Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness

Nathaniel Tkacz

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780226192444
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Few virtues are as celebrated in contemporary culture as openness. Rooted in software culture and carrying more than a whiff of Silicon Valley technical utopianism, openness—of decision-making, data, and organizational structure—is seen as the cure for many problems in politics and business.But what does openness mean, and what would a political theory of openness look like? With Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness, Nathaniel Tkacz uses Wikipedia, the most prominent product of open organization, to analyze the theory and politics of openness in practice—and to break its spell. Through discussions of edit wars, article deletion policies, user access levels, and more, Tkacz enables us to see how the key concepts of openness—including collaboration, ad-hocracy, and the splitting of contested projects through "forking"—play out in reality.The resulting book is the richest critical analysis of openness to date, one that roots media theory in messy reality and thereby helps us move beyond the vaporware promises of digital utopians and take the first steps toward truly understanding what openness does, and does not, have to offer.

1

Open Politics

Most think about these issues of free software, or open source software, as if they were simply questions about the efficiency of coding. Most think about them as if the only issue that this code might raise is whether it is faster, or more robust, or more reliable than closed code. Most think that this is simply a question of efficiency. Most think this, and most are wrong…. I think the issues of open source and free software are fundamental in a free society. I think they are at the core of what we mean by an open society.

LAWRENCE LESSIG (2005, 260)

One approach to understanding the democracy of the multitude, then, is as an open-source society, that is, a society whose source code is revealed so that we all can work collaboratively to solve its bugs and create new, better social programs.

MICHAEL HARDT AND ANTONIO NEGRI (2004, 340)

“The open” has become a master category of political thought. Such is the attraction, but also the ambiguity of openness, that it appears seemingly without tension, without need of clarification or qualification, in writers as diverse as the liberal legal scholar Lawrence Lessig and the post-Marxian duo Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Every political position worth its salt, it seems, must today pledge allegiance to this strange and relatively new political concept. The epigraphs above are indicative of a development that forms the basis of this chapter: the re-emergence and repoliticization of openness in relation to a set of developments specific to the realm of software. In the first epigraph, Lessig is looking back, trying to connect open source and free software to an already existing notion of open politics, the open society. Hardt and Negri—who, it must be said, are a long way from home on this matter—are looking forward, trying to establish a connection between the really existing practices and logic of open source software and their yet-to-be realized “democracy of the multitude.” As does Lessig, I begin this chapter by connecting back, by revisiting a founding figure of open thought, Karl Popper. I trace what might be called the second coming of the open, through debates about open systems and open software in the 1980s and ’90s, to the generalization and proliferation of openness in network cultures evidenced by such notions as open access, open education, and open communities, and, finally, to the reemergence of the open in institutional politics and related writings.

My purpose is not to pin down the meaning of openness, or to moralize this notion, but to trace its proliferation and to consider how it functions in contemporary cultures, in the writings of Popper, and in relation to competing and supporting concepts. Through a reconsideration of the open in the writings of Popper, I finish by outlining some concerns for contemporary proponents of open politics—a task that I consider crucial as the open is increasingly used to “look forward.”

The Open Society

Karl Popper was not the first to write about the concept of openness, or even of the open society. Henri Bergson had already used the term “open society” in his work of moral and political philosophy, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (Bergson 1935). Likewise, Austrian biologist and pioneer of general system theory Ludwig von Bertalanffy had described the living organism as an open system, distinct to the closed systems that characterize machines (von Bertalanffy 1950, 1960). Von Bertalanffy described open (and therefore living) systems as those that maintain themselves through the constant exchange of materials with their environment, a process that also entailed a “change of components” of the system itself (von Bertalanffy 1950, 23). In both these authors we already see developments that have today become commonplace: the conjunction of open and system, or more specifically the emergence of openness as a quality of a system, and the moralization and politicization of open and closed. However, it wasn’t until Popper wrote The Open Society and Its Enemies (1962) while in exile in New Zealand during World War II that the political notion of the open gained a wider resonance.¹

In two volumes Popper rewrites the history of political philosophy, and also lived political conflict, around the concept of openness. He locates the origins of his version of “the Open Society” in the “breakdown of Greek tribalism” (1962, 183), culminating in the Peloponnesian War (circa 431–404 BC) between the Delian League, headed by Athens, and the Peloponnesian League, led by Sparta. Interwoven with this history is a detailed critique of Plato, whose political philosophy Popper argues is strongly marked by these events. For Popper, Plato is the first major proponent of “closed societies” (although he notes Plato’s indebtedness to Hesiod and Heraclitus). Popper describes the war as a pitting of the old tribal form of society, Sparta, against the newly emergent open society of Athens, characterized by its democratic and equalitarian political organization (183).

Plato is depicted as a brilliant but misguided thinker whose experiences of the war (especially the execution of his mentor Socrates) lead him to build a totalitarian and reactionary political philosophy. This philosophy, Popper writes, is built on the principle that virtually all change is bad and society, which is always “in flux,” is therefore in a state of deterioration. In opposition to this state of flux, Plato posits an original ideal form of society existing in ancient history, highly stable and resistant to change, from which the current imperfect society is derived. This original state equates to the theory of forms or ideas that underpins Plato’s philosophical thought: the original tribal society is the ideal, whereas the actually existing society, with all its problems, is the inferior and degraded version of this form. (I leave aside the interesting dilemma of how the perfect form is able to degrade.) In the battle between Athens and Sparta, therefore, the older, “tribal” Spartan social structure is considered more desirable as it is closer to the ideal form, while the Athenian democracy represents radical change and therefore degeneration. It is around this notion of negative change and the ideal ancient Greek tribal form that Plato writes The Republic (1974), and which, Popper reminds us, is more accurately translated as The State. The Republic describes a society where all change is arrested.² The social is organized around three classes—rulers, auxiliaries, and producers—each with highly specific roles. The whole social edifice—education, law, reproductive norms, and so on—is designed to maintain this strict demarcation and rigid order. There is no “crossbreeding” between the classes and social interaction is avoided.

Philosophy, conceived as the perception of ideal forms, emerges in Plato’s thought as the bridging device from the status quo to this ideal state. As the famous “simile of the cave” passage reminds us, Plato posits the philosopher as the only actor able to see true knowledge—the light of the sun as opposed to the shadow puppets on the cave wall—and thus as the only individual qualified to determine how a society should be organized. Such enlightenment also distances the philosopher from the desires and indulgences of everyday life and thus makes them even more suitable rulers of society—so-called philosopher kings.³

Popper critiques Plato on multiple grounds, but the overall argument can be summarized as follows: Plato claims to possess a kind of true knowledge, the knowledge of forms. This knowledge provides the general laws of history (what Popper elsewhere calls historicism) and at the same time positions the philosopher as the only person able to steer society in the right direction (because of the knowledge the philosopher possesses about how things should be). All decision-making capacity is removed from everyone except the philosopher, who decides in the most disinterested fashion what is right for all; armed with the knowledge of history, with its ineluctable laws, the philosopher is compelled to become a social engineer. Deprived of any capacity to choose due to the reification of all roles and duties, coupled with the subjugation of nonphilosophical knowledge—the mere “knowledge of shadows”—the individual is effectively denied agency. Individuals in Plato’s perfect society cannot change or challenge roles; their path is fixed and their (nonphilosophic) knowledge emptied of value.

Although Plato’s influence remains crucial, Popper’s critique of closed thought and politics is then extended well beyond the writings of Plato. Any political philosophy based on unchallengeable truths—such as the discovery of the laws of history—that provide definite and rigid future programs and where individual will is always subordinated to these larger truths, is described in the language of the closed society. For Popper, the three most important philosophers in this tradition are Aristotle, Hegel, and Marx. Aristotle is largely dismissed as Plato’s mouthpiece, with the exception that he puts a positive spin on Plato’s theory of forms: rather than constantly degrading, the state is positioned as heading toward an ultimate end, toward perfection. Aristotle is nevertheless important for Popper because his biologically influenced teleological thought is taken up by Hegel, which in turn informs German Nationalism through the notion of the destiny of one race (the most perfect) to rule all others, as well as Marx’s laws of class struggle and the destiny of the proletariat. Thus, Plato is significant not only as the first closed thinker or “enemy of the open society,” and not just because he influenced these key historical figures, but because it is his political philosophy that informed two of the three major competing political programs during World War II, fascism and communism. In Popper’s time, therefore, fascism and communism are the modern manifestation of the closed society, while capitalism and the democratic institutions affiliated with it represent the open society.

The summation of Popper’s thought is a rearticulation of existing political concepts (democracy, fascism, communism), of key historical figures of political philosophy and their writings (Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, Marx, and others), and of lived conflict (the Peloponnesian War, World War II) around the new master categories of the open and the closed. In this new politics of the open/closed the fate of a nation and its people, or the class inequalities produced by capitalism, are no longer the primarily concern. The question is no longer about identity, race, or class, but about whether or not a social program, that is, a set of knowledges and related practices, is able to change. Social programs based on unchallengeable truths, so-called laws of history or of destiny, emerge as the fundamental enemy and what might be considered radically different political programs in a different frame of analysis, communism and fascism, are made equivalent. The positive side of this political equation, the open society, is one where totalizing knowledge is necessarily impossible.⁴ Openness is necessary because no one can know for certain what the best course for society might be from the outset, and at the same time it is assumed that openness provides the best possible conditions for producing knowledge and therefore making better decisions.

I return to Popper and the open society below, but first I want to map the re-emergence and rearticulation of openness, beginning in software cultures, through to network cultures and more traditional political institutions. I want to demonstrate the significance of openness by highlighting its proliferation and also to the way it is increasingly held as the highest political ideal.

From Systems to Source, or, How We Became Open (Again)

By the 1980s, the United States was under the sway of neoliberalism. The organizational philosophy of “competition” had seemingly defeated the socialist desire for “centralized planning” in the socioeconomic ideology wars. The main philosophical argument used to justify what would become the neoliberal agenda was provided by Friedrich Hayek (1944) and resonates strongly with Popper’s notion of the open society.⁵ Hayek argued that the knowledge of how a society should be organized and which direction it should take is beyond any one individual or group and can never be known with certainty. Because of this, any attempt at centralized planning (i.e., socialism, communism, fascism), which is founded on exactly the assumption that what is best for all society is directly knowable, is likely to make bad decisions that only satisfy a small group. For Hayek, giving one group the ability to make decisions for the whole results in the overall reduction of liberty and the advent of totalitarianism. Instead, Hayek suggests, once society reaches a certain complexity, only a decentered mode of organization, where competing ideas and practices can interact and adjust in relation to change, can ensure liberty:

It is only as the factors which have to be taken into account become so numerous that it is impossible to gain a synoptic view of them, that decentralisation becomes imperative…. Decentralisation has become necessary because nobody can consciously balance all the considerations bearing on the decisions of so many individuals, the co-ordination can clearly not be affected by “conscious control,” but only by arrangements which convey to each agent the information he must possess in order effectively to adjust his decisions to those of others. (Hayek 1944, 51)

The precise form that decentralization takes is competitive markets. Such markets theoretically enable many individuals to shape society through the sale and purchase of commodities and thus with no “conscious control.” Freedom is therefore intimately tied to economic freedom, to the freedom to sell commodities, including human labor, in a market. But the argument for economic freedom derives from a more fundamental critique of knowledge and centralization. Thus, the critique of totalitarian knowledge put forward by Popper and shared by Hayek is translated into government and economic policy to justify competitive, market-based forms of organizing society.⁶

With these larger changes in the theory and practice of governance taking place in the background, important new contests over openness arose in computer cultures, specifically around the notions of open systems and, soon after, software. These contests were seemingly far removed from Hayekinspired neoliberal agendas but, as we shall see, arguments made by Popper and Hayek at the level of philosophy and economics are isomorphic with the ones that played out in computer cultures. In regard to systems, software anthropologist Christopher Kelty has covered the early debates about openness that played out around the UNIX operating system as well as the TCP/IP protocols. He describes these debates as at once technical and moral, “including the demand for structures of fair and open competition, antimonopoly and open markets, and open standards processes” (2008, 144). In the open systems debates, the battle for openness is not against closed forms of knowledge, à la Popper, but against proprietary standards—what might be described as closed infrastructures. I will not recount the history of these debates in detail, which has already been done very well by Kelty. Instead, I will focus on one story that developed throughout this period: the birth of free software and the challenge of open source. I focus on this story because it surpasses notions of openness in open systems and captures both the lived experience and the contested distributions of agency in software cultures. It reveals how competing mutations of liberalism were aligned with new legalities and modes of production and, most important, how all these developments would redefine and re-energize political openness.⁷

In 1980 a group of programmer-hackers at MIT, including a young Richard Stallman, were confronted with a problem: the AI Lab they were working in had received a new Xerox 9700 laser printer.⁸ As the printer station was located on a different floor to the majority of people who use it, the young Stallman had written a small program for the previous Xerographic printer that electronically notified a user when his or her print job was finished and also alerted all logged-in users when the printer was jammed. This required some minor modifications of the Xerographic printer’s code. When the new Xerox machine arrived, Stallman intended to make similar program modifications. But curiously, this new machine, which was offered to the lab as a “gift” from Xerox, did not arrive accompanied with a document containing the printer’s (human readable) source code.⁹ Without the source code, no modifications could be made to the Xerox and the tyranny of distance between the people on one floor and the Xerox on another would be felt once more! Stallman grew increasingly suspicious of this act, or rather nonact, by Xerox. Up until this point it was common courtesy to supply the source code along with any program that entered the laboratory. When it became clear that the source code was not going to appear on its own accord, Stallman decided to track down the original programmer to ask for the source code personally. On confronting the programmer, he was told that he could not have a copy of the source code and moreover, that the programmer had signed a nondisclosure agreement (NDA), which at the time was a complete novelty in the fie...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Open Politics
• 2. Sorting Collaboration Out
• 3. The Governance of Forceful Statements: From Ad-Hocracy to Ex Corpore
• 4. Organizational Exit and the Regime of Computation
• 5. Controversy in Action
• Conclusion: The Neoliberal Tinge
• Appendix A: Archival Statements from the Depictions of Muhammad Debate
• Appendix B: Selections from the Mediation Archives
• References
• Notes
• Index