I don't agree that this question is flamebait-y, or that it shows a
lack of clear thinking. It's perfectly consistent with lots of
research on self-organization and distributed communities. See Shirky
and especially Weinberger.
Asheesh is right that "disorder" needs a more stable definition in
this thesis. In a lot of cases open culture is simply synonymous with
counter-culture—that is one kind of disorder. A different kind of
disorder is visible when there are no clear organizational structures
or hierarchies. SFC is a pretty good example of this, since it's
pretty autonomous.
Yet as Asheesh says, some of these communities have a LOT of self-
imposed order. Take one look at the insane bureaucracy at Wikipedia;
does that self-imposed order help the project, or does it make
Wikipedia less dynamic and flexible? In the Wikipedia case, there's
arguably a SURPLUS of order. It becomes harder to make contributions
to a project when it becomes so institutionalized. In that sense, it's
easy to argue that "disorder" can be a major source of energy.
I can get behind Christian's basic idea. Without condoning piracy, you
have to admit like a super-distribution system like BitTorrent is
incredibly efficient and innovative, and also impossible to do
legitimately. All innovations are born on the edges of legitimacy—when
Google started, sysadmins all over the world were complaining to the
Stanford computer lab from which the first Google crawler was leaching
copies of every resource on their servers. It just seemed wrong. Today
the legitimacy of search engines and indexing is beyond dispute.
-Ben
On Feb 26, 2010, at 12:37 AM, Asheesh Laroia wrote:
On Wed, 10 Feb 2010, Christian Villum wrote:
Science question: I am researching disorder in open culture (open
culture defined as referring to the actors, practices and produce
that constitute an environment of open sharing, prosumerism,
copyright liberalization activism and collaborative development
work).
My hypothesis is that the immanent and ubiquitous disorder
(unstable, autonomous, illegal, unpaid and irregular practices) is
a most significant part of what makes open culture vibrant,
dynamic, innovative, productive and even at times what makes it
competitive (compared to similar conventional/proprietary/
controlled/corporate practices). In other words, that this disorder
is a strength in the open culture, not a flaw. Do you agree?
Disagree? Why and why not?
Secondly, I am looking for particular examples from open culture
where disorder is appearant.
So this question is pretty flamebait-y for FC-Discuss, which
generally stays on the "legal" side rather than the illegal.
But a few thoughts:
* Windows Mobile and Apple iPhone hacking groups seem to relish
legal uncertainty of their position. I think that having a *fight*
really helps these groups gather enthusiasm.
* "Irregular" practices could mean either (a) rapidly-changing or
(b) unusual. If it means (b) then it's only "irregular" from your
perspective. For example, IRC chat is considered "irregular" by most
Internet users these days. Yes, Free Software geeks take some pride
in their use of a historic but today-obscure protocol.
* Your willingenss to call "unpaid" work evidence of "disorder" is
strange, at best.
Take a look at the emergence of freeculture.org chapters,
Hackerspaces, the co-working groups, and the Maker community and
you'll see that the human beings who participate in open culture
find order useful. It's a balancing act. Check out the history of
Students for Free Culture. It started out as ad-hoc and disorderly
(even possibly illegal -- we won OPG v. Diebold, but we could have
lost the case). Today it's so institutionalized we have sponsorship
and (I think) a legal entity. There are efficiencies that
organization can provide, and open culture groups are no exception.
The Internet itself is "disorderly", but it appears calm to users.
You only see the disorder when (for example) an ISP in Pakistan
breaks YouTube for much of the rest of the world by fiddling with
the routing tables the whole world uses. (see http://blogs.zdnet.com/threatchaos/?p=548
and http://www.circleid.com/posts/82258_pakistan_hijacks_youtube_closer_look
)
Generally, I think your question doesn't show clear thinking or good
understanding of the communities we'd call open culture ones. That,
or it's bizarrely vague. The answer lies in the specifics and your
perspective.
But there are some thoughts.
-- Asheesh.
--
All most people want is a little more than they'll ever get.
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