Re: [ox] notizen zur keimform
- From: <graham belegost.mit.edu>
- Date: Sat, 19 May 2001 19:14:35 -0400 (EDT)
Hi People,
Usual disclaimers - I haven't read all the mail in this thread,
so all this has quite possibly been said before. Sorry, if so.
On Thu, 17 May 2001, Stefan Merten wrote:
Last week (10 days ago) Glatz wrote:
"keimform" beinhaltet im wort eine analogie zur biologie, legt einen
entwicklungsprozess zumindest nahe, der bei allen veränderungen im ablauf
einem bauplan, sozusagen einer DNA, folgt.
Ich mag den unterstellten Determinismus jedenfalls nicht. Umgekehrt
scheint es mir übrigens auch Geschichtsdeterminismus zu sein, wenn
behauptet wird, daß es keine Keimform geben könne.
Personally, I think the 'keimform' analogy is useful as a shorthand. But I
wonder why it is so hard to find a different analogy that does not suffer
from the implied determinism of the biological 'keimform'. There are two
aspects to this determinism:
1. That the plant/society will grow. But this
is not inevitable in either case (there may be a drought. Governments may
make it too difficult for free software to grow).
2. That the seed will grow to become a particular kind of plant. This is
inevitable for a plant, not for a society: in general terms I think
everyone would agree that what form the gpl-gesellschaft will take is
unknown, we cannot write the music of the future, usw. But there is still
a tendency to see free software in terms of a line, with the FSF at one
end, larry wall in the middle and esr at the other. If you then remove
everything except the FSF, you no longer have a line but a point. What can
grow from a undifferentiated point? Its future is not determined from
within, but from without - it is subject to accidents, but not real
development of its own.
But free software is not undifferentiated, and the
rms-esr 'line' is only one of many aspects. In some ways some of the BSD
and Perl people could be considered to the 'left' of rms; or at least they
see themselves as the true defenders of freedom against the 'dictatorial'
gpl. There is a technocratic theme running through much of free software
though rarely explicit (I guess Bruce Perens would be the nearest to a
spokesman for this). There are differences over tactics in relating to the
surrounding capitalist society. There are differences over development
style (on this plane m.E. esr would be to the left of rms). As a
'keimform' free software has many many internal differences, it is not
undifferentiated. Any of these tendencies may finally be stronger than the
others, and what the 'keimform' develops into will depend partly on the
relation between these tendencies and how they evolve. But all the
tendencies, not only the FSF, are part of it.
None of this is anything like a biological 'keimform', so why is there no
word for the social equivalent?
On the other hand, there are already visible some features
common to all tendencies. One in particular (which I don't much like!) is
the way in which politics is hidden. Just as in the middle ages politics
was not explicit, but had to be expressed indirectly through religion, the
political discussions of free software seem to have to take place in a
disguised form, through positions on licenses. Hopefully this will no
longer be true once capitalism has gone ;-)
Last week (9 days ago) Glatz wrote:
Vielleicht bietet Freie Software aber auch beträchtliche
Handlungsmöglichkeiten für eine postkapitalistische Gesellschaft, die
keineswegs herrschaftsfrei ist, sondern eine neue Art quasipersonaler
Abhängigkeiten von Technokratien hervorbringt.
Kann eine Technokratie im engeren Sinne nicht nur dann bestehen, wenn
das Wissen fein säuberlich weggeschlossen und nur den Technokraten
zugänglich gemacht wird? Ist es nicht ein ganz entscheidender Witz an
Freier Software, daß jedeR, die sich ein bißchen mit der Technik
auskennt, aufgrund der offenliegenden Quellen ausrufen kann: "Der
Kaiser ist nackt!"? Schwierige Bedingungen für eine Technokratie m.E.
I don't think this is so easy to dismiss as a possible perversion of the
'gpl-gesellschaft'. Certainly there are many people who write to Slashdot
or Kuro5hin (and I presume, the German equivalents) who assume that
because they have technical knowledge they
are entitled to decide on other issues in people lives. Bruce Perens'
(now defunct) Technocrat.net was a failed attempt to find ways for
technical people to influence US government decisions directly, and
everyone involved seemed to feel it natural that people with technical
knowledge should have more influence than 'ordinary' voters. And
there does seem a tendency for free software people to form a hierarchy
in levels of skill which is usually expressed in terms of apprentices,
journeyman, masters, and wizards (eg advogato.org). If this were
carried over to the gpl-society, then how would the life of an apprentice
compare with the life of a wizard? Or the person who can't even become
an apprentice?
Even in our conversations in this list, people have said that industrial
production will become a simple appendage to production of information in
the new society, just as agriculture became an appendage to industry
in capitalism - with the implication that what happens to people currently
working in industrial production is not a problem, since any problems
will have been solved after the 'transition'. This also seems a rather
technocratic attitude to me. What happens to people who don't want to
(or can't) program, or create information of other kinds? And how
will you ever get rid of capitalism without them? ;-) Is there any
guarantee that the gardener or the cook will have equal rights
with the programmer or the nanotechnologist in the gpl-gesellschaft?
Where do these guarantees come from?
I'm not really feeling so negative as this sounds!
Graham
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