Some replies follow<br><br><br>>Date: Thu, 9 Jul 2009 16:01:49 -0400<br>>From: "Dean, Jodi" <<a href="mailto:JDEAN@hws.edu">JDEAN@hws.edu</a>><br>>Subject: Re: [iDC] "recursive publics"<br>
>To: Christopher Kelty <<a href="mailto:ckelty@gmail.com">ckelty@gmail.com</a>>, Trebor Scholz<br>> <<a href="mailto:scholzt@newschool.edu">scholzt@newschool.edu</a>>, "<a href="mailto:idc@mailman.thing.net">idc@mailman.thing.net</a>"<br>
> <<a href="mailto:idc@mailman.thing.net">idc@mailman.thing.net</a>><br>>Message-ID:<br> > <<a href="mailto:A9CB20B2E922894AB91C979CE39066F5F5E14C0694@EXMAIL.hws.edu">A9CB20B2E922894AB91C979CE39066F5F5E14C0694@EXMAIL.hws.edu</a>><br>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset="Windows-1252"<br><br><br>>I have a question about 'recursive publics.' Here is an excerpt from the interview with Geert Lovink. (The cases are Debian and Ubuntu). Chris says:<br>
<br>>The concept of a recursive public was my way of articulating the significance of these pure forms, not just the conditions of their existence.<br>>And that significance is<br><br>>1) that they treat technical infrastructure and decisions about its design as political through and through, as far down the ?recursive? stack of technical layers as possible and<br>
<br>>2) they do so in order to maintain the possibility not only of an authentic public sphere that they inhabit, but the possibility of the emergence of publics oppositional to themselves, and to those that emerge, and so on.<br>
<br>>Whether or not people take advantage of these publics to develop counter-hegemonic discourses and new political powers is uncertain, it?s not implied by the form of the technology, but it is enabled by it.<br><br>
<br>>It seems to me that characteristic 1 restricts the notion of recursive public to the reflections of technicians and experts, that is, to expert debates about design (which could be<br>>about laws as well as protocols or roads.<br>
<br>This is true in the way that 1 is described above. I think the focus on technicians is reflective of the current environment within which "recursive public" behavior is currently usually observed. People can socially negotiate, and also "stigmergically" collaborate (<a href="http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0605/03-elliott.php">http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0605/03-elliott.php</a>) around sets of standards if they have a basic co-constructed language around which to organize those standards, social norms, etc. Right now it just so happens that technical realms already have some form, or forms of co-constructed language readily available (for those that understand it).<br>
<br>This does not limit the phenomenon to areas that require technical expertise. What is required fundamentally is trust, plus shared understanding. We could pursue any human activity in a so-called "recursive public" fashion, if we found a way to make co-construction of language, standards and mutually agreed-upon social norms part of core operating processes. <br>
<br>> To this extent, 'public' means 'group of experts talking about the conditions of talking.' What makes characteristic 2 connect with<br>>characteristic 1 (or is the combination contingent?)? It seems to me that characteristic 2 is a statement about politics--basically, politics designates the impossibility of closing<br>
>off a sphere, of preventing the emergence of opposition, of eliminating closure, or completely stifling resistance, etc. So, there really isn't anything to maintain--unless one wants<br>>to say that this maintenance has to take a specific form (say, non violent but even that is impossible to maintain).<br>
<br>Another way to say #2 is that there is a byproduct of pooling and sharing creative output, and creating rules that allow others to copy and re-use, and extend creative output. The byproduct consists of a right of any one participant in the current scheme to "leave", to stop participation. Another by product consists of any one participant's right to create "fork" of your project, to rebuild and refashion to meet emerging needs. <br>
<br>Now, the "recursive public" could also choose to make itself inherently adaptive, by arranging processes, social norms, and conventions in a way that allow for atomization down to the individual, and interoperability of any output of any one individual with uptake/input of any other. But maybe that is a wholly different topic? ;-) )<br>
<br><br><br><br><br><br><br>>Can you also say something about how it is the case that markets and publics are basically indistinguishable in your view. Doesn't this lead to the view that anything that is good<br>>for the market is good for the public?<br>
<br>>Jodi<br><br><br>______________________________<br>__________<br>>From: <a href="mailto:idc-bounces@mailman.thing.net">idc-bounces@mailman.thing.net</a> [<a href="mailto:idc-bounces@mailman.thing.net">idc-bounces@mailman.thing.net</a>] On Behalf Of Christopher Kelty [<a href="mailto:ckelty@gmail.com">ckelty@gmail.com</a>]<br>
>Sent: Wednesday, July 08, 2009 3:23 PM<br>>To: Trebor Scholz; <a href="mailto:idc@mailman.thing.net">idc@mailman.thing.net</a><br>>Subject: Re: [iDC] "recursive publics"<br><br>>On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 6:12 AM, Trebor Scholz <<a href="mailto:scholzt@newschool.edu">scholzt@newschool.edu</a><mailto:<a href="mailto:scholzt@newschool.edu">scholzt@newschool.edu</a>>> wrote:<br>
<br>>2. Infrastructure. The thread about data centers struck a nerve. Free Software is a creature of the era of the PC and the widely distributed (in the sense of not-centralized) Internet. It is not a creature >of the heavily concentrated data center, massively clustered "cloud" computing era we are now living in. This is important to me, because whatever the priniciples of free software are, they now confront >changed technical conditions of massive concentration and control at a particular layer of the infrastructure. <br>
<br>The technical potential, the possibility to alleviate this situation exists now. The situation literally is that because these concetrated systems do not currently exert the full potential of their ability to control, they are not seen as an obstacle relatively free flow within the system.<br>
<br>Since the technical potential, and barrier to entry are now very low for the decentralization of these systems, when concetrated systems present themselves as a barrier, you will generally see the network of people move into a more distributed set of processes. <br>
<br><br>>So in terms of recursivity, one can have Free software on the desktop, or on a mobile device, and one can have free software operating systems running the servers in a cluster, but it is much harder >to have a Free Software "cloud" system. Web services and cloud computing could be created in a Free Software-inspired manner, (see <a href="http://autonomo.us/">http://autonomo.us/</a> for dicussions of just this problem) but >the reality of the situation is that Americans seem to love Really Huge Shit, and so the tendency is towards Google and Facebook and their hundreds of Millions of users and hundreds of thousands of >servers since it feels big, solid and fundable, like a natural resource. This sort of sucks when we are talking about Facebook and its exploitation of your data to sell advertising... but where it really >sucks, in my opinion, is in healthcare and in science, where it's clear that the concentration of data+control leads to badnesses of all sorts. But that would be a new thread :)<br>
<br><br>I think it is *this* thread. <br><br>Americans love Really Huge Shit because the systems we have created around ourselves on all scales are optimized for a Really Huge Shit-way of solving problems. This way of solving problems is now collapsing in many ways. The part of America that I am in (Michigan) happens to be at the cutting edge of this collapse (or at least in a tie with California). This collapse is spurring an emergence of exploration towards localized production of the majority of basic existential needs. You will see more and more of this if you are not seeing it already.<br>
<br>The conceptualization/world view that is being discussed here as "recursive publics" is extending itself in different ways into every sphere of operation in the US. Students of Complex Systems theory will recognize that change tends to begin on localized scales, especially in human systems. So, if you watch for signals on the *local* scales, and add them up, you will see something emerging which may very well be far, far more *important* than Google and Facebook, or current health care providers, or the infrastructure they are creating.<br>
<br>The more that people discover useful ways to pool and share, and co-construct language/shared meaning and conventions on smaller local scales, the closer you are to seeing the sun set on large and unwieldy systems, no matter how entrenched and immovable they may seem right now.<br>
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