is that participation is supposed to bring benefits to the person who participates Right, it's got a loop in it, right? You don't just participate and make something better you Benefit from that. We don't know exactly how we don't know exactly what but that's what participation means here Collaboration can happen without you necessarily benefiting from it cooperation can happen without you benefiting in fact you can lose by cooperating That's one of the puzzles that evolutionary biologists love Yes, am I am I torturing the translators my apologies. They've been working very hard and There they deserve a break. So I won't speak too quickly Um participation also has its own visual language. It's usually involves raising your hands, right? In whatever context here's the Pirate Party voting right or in this case laughing which I like Participation is a creature of the 20th century. I don't know if you can quite see this This is an Google n-gram graph of in red Is representation in green is democracy and in blue is participation? So you can see participation Exploding over the course of the 20th century as a concept Which is in Google's digitized books. So take that with a grain of salt, but just as a way of demonstrating this Similarly versus collaboration It's much more common and the the adjective participatory is interesting because it didn't really exist before May of 1962 and I'll explain why but participation has a lot of different histories to it For my Portuguese listeners, I think of these as hedronims after Fernando Pessoa very different categories of what participation means that are kind of Non-overlapping but seem to deal with the same conceptual problem. So participation in in labor worker participation participation participatory design participatory culture Methexis and participation in philosophy, right? There are sort of these interesting points of overlap. So Worker participation is an obvious History comes in a rainbow of colors. This is a very happy version of worker participation right here Spain has its own sort of much much heralded version of worker participation in the Mondragon collectives this has a Robust tradition that goes back into the history of socialism and unionism under the label of industrial democracy Which was a very actually very active and very robust community of people thinking about participation in America from about the late 19th century until 1962 which also spawned as one version of it what we know of as participatory design in Scandinavia Here's Kristen Nygard the inventor of similar who was also involved in participatory participatory design as one exemplar of that and then of course in 1962 the creation of the students for democratic society and the port Huron statement which Declared this label participatory democracy for the first time and declared it as a goal for the student movement at that time the student the SDS was in fact the Edible successor to the League for industrial democracy right it was a way of killing that got it and of course 50 years later the connections are very clearly made to the Occupy movement And here you see the hands again the visual language of participation always involves hands Here's a local example. I Won't talk about the work. We're doing which is looking at a case-based analysis of participation Where we're trying to figure out ways to visualize? Questions we have about participation. Maybe I'll do a lightning talk on it tomorrow But one of the things we do ask about it is the question of normative theories of participation and that is What makes participation work and how do you break it down? Does it have an educated dividend? Do people get some kind of education out of participating does it benefit the participant? Do people get to participate in goals as well as tasks in any given project? Do participants maintain control or ownership over the resources that are created a lot the GPL, right? Is there the capacity for exit without harm or penalty most of the answers to these questions are yes in free software? Right, but no in a lot of other cases that get called participation in contemporary culture Doesn't have metrics doesn't allow for communication and this has implications for what the word participation means so it often Forces us towards talking about things like liking instead of voting or deliberating versus interacting or protesting versus giving feedback or giving some sort of comment Right, so let's come back then to our friend The parasite and return to this question of what it is that parasites can help us learn about this and let me Remind you then that I had these three ways of thinking through parasites and I actually think the last two of these are related And and it's important. I think to try to understand how they are related We live with an opposition between free software and proprietary software because we're relying on a narrow understanding of freedom and participation I think we think of it as the as I would say in parasite language the free living stage of the cycle of free software For over a decade free software appeared to have broken free from its hosts and wanted an environment all its own Rather than living in shit It wanted to float free in the air or on the water All this talk of using this application or that application or this operating system or that operating system instead of that one In order to enhance freedom Was right for one stage of the life cycle I would submit, but it might be wrong for the stage that we're entering into Instead we're back inside the rat as it were the cloud computing proprietary IP madness of the crazed Silicon Valley rat and And it's time maybe to infect its brain again To find new ways to manipulate its behavior and to become again a free living entity if only for a time Now I would say that we've seen this cycle before We've been through several stages at which freedom and participation have redefined the technology that we use and in turn been redefined So for instance in the 1970s the personal computer freed us from the main frame But what we got in response was proprietary operating systems and incompatible devices and formats But in 1980s UNIX and open networks offered to free us to connect and experiment But what did we get instead in the let's say second stage of the life cycle? incompatible versions of UNIX but in the free living version Free software freezes from UNIX right and we have a legal revolution I think this cycle actually repeats I used to think that we were on our way towards a world in which free software would be spread everywhere But I actually now think that the cycle just continues to repeat And I think it's incredibly important for every generation of people who are involved in it to understand that there's always More of this kind of work to be done to figure out how freedom and participation Can be brought to bear on problems that are not Specific to free software but specific to all of the environments in which we live and work right that too much focus on free Software as an internal community in which people communicate with each other means not enough focus on how free software infects and manipulates the behavior of External hosts like Silicon Valley for instance and we could say the same thing of participation But I won't go through that here because I think maybe we'll have some Questions, so I'll just say thank you to everyone Including the translators who are not Maybe you'd like a mic like this so you can move a bit sure let's do I does it look like I want to get up and move around No, I can I can I can I can play as we filled on you here and go out into the audience Are there any questions from the audience? questions competing microphones You may ask anything Yes I really like the font you were using How what's it's called? It's not an open-source font. I wish it was It's called graphic I'm intending to make an open-source version of it because I learned all kinds of things about font forge today So Brandon okay, so I've been reading a lot of Friedrich Kittler lately and he's I mean some people don't like his ideas, but It made me start thinking about the fact that if we accept the use or the particular technology gets used and really widespread how much of How much of the realm of possibility of freedom is dictated by that system itself so so Yes, I think I'm asserting something fairly similar there, and I just don't think that it's Restricted to the question of free versus proprietary right that there are ways in which technologies that we have to rely on spread all around us and change the configuration of possibilities for freedom But we also have the ability to explore what freedom is and how it can be brought to bear on these new technologies Right, so cloud computing is a very concrete example here, right? The GPL doesn't really work for cloud computing because it's not a desktop PC It's not really of interest to most people to install a version of Gmail on their own machine, right? So how do we infect? Cloud computing practice with the same principles of free software Without having to rely on the principles that we developed in the era of the desktop PC, right? Of the individualized personal computer, right? Does that make sense? I don't know the answer. I mean asking the question Maybe just a slight remark. I'm not sure if cloud computing is the right Target here. It's more like the the thing that the personal computer enabled like managing your own information is What is changing right now is that a lot of your personal information is managed by someone else Like what is your social status in what are in what groups are you? Basically, which social network are you in and So I'm not sure if that's the same as cloud computing So maybe more a little bit technical network, but no, I would I would I would I would agree with you I think there are two different things so that they're connected, right? And actually cloud computing is a good example because there's a tremendous amount of open source activity around for instance The hypervisor level right and so one can say well Free software open source is alive and well within computing within cloud computing But we have this other problem which is private information and privacy and the control of those resources now Whether or not we can solve that problem in the same way that we tried to solve it with free software is I think an open question That's not two questions, but two remarks first we I think Building a free internet we we build a jungle so Bigger predators Instinct and The best technology we have to fight gmail or other clouds computing application is things like adblock or It's a I don't want to be a client of your system and that's a working technology actually I Would add to that Diversity right if you want to understand how a healthy Biological life cycle works and how evolution functions Diversity is the central concept to how that works So the world we're creating right now the world let's say the world Silicon Valley is creating right now is one That's concentrating and monopolizing and reducing diversity and it does this I think cyclically right So the question is how do you fight back to produce more diversity in the information technology? Ecology that we all live in right and I think free software contributes to that I think open source contributes to that, but there may also be way other ways of of Increasing that diversity Okay Well, I think in the end you have given a brush of what I'm going to ask you, but I would like you to be as good as you will My doubt or my question is a controversy about the concept of freedom and participation In terms of free software and what is free culture In the moment that the software is free It allows us to download ourselves in a free way or Have access to information that was previously restricted under pre-payment but my doubt is if the fact of having that information Permits a participation Not only from the discipline itself of which Let's say it can participate That collective but from others, that is This platform for example the media lab With this meeting Selects not only designers but another type of profiles to participate in it However, for example the the expositions Even being free They are with a very specific language, that is to say that if you do not belong to your discipline You will not find out I would like to know what is your opinion about that The concept of free culture, that is, if it really is free accessible culture. Thank you That's a fantastic question One of the things that I'm trying to figure out with participation is the difference between participation within group, so those who do actually understand the language for instance and General universal participation, right? And I tend more and more not to believe that the latter actually exists So it becomes a question of Scale and modularity basically patterns of participation And this is something that actually Carol Pateman who wrote one of the famous works on participatory democracy Described as patterns of participation in society So if you have good forms of participation in the home and in the workplace And in the art gallery and in the cafe that those patterns build on each other to produce better patterns of participation at the political level and That that's the kind of thing that people should be working on to enhance participation. So I think people who actually participate in free culture of the sort that involves participation not just Downloading and I include piracy here at piracy here at some level that there is participation in piracy But those who participate in that I think learn good forms of participation those who participate in Say crowdfunding or not crowdfunding crowd sourcing a la Amazon Mechanical Turk May not be learning good forms of participation and the more of those patterns we have the worse our political system looks I think Okay, I Take one more question because I think we can speak for the rest of the night I think over there Well, okay, too Because we would like to see the processing a documentary that's made here in Madrid and we'll screen it here in this Auditorium tonight. So I take one to so You describe this historical Dynamic that we have between these opposing ideas and you describe them largely in terms of different opposing forces In some sense transforming each other I suppose I suppose what I'm wondering is whether there's something presence within those forces which is redefining The next the next iteration so to speak and I guess I'm kind of thinking about that in a kind of Marxist frame do does the current definition of priority software Itself hold within it the next definition of freedom for example, you know, I'm I tend to be agnostic on such theories If it's true that that kind of development happens That kind of development of let's call it a technological determinism or a conceptual determinism that one stage Determines what's what the next one is. I think it's local I think it's fundamentally local that it's not something that is autonomous and unfolds with Uncaring certainty right and one of the ways I think about this is the function of maintenance in our culture Which is undervalued and underappreciated generally and hidden for the most part But is absolutely essential to whatever it is the tech whatever technologies that it is We actually use on a day-to-day basis, right? We would not be able to do any of these things if there weren't a tremendous amount of human activity going into maintaining them and If that stops then it's not that the technology held within it some the seeds of its own destruction It's that we've stopped maintaining it right who knows why those choices were made But if they're made then we end up ceasing that maintenance and I think Understanding that that human component of it. This is about as Marxist as I get Understanding the centrality of that human component to the maintenance of technologies is I think really important understanding whether or not They can produce freedom for us or more kinds of freedom for us Hi, sorry last question Wonderful lecture Which was the sort of most in software culture as a representative startup culture I was interested that you wanted somehow to problematize it a little bit because it's sort of become attacking one specific strand of ideal in Silicon Valley as Rand and Libertarianism and there's also like a bit of a revival showing obviously in the Leftist political analysis of things like the so-called sharing economy and the and the and the kind of activity that is appearing around it So I was curious if you could expand your idea about it What is the actual weight of this specific strand of political thought if we analyze Silicon Valley? And also we can actually reduce it to something like that because I suspect is way more unstable and abstract and as an entity To to to understand politically Are you talking about reducing it to Silicon Valley and startup culture? Is that what you said? I mean that Silicon Valley and startup culture. Yeah, would be more problematic to define as something that Coming basically from the Rand Libertarian Strand of ideology and and that's about it I think if you go to Silicon Valley, you'll discover worlds and worlds of difference, right? The place itself contains multitudes, right? What's wrong with Silicon Valley is its media presentation, right? And this is facilitated by and enhanced by journalists who Are always on the lookout for the pundits who will tell us what's going to come next from Silicon Valley That's the problem with Silicon but not Silicon Valley itself per se Which has all kinds of people in it and one of the ways I give this talk about freedom is to say Associating libertarianism with Silicon Valley is unfair to the other 90% of people who are not libertarian, right? There are conservatives and there are Democrats and there are people who don't care at all about politics and etc etc in Silicon Valley So the question is why does the media and why does the discourse around it? Automatically come back to this punditry and that especially in America is a problem that we have with lots of Areas of our culture But it's particularly pronounced with Silicon Valley. We don't get it with media startups in New York We don't get it with European media startups. We don't get it, you know, we only get it with Silicon Valley for the most part So that was the last last question. Yes, although if you want to have a parasite meal, right? Then you can ask me questions later. Chris will be able you can sit at my table. Thank you very much