Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking
lawyer-advocate Lessig; but there are other mechanisms at work, such as the semiotics of translation.
To understand why and how the semiotics of translation matters in the case of free software, Gyan Prakash’s study of science in the Indian colonial era is instructive. While colonial rulers heralded science as a sign of Western reason, ideologically used to justify their presence and undemocratic rule, Prakash shows how this association between despotic rule and technoscientific projects did not determine how others grasped as well as represented the politics of science. Because the sign of science is able to “spill beyond its definition as a body of methods, practices, and experimental knowledge” (Prakash 1999, 7), a cadre of Indian nationalists reenvisioned the meaning of technoscience instead to justify and direct an anticolonial national liberation movement. In other words, the flexibility of the sign of science was an important precondition for the radical redirection of its meaning and the ability of Indian nationalists to take science down a new political path.
The sign of science is not unique in having such semiotic flexibility; the term freedom is loaded with a similar elasticity. Of course, as a number of theorists insist, all language, words, and especially dialogue tend toward a type of indefiniteness, openness, and multiplicity (Bakhtin 1981; Butler 1997; Silverstein 2004; Wittgenstein 1953). But since the sign of freedom (as well as related ideals of liberal enlightenment, such as the public or science) rests atop a trope of universalism, its ambiguity is accentuated, and so is its ability to take on various configurations of meaning (Joyce 2003; Warner2002). Furthermore, since the time of the Enlightenment, freedom has acted as a master trope by which to prop up a vast array of political theories and imaginaries, ranging from anarchism to socialism as well as liberalism (Lakoff 2006; Hardt and Negri 2000), and also underwrites contemporary notions of personhood (Rose 1999).
Drawing on these various insights, we might say that the ideas of free software and freedom are similarly endowed with semiotic surplus and elasticity. The meaning of free software is further specified, although also transformed, as different types of actors—journalists, educators, scientists, artists, lawyers, and businesspeople—have taken the idea or objects of free software to justify new practices. To put it in slightly different terms, F/OSS acts as an icon as well as a transposable set of practices for openness, collaboration, and alternative licensing schemes that are tactically adopted by others to justify divergent political and economic practices and imaginaries. I now present three examples of F/OSS’s wider adoption, each of which has also shifted the ways that many F/OSS developers conceptualize and engage in F/OSS production.
Open-Source Circulation within Capital: IBM
Now a massive multinational corporation, IBM has dominated a wide array of technology-based markets for more than a century. Deriving much of its revenue through the tight control of its vast intellectual property holdings, the company has boasted that it files thousands of patents each year, or up to 75 percent more than the next most active filer. 8 In 2000, IBM started to sell the freely available OS GNU/Linux on its enterprise servers in place of its internally developed proprietary operating system, AIX; this change made big waves in the news.
In 2001, attempting to link its name with the growing surge of popularity for Linux, IBM ran a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign featuring three recognizable icons, the peace symbol, a heart, and Tux the GNU/Linux penguin, that together conveyed the message of “Peace, Love, and Linux.”
Big Blue, as IBM is sometimes called, hired marketing firms to perform guerrilla marketing tactics as part of this ad campaign, such as chalking and spray painting these icons on the sidewalks of several major cities (Kenigsberg 2001).
In this advertising campaign, IBM connected using and buying F/OSS-based enterprise solutions with countercultural ideals of sharing, empowerment, and openness, on the one hand, and market agility and dominance, on the other hand. This campaign drew from an already-established advertising tradition, introduced and perfected by the Apple Computer television commercials of the 1980s that equated computing with personal empowerment and even social revolution.
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