Hacking Capitalism

Book: Johan Söderberg. Hacking Capitalism: The Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) Movement. Routledge, 2007

Description

"The Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) movement demonstrates how labour can self-organise production, and, as is shown by the free operating system GNU/Linux, even compete with some of the worlds largest firms. The book examines the hopes of such thinkers as Friedrich Schiller, Karl Marx, Herbert Marcuse and Antonio Negri, in the light of the recent achievements of the hacker movement. This book is the first to examine a different kind of political activism that consists in the development of technology from below."

Excerpt

"In Linus Torvald's book about the invention of the Linux kernel, he states that hackers have become revolutionaries 'just for fun'. The word 'fun' is here meant to smooth over any leftist conotations from the word 'revolution'. However, the notion of hackers becoming revolutionaries just for fun would have appealed to the eighteenth century poet Friedrich Schiller. Disappointed by the failure of the French Revolution, he sat down to ponder over how to make revolution work better the next time. Friedrich Schiller saw the ‘aesthetic play-drive’ as the primary force which could foster a more wholesome human being, whose maturing would also carry forth and be able to sustain a post-revolutionary aesthetic state. Schiller meant that the aesthetic education of man was necessary to heal the rift within man caused by specialisation:

“[. . .] If man is ever to solve that problem of politics in practice he will have to approach it through the problem of the aesthetic, because it is only through Beauty that man makes his way to Freedom.”

Both adherers and critics of Schiller have pigeonholed him in the tradition of romanticism. It would do Schiller more justice if his words were recovered from the fine arts scene and instead applied to the politics that flow from the ‘beauty of the baud’ and the play with source code in the computer underground. It was this kind of poet that Herbert Marcuse encountered when he begun his investigations into the liberating potential of art and play. Already back in the 1930s Marcuse contrasted aesthetics and play with the instrumentality and drudgery of labour. The argument in Hacking Capitalism is that hackers have invented a new mode of developing technology and organising labour that is subjected to the play-drive in Schiller's and Marcuse's sense. The politics of hackers has only partly to do with resisting copyright, censorship and Digital Rights Management. At its heart, the joyful revolution of free software development consists in the distance it places between doing and the wage labour relation."