I defended my thesis this week and will be finalizing it very soon, at which point I'll upload it here for public consumption, but I wanted to briefly think aloud about some of the questions that came up during my defense. This is not a fully developed post, but more of a kicking of the tires.
The gist of my thesis was an attempt to explain the success of open source software by focusing on some of the unique characteristics of software development, particularly iterative development and the use of abstraction to aid both development and collaboration. This is a much different approach from much of the existing literature, which has tended to apply very general theories of economics, culture and political economy to open source.
During my Q&A, however, I was asked about points where my analysis might be able to creep out of "software development" and into more generalizable areas. The specific example was Yahoo Pipes, but it was really a question about mashups, life-hacking, and DIY culture, particularly online.
One of the big problems with a lot of the scholarship on hacking and open source is elitism and technocentrism. The literature depends heavily on Marx, and often implies some sort of counter-hegemonic revolution, but doesn't deal very well with the fact that hacking skill is a privilege of an elite and educated few. Johan Soderburg writes about the "play struggle" of hackers, a post-Fordist replacement for class struggle. MacKenzie Wark talks about an "abstract class." In both cases, though, there is a failure to address the fact that hacking is a white collar activity (even if hackers opt to wear geeky t-shirts instead of business attire), incredibly out of reach of not only the working class, but also the vast majority of the middle and upper class, even highly educated elites.
One exception: Tim Jordan calls hackers "warriors of technological determinism," but also does a solid job of extending his analysis outside of programming. I'll revisit this in a later post, I think.
The reason I distanced myself from these sorts of large claims, in my thesis work, is that I felt they were sacrificing a deep understanding of the open source phenomenon in pursuit of sweeping theories, and I wanted to ground my work more firmly in an understanding of practices.
However, along the way I think I may have built something that can be extended quite effectively to these more sweeping ideas. In particular, by orienting my work around iteration and abstraction in all software development, instead of focusing narrowly on the politics of open source, I've described open source not as an alternative model of controlling property and ideas, but rather as one of many ways of solving a problem of restrictive processes in computing, collaboration, and distribution.
If we start to think in these terms, and reconsider mashup tools like Pipes, we are still confronted with a problem of elite tech skills (Pipes is hardly simple to use), but we can begin to see how the abstraction of programming logic into usable visual interfaces is, in a sense, lowering the entry requirements to join the hacker class.
Perhaps more significantly, this approach drops the historical baggage of the Free Software movement and its obsession with source code as the only politically and culturally significant form of abstraction. Open source is not the only technology available to the hacker class.
