[ox] FWD: The Architecture of Information...
- From: "Kurt Werner P rtner" <apynch2 icqmail.com>
- Date: Sun, 21 Sep 2003 04:16:25 -0700 (PDT)
The Architecture of Information: Open Source Software
and Tactical Poststructuralist Anarchism
Michael Truscello
University of Waterloo
novel_t rogers.com
© 2003 Michael Truscello.
All rights reserved.
Introduction
1. The traces of power in the network society are
equally located in the architecture of bricks and
mortar and the architecture of information, the
discursive practices that constitute the coding of
network topologies. This paper examines the discourse
of computer programming through Eric Raymond's
ethnographical account of the Open Source software
developmental model. Raymond's Open Source software
manifesto, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" (hereafter,
"CatB"), the infamous text that inspired Netscape to
release the source code for its Web browser in 1998 in
an attempt to compete with Microsoft's Internet
Explorer, differentiates Open Source software
development, which is figured as nonlinear and
self-organizing, from Closed Source, which is
represented as hierarchical and authoritarian. The
Open Source model has been characterized by some as
representing a liberatory politics for the information
age. Open Source, as represented in the work of
Raymond, is a tactical political philosophy whose
central architectural metaphors--the bazaar, and its
supplementary term, the cathedral--share theoretical
homologies with anarchistic poststructuralist
statements by Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Lebbeus
Woods, and Hakim Bey. The intent of this essay is to
examine points of generative convergence between the
history and philosophy of software development and
certain proponents of poststructuralist thought. In
doing so, I wish to initiate a cultural analysis of
the historically situated discourse that shapes
software development, the texts and practices that
inform the coding of the architecture of information.
Raymond's bazaar shares theoretical homologies with
Deleuze's modulations, Woods's freespaces and
heterarchic societies, and Bey's Temporary Autonomous
Zone, but it is in the figure of the programmer
especially that the intersecting discourses of
electronic and concrete spaces converge and the
inescapably cultural base of technology emerges.[1]
The bazaar programmer loses the distinction of
"developer" and becomes a "co-developer," dissolving
the categorical distinction between those who code and
those for whom there is a Code.
...continues:
<http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/pmc/current.issue/13.3truscello.html>
kwp
---------------------------------------------------------
Melden Sie sich bei ICQ an, und Sie erhalten kostenlos ein E-Mail-Konto bei www.icq.com
________________________________
Web-Site: http://www.oekonux.de/
Organisation: projekt oekonux.de