Too many topics, too little time

This paper presents the theory that software code and the practice of coding is a system of communication above and beyond the code itself. It posits that the language and practices of coding are a method that allows knowledge and culture to move from one cultural milieu to another, and creates through that movement, a transnational coding culture that is built upon the shared experiences and understandings that surround coding practices. By analyzing the modes of cultural transmission available to a particular group of programmers that use the internet extensively, I show that these modes tend to discipline and educate, and slowly indoctrinate newer members into the community of knowledge that embodies this transnational class. This power of code to bridge and then hybridize cultures is significant in that it is highly formalized and rigorous, and thus provides a stable platform for coding expertise to transition, however, as we will see coding expertise is not all that becomes hybridized.

In this paper, I argue that Information Schools are on the cusp of a very difficult transition. The ubiquity of information is pervading previously disciplinary endeavors. Not only is computing found in all disciplines, both in general use, but also in fields such as Humanities computing, Social Science computing/E-Social Science, Biological systems computing, but so is information and information technology, with parallel fields. Those fields are traditionally interdisciplinary in nature, in which people use techniques, methods, and knowledges from different fields and use them to produce new knowledge. A transdisciplinary field is different, it’s object of study cannot be captured by interdisciplinary techniques, It requires the development of new foundations, such as those found in informational concepts and models. Transdisciplinary fields are ones in which the globality of the object cannot be fully understood from any single disciplinary or interdisciplinary perspective. The conceptual and thus linguistic tools for understanding

The transdisciplinary opportunities of information science and technology were noted before, (Lyotard). They were a popular in certain optimistic and utopian discourse from the 1970’s and 1980’s, until the popularization and formalization of commodity computing and specialized tools transformed many viewpoints away. The discourse of transdisciplinary informatics still exists in the background of many discussions. As informatics has pervaded other disciplines with the growing number of hobbyists and hackers, a new set of institutional transformations is arising. This institutional transformation could have significant effects on information schools, either opening up a world of opportunity or isolate them

Internet Research is research that investigates the way individuals, communities, and nations, use computer network technologies and the interconnections those technologies provide in their everyday lives as parents, researchers, workers, entertainers, institutions, governments or whatever they were, are or are becoming. It is an expansive field for research and has become accepted Since its first Internet Research conference in 2000, the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) has produced a solid body of research, exemplified in its Research Annual and numerous publications.This presentation will provide an overview of several trends and methods within the field of internet research as exemplified by the AoIR’s first five conferences, and extrapolates some future directions for research based on those trends and methods. Some of the specific trends that will be discussed are: the internationalization of collaborative internet research, the development of an understanding of community norms and self-governance of internet-based organizations, and the needs for ethical internet based research. Some of the methods that will be introduced will be qualitative research, ethnographic research, community and/or network modeling, and mixed methodology internet research. These trends and methods in internet research point toward a future in which ethical, transdisciplinary research, pursued across national boundaries will become the core of the major projects for internet research.

Founded in Bataille’s theory of the general economy as descriptive of a general theory of organizations, this paper relates Bataille’s conceptions of knowledge and non-knowledge to his conception of evil in order to reconstruct the importance of excess to the production of subjectivities, both good and evil, in organizations. In reading contemporary organizational thought through the body of Bataille’s works, I find that Bataille provides us with several innovative ways of understanding the organization as an aspect of society. In On Nietzsche, Bataille locates evil as symbolized through the negation of Christ, a component of good, and a necessary component to human life in the forms of egotism and freedom. These constructions of evil compliment the ecological model of production found in the Accursed Share in that evil functions as part of the Western model of subjectivity, and thus is fixed by both the human and non-human elements into its representations of knowledge and non-knowledge. The idea that the production of excess in organizations, not just excess commodity, but also excess subjectivity is the idea that unites the general economy to the production of evil because evil arises both from the overproduction of symbols and the inadequate faculties of interpretation to confront the interpretations. of those symbols. This exasperation of the organization’s capacity to interpret the world in which they exist produces non-knowledge, and opens up the space for the production of evil. Thus the logic of my argument reduces to:

Organizations produce subjectivities, commodities, knowledges, and non-knowledges as parts of symbolic systems.

In a general commodity, production of subjectivities is the production of knowledges and non-knowledges in excess.

The overproduction of symbols in the system combined with a differential production of subjectivities creates a critical space for non-knowledge, or the unknowable to exist.

As parts non-knowledge become othered and alienated they enter the realm of the individual’s ego or freedom.

When individuals act upon those non-knowledges in organizations, they become the outsider, or the evil from within the organization.

Thus the overproduction or excess production of symbolic systems creates evil.

In conclusion, this Bataille-based thesis is comparable to Baudrillard’s argument about the origin of evil in society, as found in the Transparency of Evil. Thus, we can see the need to build more deeply into the realm of semiology in order to understand the functioning of evil in organizations.

Towards Archiving a Generative Culture: the Australian Creative Resources Online project. This paper explores the possibilities of moving beyond the archiving of digital objects as fixed and unchanging reference points for culture and demonstrates that we can archive those cultural objects but we must also archive the mutations that cultural objects go through as they become new objects over time. Digitization of cultural objects creates a new source of mutability and a new location to generate cultural meanings through the combination, reinvention and serialized appropriation of cultural objects in their ever changing digital milieu. An object then is really fixed in place when it is archived, but it is a living document both of the digital and cultural world. It is not enough then, to just create the ‘archival copy’ with its manifold copies of the digital object, because people will manipulate it, will inscribe it with new meanings, with those meanings’ new points of negotiation, and new interpretations. These new meanings and the changes that occur to the objects over time need to be traced in order for the original meaning to be preserved in relation to the newer meanings. Without the documentation of change, the objects that we digitally archive lose meanings, much like when you move a document from its original context in a paper archive and place it in another context. Without documenting the change in the paper document, you change the meanings both of it, and those knowledges that stand in relation to it. In this paper, I am showing the beta copy of a database engine that is made to track and follow those changes.

In the ACRO project, we archiving the digital detritus of film, photographic, and musical production with an eye to their reuse. The purpose is to provide the common open foundation for future high quality production of cultural objects. We are forced to confront the problem of both derivative, remixed, and novel uses of digital objects. Objects that in fact are in a constant state of multiple use, and thus their meanings are changing in relation to each other. In order to resolve this, we are turning to socially constructed ontologies in order to both track changes over time, so authors can tell us that their contribution is a derivative of another contribution, but also to tag or label these new contributions more thoroughly with their own interpretation. Allowing users to both tag, to discuss and to maintain a glossary of meanings related to their discussion and tagging, allows the ACRO beta to maintain and track the mutations that digital media from within the system. By using microformat data in relation to user constructed data, we hope to operate in parallel relation to the growing standards in the cultural object arena, mapping the microformat and user constructed data into standards compliant metadata.

In What is Democracy, Alain Touraine presents a theory of the constitutive necessities for a capitalist democracy. This paper argues that Open Source as a property system based in licensing parallels and extends the Touraine’s theory and in that matter enables more fully the theory of equality found there, but it moves the property relationships from those prominent in monopoly capitalism to those prominent in late capitalism. Open source goes beyond the models of equality of nature, or equality of opportunity that constitutes democratic culture and introduces several forms of equality of access, such as an equality of learning, an equality of innovation or creativity. These modes of equality are also foundational to the development of the democratic state. Where the development of proprietary systems, and their institutional technics based in absolutist models of property are perpetuating in monopoly capitalism and centralizing wealth thus promoting economic inequality, they do not provide for the equality of innovation which perpetuates the growth of equality in the state. Touraine promotes education as a primary tool to move toward an equality of access to capital, but in the information age, open source combined with cheap access to computers becomes access and control of the means of production. This moves the possibility of the unification of the conceptualization of the productive act and the democratic act in a very profound way. In this paper, I describe the open source system of property relations as an entryway into the unification of the constitutive requirements of production in the information age with the the constitutive elements of democracy in any age.

“A code is a tool well known to lawyers in the sense of a set of texts which have the force of law”[1]. Digital objects as internet objects are codes in that they are a set of texts that have the force of law, as objects created in the world, but also as as text embedded in a system of conventions. They form a non-arbitrary, yet socially constructed set of goods in the networked world of production.

In this paper, I introduce aspects of the economics of convention as a way of understanding the way that internet based objects operate both in both the real and virtual aspects of our everyday lives. I also introduce the idea that as much as we need to focus on creating internet objects for our real and virtual environments, we also need to participate in the creation of the conventions surrounding those objects. It is those conventions that define the object in social, political, economic, and intellectual space, and these conventions legitimate the continued practice of creating internet objects. The economic and other implications of the internet object in both its real and virtual existence arises out of those conventions. Conventions order the market, but we as engaged creators of internet objects have the opportunity to encode and order the conventions.

The idea of convention in this paper arises out of two fields. The first is the economics of convention(EC), which is closely related to the second which might be termed ‘pragmatic sociology’ which is represented in the French tradition by Latour, Callon, and others.[2] Both fields focus clearly on human actions and considers only the inscriptions of those actions into their whole social world, which is ’socially constructed’ in so far as the construction is discerned by action in the world and in this respect objects in that world exist as intersubjective constructs only when they can be seen to have a relation to actions. Actions have a clear relation to the social, political, ethical, and ontological systems have in the world, because humans structure their actions according to such conventions. Increasingly action oriented concerns are becoming part of the design processes.[3] To understand an individual actor in this world of production, one must start as Storper and Salais do with “… the individual’s interpretive effort, a strong form of action in itself.”[4]

A philosophical definition of a convention is: A regularity R, in the behavior of members of a population P, when they act in a recurrent situation, S, is a convention, if and only if, for each example of S, for the members of P: Each conforms to R Each anticipates that all others will conform to R; Each prefers to conform to R on the condition that others do so. Since S is a problem of coordination, the general conformity to R results in a coordination equilibrium .[5] in [4]

The more common understanding is the way in which things done, or operating agreement through which everyone abides. short, we can understand a convention as a coordinated collective action [4].

We come to know and understand conventions in our everyday lives as we identify, negotiate, and construct them in order to manage our increasingly complex lives. Conventions proceed through time and either become reified in physical structures such as architecture or institutions. Internet objects are very much the in this understanding of convention. They are mutable, but so are other conventions that eventually become real parts of life. Coming to terms with these conventions as part of our social system requires that we act reflexively in respect to their creation.

From this framework we can see how internet objects are interpretable as conventions. Internet objects are defined by their creator/s and then people tend to come to an interpretation of their existence online and off. Because of the architectonics of the conventions of the virtual and real world, internet objects become normal objects in many ways, much like conventions may be come real as objects or as social facts.

Internet objects as code regulate human actions much as regular objects in the real world, until the point in which the conventions no longer regulate, but there are intervening considerations in conventions that transform the way people act. People ‘invest’ in conventions, because the normal operation of a convention increases the overall capacity of the system for participation. That is, because conventions are continually accepted or renegotiated, people tend to accept them because they make existence in the world more efficient. Were we have to renegotiate the internet object at each juncture, the maintenance of the object would quickly become insurmountable. The insight this gives us helps to explain how internet objects become stable social and thus they also become economic conventions over time.

If the idea is for universities to be involved in the development and dissemination of knowledge in the face of the increasingly burdensome intellectual property regimes, then one way to accomplish this goal is to open the systems of knowledge at its point of origination. The argument of this essay is that for development to be successful, open and interpretable archives of knowledge, much like the great libraries of the world, need to be made accessible to the developing world so that they can develop systems that allow culturally situated development of the knowledge that they contain. The current model of knowledge production and distribution in university frequently abstracts significant culturally specific information that grounds the knowledge. In short, much like in Boyle’s day, to gain access to the complete picture of the knowledge represented in a scholarly paper or book, you need to have access to more than the paper itself (Leviathan and the Airpump). You need to have actually been there and observed the knowledge being produced (Science in Action). However the volume of papers and their requisite practices multiply and verify the results of scientific action giving us a body of knowledge that can be interpreted and built upon. However, in the last 25 years the amount of knowledge produced in papers is significantly more than the amount of knowledge that is published, which is significantly more than is openly accessible to people in the developing world.

See the happy idiot
He doesn’t give a damn.
I wish I were an idiot.
My God! Perhaps I am.
from http://www.ernietheattorney.net/ernie_the_attorney/2005/08/happiness_bliss.html

ssh -N -p 22 -c 3des username@example.com -L 10025/localhost/25

This opens up a ssh tunnel which routes all mail sent to port 10025 on my local machine to port 25 on Dreamhost’s server.

You can make this process seamless by (1) generating a SSH key pair [ssh-keygen -t dsa] with no password (just hit return) from you personal computer, (2) copying id_dsa.pub from your personal computer to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys in your dreamhost home folder, then (3) making the above SSH tunnel line a script that automatically runs on login. On my Mac, SSH Tunnel Manager does this last step great: it creates the tunnel on login and the process is completely automatic and transparent.