Sandro Gaycken has given a clarifying talk at the last Chaos Communication Congress (22C3) comparing the quality of free software with anarchist theory. He starts out with the obvious similarities between those two concepts: consensus decision making and flat/no hierarchies. Furthermore both, free software and anarchism, are regularily defamed as being complete disorder and distruction of all human values. While those rather colloquial similarities might hold, he argues that looking more closely shows that free software today is based on a lot of assumptions that wouldn’t be counted as ‘valid anarchism’:

• production of computer hardware is connected to hierarchies, centralization, pollution, and exploitation
• engagement in the free software process poses great requirements: investment of money for hardware, skills to understand programming, and specialists for maintenance.

He also states that the “legal games” (read: rules) around Creative Commons and the GPL would barely count as anarchistic. While a person of the audience added that GPL and such should rather be seen as weapons to defend the realm of open source against capitalism Gaycken responds that these weapons when employed are turned against one self one day. He compares them with the historic ‘compromises’ such as in the Soviet Union that led to the enslavement of millions of people – advertised as a transitional phase until capitalism has vanished once and for all.

Gaycken surely takes a purist approach to differentiate between anarchist theory and free software, yet i don’t see this as an end in itself. While free/open source software is a great thing it is worth noting that it (still) has quite a bit of negative implications for emancipation and the environment. In this respect i understand his talk as an eye opener: we need to pay more attention to the exclusive, polluting, and otherwise malicious context of seemingly emancipatory technology.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 2nd, 2006 at 5:54 pm and is filed under english, technology, selfrule, environment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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