[tt] two bits: the cultural signficance of free software

[Eugen Leitl]

http://twobits.net/2008/06/06/its-a-book-two-bits/

from Savage Minds…

So I have an announcement: I have written, and published, A Book. I know that
Savage Minds readers harbor the suspicion that we are all just doing this gig
until someone pulls the curtain back and we have to dust off our barista
aprons and work for a living, but I am actually in this for the long haul…
The book is called Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software, and
it is produced by the punkrockingest press ever, Duke University Press. It is
now available for purchase, for download and for derivation and remixing. Two
Bits Cover

I am extremely happy to finally be able to announce its arrival. I’m also
happy to announce that it is part of a series edited by Michael M.J. Fischer
and Joe Dumit called “Experimental Futures” of which Jeff Juris’ excellent
book Networking Futures: The Movements against Corporate Globalization is
also a part. And as well to thank HASTAC for helping out in its publication
and in marketing it as well.

Two Bits has taken a long time, and it’s a better book for that. In some
ways, it is untimely: the moment of Free Software is over– both the media and
many of the scholars who focused so much attention on it starting in about
2000 seem to have moved on to some other next big thing. This is a shame, but
predictable given the drive for novelty and for being first in academia. But
I think (and I will throw modesty to the wind here) that anthropology has a
tack on such things that is slower, more coherent, and more concerned with a
certain precision in charting historical changes. I like to think that the
book isn’t only about free software, but an anthropology of knowledge
circulation more generally, and I hope that it interests even those who are
too cool for old school.

Obviously I hope that others think the same thing, and I expect people to
read it in light of the current peak of interest in web 2.0, social
networking and internet celebrities, or whatever, which might be usefully
re-thought through the lens of Free Software. And maybe it might just
convince a few people, scholars especially, that the moment of Free Software
is definitely not over, and that there is some really incredible scholarship
out there by people like Gabriella Coleman, Matt Ratto, Shay David, Casey
O’Donell, Jelena Karanovic, Anita Chan, Samir Chopra and Scott Dexter, Jenny
Cool, Allison Fish, David Hakken and Karl Hakken, Jeff Juris (my labelmate!),
Bernhard Krieger, Karim Lakhani, James Leach, Siobhan O’Mahoney, Greg Vetter
and many others on these topics. Like the scholarship emerging on gaming
(with Rex representing), that on Free Software constitutes a major locus of
scholarly concern and questioning that should be the basis for understanding
much of the recent past and near future.

Having been through the process of publishing a book, like oneman, I wish we
could publish our books faster, and try to merge some of the timely but
ill-considered insight of the blog-form with the deliberate and peer-reviewed
caution of the book-form… but I’m nonetheless a committed modernist in that I
think the book-form has a quality that no other form of communication has,
and it has taken centuries for that quality to develop. Nonetheless, nothing
lasts forever, and since this is a book about software, there are a few
special things that I want readers to know about this book:

    * the book is licensed under a Creative Commons (by-nc-sa) license, and
is therefore freely available for circulation and modulation. Duke generously
permitted me to do this both because I (and the audiences of the book) expect
it, and also because I think it is a good experiment (I’d have preferred to
drop the non-commercial restriction, but it’s obviously understandable why
Duke might want it). I’m convinced, the way Cory Doctorow is, that we can
sell books and give them away. And though it is impossible to know how many
copies the book might have sold without this decision, I’m convinced it will
sell as many and more (and for those wondering, the reasonable expectations
in our little corner of the world are more on the order of one or two
thousand, not tens or hundreds of thousands in Doctorow’s case). For me, as a
teacher and a scholar, openly licensing the book is primarily a way of
getting it in front of people the way it used to get in front of you in a
bookstore. If you are serious about the book, you’ll probably buy it, but if
you aren’t you might a) read a bit anyways, and b) not be angry that you
bought it and don’t like it. In either case: bottoms up to Duke University
Press for taking the risk.

    * The book is online in pdf form, but I also created a site using the
Institute for The Future of The Book’s “comment press” template for Word
Press. I think the IFB is the bionic bees knees, and I’m keen to see people
use this version as a place to discuss the book, both as individual readers,
and for classes (btw, Jonathan Zittrain’s book is also in IFB format, and
they would make great reading together… hint hint to those organizing reading
circles). I like to think that this is a first step towards producing living
books, books that modify and modulate, books that respond and transform, but
without sacrificing the kinds of permanence and scholarly apparatus that we
value. Thanks in no small part to some work by people at Achorn International
(Joel Ibarra) and IFB, the online version is correlated with the print
version by page number, and includes all the notes and references as well.
Adding and updating links is also something that this renders possible.

    * The book is beautiful. Duke (and in particular Cherie Westmoreland) did
a fantastic job. The font is an open source font (Charis SIL), the cover is
combination of a painting from the Boston Public Library by the 19th century
symbolist painter Pierre Puvis de Chavannes depicting the telegraph (and
called colloquially “Good News, Bad News”) and a Hollerith punch card. And
here’s a reason to choose a short title: the spine has the title written
perpendicular to, not parallel with the length of the book. Minor, I know,
but how cool is that?

    * Last but not least, I’ve been thinking about the meaning of “re-mixing”
a scholarly work. Various works on the Internet and free software have
experimented with this… Lessig’s Code V2, Benkler’s Wealth of Nations as well
as others, scholarly and not. However, I’m not so sure it’s clear what
remixing means in scholarly terms. I’d love it if people want to translate
parts of it, or transform it for other media (anyone interested in doing a
version for the Wii contact me immediately), but those are explorations of
the form, and not the content of the book… so what would remixing scholarly
work really mean? One thing I hope it means, in the social and human sciences
especially, is that we contribute to a shared collection of conceptual tools
that are refined by confrontation with empirical reality. Two Bits contains a
couple such concepts (recursive publics, usable pasts) as well as
contributing more generally to research on the public sphere, on the meaning
of making things and making things public, as well as a substantive field of
work focusing on software, networks, geeks, hackers, entrepreneurs,
intellectual property and so forth. So one key aspect of the future of this
book is a project I’m calling “Modulations” for short, which is an attempt to
think about not just these concepts and problems in particular, but the modes
and manners in which we interact as scholars around the development,
refinement and co-ownership of such concepts. I don’t really know what this
means yet, but I’m looking for anyone with ideas.