Feyerabend, Open Source
Paul Feyerabend – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
It’s perhaps a measure of my ignorance that it seems to me that the great Paul Feyerabend is not cited more in the fields of open whatever. His central argument, on behalf of a radical pragmatism in science as well as everything else having to do with obtaining knowledge and information (usable or not; and post-Kant, what is not usable, in the end?), is relevant as few other things are to open access, open knowledge, open source. In practical terms, it means that one puts outcomes over prescribed methods. It does not mean that one must abandon a consciousness of method; indeed, it argues the contrary, for a relentless inquiry into what one is doing and if there is another way of doing it. I think that’s what Feyerabend meant by scientific pluralism.
How do we apply this insight to open source production? Productive open-source communities resist are resistant to fixed methodologies. They require agility and flexibility on the part of the manager, community members, sponsoring entities. I don’t mean by this that obvious protocols of behaviour, such as not being rude on lists, ought not to obtain. But I do mean that the methods of production, the tests of product quality, of merit, are necessarily flexible enough to accommodate the divergences of style and character found in larger projects. Yet, clearly, for there to be communication of any sort, there must be agreed-upon standards–conventions of identity–that allow for difference of implementation and use without mutual incomprehensibility.
This coupling of the anarchic with the conventional makes open source production management an art form: something virtually impossible to codify (at least not without losing its dynamic essence) yet utterly recognizable as producing a valuable object others not engaged in the community can use.
Yanis Varoufakis
I’ve been following YV’s comments for some time, but usually via interviews and other accounts. I’d not subscribed to his blog. Now I have, and recommend it. I suppose that from my perspective, the disintegration and possibly savage destruction of the Eurozone is both affecting (in the human sense: to see the breadlines, for instance) and fascinating: how will the structures of power maintain themselves in the face of dissolution? Or, to put it otherwise: What will happen to capital in this erosive zone?
And, though the Eurozone crisis is particular to the zone, which is a Frankenstein monster stitched out of the cadaver’d parts of others to resemble something beautiful in the abstract, ugly in the flesh, nevertheless, it does suggest a future for other deep capital markets, especially those rooted in the foundry technologies arcing back to the 19th century.
But we are entering a new capitalization, with different models of making, distribution, selling. The question is: are they different enough? I’d say: not yet. Remember when the crisis first hit, the comforting notion was that the world was different now, for it was no longer the case that when the US sneezed–had a recession–the rest of the world caught cold. In fact, what really happened was that the novelty of this new recession simply proved that the driver for the global economy continues to be the potlach American consumer and the object of consumption the commodity, whatever it is, she desires.
I suspect that will change, and is changing. But slowly.
(Mind, I’m not opposed to consumer capitalism nor to commodities: I like those I have. But in the face of a world beyond the brink and in the face of the knowledge that my commodities equal somebody else’s certain misery and exploitation, and that situation has not gotten better over time…. well.)
World News: Firing of charismatic mayor shows limits of Chinese leadership’s patience – thestar.com
World News: Firing of charismatic mayor shows limits of Chinese leadership’s patience – thestar.com.
The Star is a small paper for a big town and its world section usually taken from the wires. But for that very reason, the article cited gives a fascinating peek into the logic of democracy and its tension with demagoguery (i.e., charismatic leadership leading to political unaccountability) and its balance against bureaucratic consensus (is this the same as the old Soviet Politburo, as was once the case?).
Put it this way: Supposedly democratic states resist the volatility of mob rule by rule of institutions that are by and large accountable to those giving them the power to govern, though this is not actually a necessity. But the effect is social predictability and also, not incidentally, economic stability and, given a diverse commercial environment, growth. But not all regimes articulating social and economic stability are the same, just as not all accounts of “the people” are identical. One, say, can be thought of as the grouping of individuals, rational or not, and grouped as a representable community, the threat of losing individual identity within the community is always present. (From schooling to voting, from birth to death, the individual is made as the natural figure of value, and reminded of that by the incessant claims and lures of commodity culture.)
But an other mechanism of identity can be said to start from the other direction, from the idea of community, with the individual as the sign of that community’s dissolution, and not its embodied atom of value.
Right-wing political extremism in the Great Depression | vox – Research-based policy analysis and commentary from leading economists
Nations are turning to far-right demagogues and magical solutions. This exceeds the trend seen during the Reagan/Thatcher period, and the turns are dramatic. The article cited above is insightful.
Scientists tout \’open source\’ drug discovery – university of sydney, open source – Open Source – Techworld
Few efforts as fraught with intellectual property issues as laboratory discovery; exceeds software, probably, if only for the amount of money involved. I can well believe that the only effective way to promote an open source process would be to favour it via governmental policy. Else, I’d guess that the vastly powerful multinationals would overwhelm any local effort.
Information Obesity
Just as with food: too much made for too few, too much consumed. Information obesity is about the glut of stuff that passes as information, that masquerades as good-for-you info, and that isn’t; that ends up bloating your day with distended periods of nothing doing but consuming the Tweets by twits, the blogs by bores, the stuff not that dreams are made of but killed by.
Once, poetry was the speech of the refined and adhered to strict rhetorical principle Qunitillian or Cicero would have recognized. The Wordsworth and Coleridge and the very greatest of then all, Blake, and the other Romantics rewrote the book of poetry out of the language of the common man. A crime, to the hidebound, this endeavour, for it graced the commons’ dross with nobles’ gold, giving the value of graceful form to gutter content: worse than a mismatch, a kind of counterfeit.
Do I think that the information obesity that elevates the most banal to the level demanding attention the same? That it should stay hidden under the rock of private discourse and not shown the public light of day? Neither information anorexia nor bulimia is the answer; starvation makes you not just weak but stupid. Perhaps a simpler answer, to address information obesity. Be selective.
Related Tags:
Who are the people USTR clears to see secret text for TPPA IPR negotiation? Knowledge Ecology International
Invaluable from James Love of Knowledge Ecology International, KEI. Worth looking over, as Love also asks the question that keeps me wondering: “[W]hat is the point of keeping the text [of the trade agreement] secret from the American Public?”
Assume ubiquitous clouds: claves. And users are in many, as we are with social media networks. So: What would be the best way to stake identity. Obviously there is no private/public, but access pri…
Assume ubiquitous clouds: claves. And users are in many, as we are with social media networks. So: What would be the best way to stake identity. Obviously there is no private/public, but access privilege.)? Write an answer on Quora
The Library at nothingness.org/Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography
A friend recently told me that he had just wandered through the Harz region of Germany while blindly following the directions of a map of London
via The Library at nothingness.org/Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography.
newspeak 