Comments on
Chapter 1: Geeks and Recursive Publics
Doesn’t the “background” described in paragraph 47 fall away for geeks/hackers? They were working on the periphery and they knew it. They embraced their uncharted terrain. So wouldn’t this lead them to divorce themselves from the background of other social narratives they know?
I wondering about the imagination involved in the recursive publics as you describe it. To what extent is this imagination required of the hackers – must they merely believe in the order of the public, or must they have a detailed and winding picture of this public so that they can run wild in their own meanderings?
It seems related to another imagination of hackers – that of the “normal.” Since hackers don’t display themselves in groups publicly, they must imagine the authority they are subculturally trying to subvert. How is this imagination related to the one necessary for a successful recursive public?
This idea of becoming lost in the inundation of “denizens” online reminds me of a person who finds a great band only to get lost in confusion when the band makes it “big” – they develop a contempt for the “mainstream” like the underground hackers did. So my question is about unpacking the relationship between the geeks and these people who actually didn’t understand how the Internet worked. If it’s true that an end-user’s obliviousness about how the medium works means that it works seamlessly, wouldn’t this strengthen the bonds between geeks/hackers since they became the very few who actually wanted to understand it?
The word “geek” seems to be one that grows more acceptable as life goes on. That is, I’m wondering how willing the young “geeks” are to adopt this identification. To me, “geek” signifies being outside the norm in a bad way while “hacker” might be more appealing to young people for the same connotative reasons you described.
Winchester is not on the Charles River, and this commenter is unaware of any Indian restaurants there. Waltham is on the Charles, has some good Indian restaurants, and from Boston you’d more likely meander through Cambridge streets. I’d suggest Waltham is probably the town holding the Indian restaurant.
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[...] and software, its legal status and the licenses and regulations that govern it.1 Footnotes 1. http://twobits.net/discuss/chapter1/15 page_revision: 4, last_edited: 1252903763|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z (%O ago) edittags history files [...]
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@Lisa: this is a great question with various answers. the first is that ‘recursive public’ was intended to characterize free software first, and the internet as a kind of milieu in which recursive publics might form. Definitions of the ‘public sphere’ face a very similar challenge, which is that not everyone is or wants to be in the public, and yet those publics have to deal with the fact that there are lots of other people who are also citizens. Indeed this may point to one of the core problems of egalitarian democracy, which is that we are not all equal all of the time. Not everyone is or wants to be a Free Software geek… does that mean they shouldn’t have a say in how technologies are configured? In a way, Free Software answers ‘yes’–but only because it values a mode of interaction that is directly experimental and pragmatic over one that is consensus-oriented and egalitarian.
A different way to respond is to insist that ‘geek’ is not a culture, it is a mode or relationship to technology. One can adopt it or not (it’s obviously hard work, but the point of the concept is that it is open and accessible to anyone, even if it is not equally easy for everyone to do so). What this means is that one cannot be “other” to geek culture, one can only insist on other modes or relations to technology (e.g. luddite, techno-pagan mystic, consumer), and my reasoning in the case of Free Software is that it is perhaps the most “free” relation to technology of the available modes.
I find the idea of a recursive public a very clever way of understanding the nature of committed internet users. My question is this: when working through your definition of a recursive public, what other ideas came to mind? How did this definition of a recursive public benefit your research? In other words, What insights did this definition reveal to you that might not have been evident from a different definition? I am interested in this topic because the internet has such a varied multitude of users; is it affected by the users who aren’t part of the ‘geek’ culture? If the recursive public is defined by their commitment to the infrastructure with which their public communicates, isn’t the influence of others who engage with the infrastructure a presence to be reckoned with?
the term has been applied by others… it isn’t that peculiar that I use it this way (Gregory Bateson, for instance, was very fond of the concept in his understanding of Mind). Nonetheless, it’s true that applying it to “publics” or public spheres is both something that programmers or geeks would see as a weird use of the term and something that political theorists interested in Habermas seem to find off-putting. Mission accomplished I say 
I’m not sure why it seems paradoxical though… say more? As I say in the book, it’s a diagnostic concept, not a thing in the world. If it helps make sense of the way a particular public is organized (through technology, in layered “recursive” levels of concern) then it has done its job. If it doesn’t, there is no point in searching for examples of it everywhere. Free Software and the people who build it and modulate it are the object of the study, “recursive public” is the concept that I offered to make sense of that.
Of course there may well be other examples of recursive publics, and I have a couple of examples lined up that fit the bill… so if the concept helps pick out features of other groups (say, printers in 17th century England– pace Adrian Johns), then it is useful for making distinctions… but that doesn’t mean both groups are the same…
they do, though I won’t venture a guess as to how “geek” is translated into the various different languages–it is no more or less culturally specific than free software itself. You are right that it is a word that straddles native and observer categories, that’s a nice way of putting it. This is also a way to understand how people who might occasionally think of themselves (or refer to themselves) as geeks do so in a manner that is distanced and self-regarding, and not always a label that clearly indicates who they are. A proper linguistic anthropological analysis of the term geek (and its semantic field, nerd, dork, techie, etc.) would reveal some of this more clearly I think. For my purpsoses, geek is just a way of opening the door–any body who wants to think of themselves as a geek might consider themselves part of the world of Free Software and Free Culture.
The use of the word recursive seems similar to that of the word geek, in the sense that it is a concept that is closely tied to the activities and ideas of the people that are described, yet it is used in a way that is specific to this book and its author. Bridging the gap between ideology and materiality is especially useful in this context, but the us of the plural recursive publics seems paradoxical. How do we know if a new recursive public has emerged, or if a recursive public is simply a succession of itself?
The question that immediately struck me when reading about the use of the word “geek” is whether or not the people in Germany and Bangalore used the same word to describe themselves. I think this especially relevant because many of the people described in the book speak multiple languages, and some are described as polymaths. The word geek seems to straddle the divide between a “native” and an “observer” category, even though it’s clear this is an inherently problematic distinction.
While Lessig asserts correctly IMO that the code is law, so no one can close the internet, since it’s a decentralized network coded to bypass barriers at the level of the protocol (TCP/IP), it still seems very hard that the process would be guided by any regulation.
First because there is no government that can be regarded as absolute controller of the net, but second and most important, because technology is always steps further ahead than law. Tech is on speed, while law is on pot.
yes it is… and thank you, JES, for the correction, I removed the duplication. The Comment Press software is a bit buggy, and no one seems to be maintaining it anymore… so the issues with highlighting and other thinsg are hard to fix.
Is the comment highlighting off-by-one? Click on the comment balloon for p2, but p1 is highlighted in my browser (FF3).
Anyway, p2 seems to have a big ‘copypasto’:
s/In this chapter I describe, ethnographically, the diverse, dispersed, and as an exemplary instance of a recursive public and as a set of practices that allow such publics to expand and spread.//
Is this the right place for such trivial ‘modulations’?
a mistake? bah! No such thing in my book!
(thanks, I fixed it.)
Paragraphs 64 and 65 have the same text. This must be a mistake.
2nd post!! (on this P). I am looking — delightfully looking — forward to reading the book so as to be able to modulate. When I think about how it will fit in, I will see how assigning the book and student modulation assignments might work. BUT, I’m getting greedy and I’m not sure they deserve to modulate such a rocking anthropology book.
You are supposed to yell “First Post!”
but thanks for thinking of me here.
I am commenting on my own book in the absense of any readers. Is that recursion?
