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ARTICLE

INTERNATIONAL
journal of
CULTURAL studies
Copyright 2003 SAGE Publications
London, Thousand Oaks,
CA and New Delhi
Volume 6(4): 449470
[1367-8779(200312)6:4; 449470; 031105]

Beating them at their own game

The cultural politics of the open software
movement and the gift economy

Kirsty Best
University of Ottawa, Canada

This article interrogates the validity of claims that the open

software movement provides a substantial alternative to intellectual property
and a challenge to the encroaching commodification of digital space. The open
software movement is participating in ongoing language wars of the new
communication technologies; it is attempting to redefine the social and economic
value of information and computer networking, and as such does present a
challenge to digital commodification. However, this challenge is not mounted
through traditional and public-oriented modes of cultural politics but instead
through personal and bodily re-imaginings and a direct engagement with the
new technologies. Indeed, similarities exist between discourses of the open
software movement and capitalist discourses of flexible work and the reinvention
of labour as temporary, transient and empowered. In sum, the open software
movement can be considered to enable forms of visceral democracy, and its
political potential is capacitated but also restricted by this form of cultural
politics.

ABSTRACT

computer-networked communication cultural politics

digital commodification flexible work discourse gift economy
language wars open software movement visceral democracy

KEYWORDS

Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1286007

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Introduction
The open software movement1 has been hailed by some to be a formidable
and radical challenge to the encroaching commodification taking hold of
the new communication technologies. The voluntary contributions of thousands of globally networked programmers to the development of software
which might provide a substantial alternative to intellectual property and
the commodification of information has been suggested as heralding the
creation of a gift economy. This article will interrogate the validity of these
claims, through an examination of the intersection between the discourses
informing the open software movement, and another prevalent discourse
circulating in networking culture, one which glorifies trends toward flexible
work and the reinvention of labour as temporary, transient, fluid and
empowered.
The open software movement and the culture of hackers who contribute
to its formation are involved in the continuing and unresolved language
wars that are being made manifest through computer-networked communication (CNC). Language wars (Lewis, 2000) are the continual struggles over
meaning-making that constitute human culture and add to its intensely
political nature. Contemporary digital culture can be characterized as
increasingly subject to the integration of networked technology with free
market capitalist discourses. The open software movement is attempting to
redefine the social and economic value of information and computer
networking, in a manner that could potentially challenge this discursive
sway. The power of the open software movement to present an alternative
to the ongoing commodification of digital space is largely available because
of changes in the mediated environment that emphasize the value of new
skills based in computerized utility and the communicative and interactive
potentials of networking.
However, I will argue that the open software movements mode of resistance is no longer the prescriptive, collectively shaped discourse of publicbased forms of democracy, but rather suggests the individualized practice of
what I will describe as visceral democracy. Resistance is built into an investment rather than a rejection of the new technology, particularly at the level
of everyday practice in work, leisure and skill building. Partly because of this
shift in the form and force of resistance, questions arise as to how fully these
engagements present a radical alternative to digital commodification as some
have claimed, or, conversely, how much they replicate techno-capitalist
assumptions. By focusing on the capitalist discourse of flexible work, I shall
examine the way in which the open software movement presents significant
ambivalence in terms of its political potential. In effect, then, I will argue
that alternatives to digital commodification presented at the level of
immersion in computer-networked communication and the attempt to beat
them at their own game build on new forms of cultural politics in their

Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1286007

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engagement in these language wars, but also extend and illustrate the
tensions of these new cultural politics in a computer-mediated environment.
The suggestion here is not that the open software movement has any
pretension to topple capitalism or significantly rewrite its foundations.
However, the movement may, indeed, challenge some of the assumptions
and operating principles of the pervasive contemporary drive toward the
outright commodification of digital technology, product and culture. The
discourses that influence the movement are what interest me in this article,
for they will indicate more precisely its potential as a form of cultural
politics. That is, I am interested in the movement at the level of meaningmaking, and its operation within the language wars. Certainly, in a general
sense, the open software movement can be related to a more extensive
position in computer-mediated culture which claims that digitally mediated
products should be freely accessible, aided by the free exchange of information (see Thomas, 2000). This discourse is reflected in the common
cyberspace dictum Information needs to be free. In this sense, the open
software movement draws on a broader position which could be called
open content, aligned to ongoing discussions concerned with restrictions
on the copying and dissemination of digitized products. However, I will
argue that an equally pervasive discourse influencing the open software
movement is that associated with the celebration of flexible work. Although
this influence does not mean that the movement does not present a certain
liberatory potential, it does indicate that the discursive meaning of open
software is ambivalent in its challenge to digital commodification, and in
its position as form of cultural politics.

The mediated environment of networking and the formation

of flexible work discourse
Digital commodification and flexible work discourse
With the accumulating ever-presence of digital culture and digitized information products, capitalism has found yet another area to colonize. Several
theorists have pointed to the trend toward the relentless commodification
of computerized communication and information (see Haywood, 1998;
Webster, 1995; Wilbur, 1997). Digital commodification is a symptom of an
increasingly prevalent discursive thrust which imagines computernetworked communication as a means of establishing a global-girding, selforganizing web of technology, communication, trade and finance that will
enable the spread of democracy, freedom and equality. This corporatization
and privatization of global organizing is linked, along with other characteristics, to the development of so-called flexible work along with a
discourse that justifies and supports it.

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As various commentators have pointed out, there have been a variety of

general shifts in the conditions of organizing production and work in the
past few decades. These processes have been argued to be characteristics of
flexible specialization (Piore and Sabel, 1984), post-Fordism (Murray,
1989), flexible accumulation (Harvey, 1989), disorganized capitalism (Lash
and Urry, 1987), the knowledge society (Drucker, 1969), post-industrialism
(Bell, 1976; Touraine, 1974) and the network society (Castells, 1996,
1997a, 1997b), depending on emphasis. One aspect in particular has been
the evolution of work from full-time lifetime employment toward part-time,
contract, outsourced, temporary and casual work: flexible labour and
capital relations in which workers expect to undergo several organizational
and career changes in a working life (Castells, 1996; du Gay, 1996b; Hall
and Held, 1989). Manuel Castells (1999) characterizes the contemporary
organizational form as that of the network enterprise, an assemblage of
firms or segments of firms, joined together through relationships of
outsourcing, subcontracting, partnerships, mergers and alliances. The
discourse that supports flexible forms of work suggests that not only is this
form of organization better for corporate competitiveness, but it should be
considered equally beneficial for workers, who will enjoy more freedom,
greater creativity and heightened initiative.
Flexible work discourse links these new organizational forms to particular democratic elements most notably, freedom of choice, of empowerment and of increased participation, and the equality of anti-hierarchical
formations of information. Manville (1995) has argued, in fact, that the
flexible and knowledge-based organization increasingly resembles classic
Athenian democracy, since the new organizations reflect a fundamentally
expanded and different social role for the individual and that role is based
on the twin ideals of liberty and equality (1995: 378). In a similar vein,
corporate culture programmes and management texts advocate an optimistic view of flexible work grounded in these democratic ideals, a celebratory position that is mimicked in more general discourse and media
reports. As du Gay argues (du Gay and Salaman, 1992; du Gay, 1996a,
1996b), this discourse suggests that the flexibility that workers will develop
through their working career to accommodate changes in organizational
hiring patterns will actually allow individuals to increase their own selfdevelopment. Thus, the lack of security of a stable and lifetime employment
is offset by the increased creativity, challenge and empowerment that will
result from the ongoing quest of individual worker-consumers to develop
new skills, increasing their marketability and hence their potential freedom
and enjoyment.
Internet start-up companies are a prime example of these trends (see Code
Rush, 2000; Dvorak, 2000). Netscape, for instance, was a company that
was born and died or rather, was acquired in only four years, during
which time the pace of work kept programmers following the maxim that

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worktimes become . . . any-time-whatevers (days/nights, weekends,

holidays, vacations), workspaces any-place-whatevers (factories, homes,
offices, cars, planes, sidewalks, the cellular revolution) (Bogard, 1996).
Job shifts too are the norm in this working culture, where if a programmer
does not change jobs within two years, people start to wonder what is
wrong with him/her (Code Rush, 2000).
The commodification of information, and its challenge
Although one important aspect of flexible work is the continual sharing
of employee knowledge, the commodification of information in organizational practices is intensified rather than diminished in so-called knowledge companies, as information becomes centralized as the primary
source of economic value. Just as flexible work is designed to meet the
organizations needs, so is the sharing of employee knowledge designed to
further the organizations strategic presence in an increasingly weightless
economy. Again, this issue pertains particularly to the realm of computernetworked communication. Thus, as Fitzwater and Henningsen (1999)
claim, the commercial software industry is based on the development of
proprietary standards the commodification and ownership of intellectual property.
The quest to commodify information in networking culture is, undoubtedly, hampered by the fluid, reproducible and porous nature of digitized
information. Even more challenging, however, seems to be the redefinition
of the social and economic value of information advanced by the increasingly influential open software movement. The open software movement is
based on an overt rejection of the anti-competitive practices and perceived
lack of quality in software development attributed to the commodification
of information by companies such as Microsoft. Indeed, according to
Fitzwater and Henningsen (1999), the threat this open software movement
poses for Microsoft is much greater than that of the Department of Justice
antitrust trial.2
That Microsoft has recognized this threat seems obvious from the
Halloween documents, internal memos leaked on 31 October 1998, in
which the company suggests attempting to decommoditize or close the
standards used by the internet, and thus re-establish scarcity and a closed
model of computer-networked development (also see Roberts, 2000). The
Internet relies significantly on open standards such as HTML and TCP/IP,
which nobody owns. These standards have not only been responsible for
the explosive growth of the Internet, but also for open software projects
such as Linux.3 Thus, the open standards that have enabled the development of and been created through open software are integral to the
networked organization of the Internet.
Open software is becoming an increasingly formidable challenge to

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ongoing digital commodification for at least two significant reasons. First

of all, the movement exploits the capabilities of networking and the architecture of computer-networked communication; the capacity of networking, that is, offers increased liberties of action (Sawhney, 1996) to software
development, programming and collaboration. Perhaps more importantly,
the collaborators in the movement are blessed with recent shifts in
power/knowledge (Foucault, 1981) because of their possession of increasingly valuable computer skills. Through the heightened utility of information in a weightless economy and its capacity to be networked, hackers
and their abilities have increased their proportion of power/knowledge, and
have become the new knowers (Ess, 1994) of networking culture.
Interestingly, the movement itself constitutes a form of knowledge
organization of sorts, and, as I will argue below, the language used to justify
it draws directly on the type of flexible work discourse exemplified above.
The question of what sort of alternative to digital commodification the open
software movement constitutes is a complex one, therefore, as it both challenges and replicates its assumptions.

The open software movement: within or beyond digital

commodification?
Certainly the open software movement redefines the social and economic
value of information. However, the question is whether it constitutes a
significant challenge and alternative practice to digital commodification.
The next section will argue that, unlike the traditional forms of resistance
offered by public democracy, the open software movement draws on the
newer discourse of visceral democracy. The contrast between these two
forms of resistance will be illustrated by contrasting variant forms in the
open software movement: free software with open software. The following section will then outline both the potential advantages attributable to
visceral democracy, and its problems, through an examination of the gift
economy. The final section will exemplify these problems and complexities
by illustrating the confluence between the open software movement and
flexible work discourse.
Language wars in the open software movement: the shift
from public to visceral democracy
Traditional challenge to the hegemony of unrestrained commodification has
primarily been in the form of public democracy. For public democracy,
collective action is understood to depend on shared memory and grounding, particularly in the nation-state; responsibility, mandate and decisionmaking lie with the people, constituted through citizenship, through the

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identification of public over private interests, through certain forms of

organization and regulation, and through boundaries of belonging and
membership. The communication that takes place is founded on information access and processes of intersubjective debate, leading up to policy
or public opinion formation. Barney thus defines democracy as gathering
together the private individuals who make up a particular community to
decide publicly on courses of action and inaction regarding their common
affairs (2000: 23). His definitions of technology and communication are
also instructive in how they operate in this framework: technology is
defined as a productive practice that simultaneously tells us something
about our collective selves and communication as the locus of relations in
which we share that which is common (2000: 2930).
However, the research undertaken in the current project suggests that
recent practices and cultures surrounding computer-networked communication seem to exist at a level closer to what could be termed postmodern or
identity-based politics. In particular, computer-networking often seems to be
drawing on visceral democracy, a form of cultural politics that entails a
more open view of the subject, and constitutes democratic participation at
the individual level of the body and the everyday. Visceral democracy might
thus include aspects of trickery, pleasure, fluidity and self-gratification. This
form of cultural politics can be called visceral (Lewis and Best, 2002) because
it centralizes the pleasures, experiences and desires of the body as fundamental to the project of freedom. Visceral democracy tends to be less
conscious, and experienced more on an individual level. It can be likened to
the resistances described by Chin and Mittelman: existing as challenges,
protests, intransigence or even evasions (2000: 29) rather than defined and
definitive countermovements, and as infrapolitics of everyday practices,
lifestyles, values and undeclared challenges. Democracy becomes manifest
through the representation of the self, through participation without
constraints, and through the ability to hold freedom and equality in ones
own hands, on ones own terms. The visceral democracy of CNC is often
formed out of the political articulation of everyday practices of computer use
(including web-page design) and production (including programming).
The shift between these two modes of challenge can be illustrated by a
comparison between free and open software. The original model of free
software was based on a conscious, ideological position that resisted the
social and economic value of information implied by an adherence to free
market capitalism without a recognition of other criteria of value. The functional value of software alone was not considered justification for its use or
development the question became not just about what it can do, but
about what kind of society we want. To this question, the Freedom
Software Foundation (FSF), as main proponent of this position, maintained
that helping other people is the basis of society (Stallman, 1999). Open
knowledge of software source code is considered, in this model, as a moral

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right. The levels of freedom that software should follow include: the
freedom to see about ones own needs, the freedom to share this freedom
to meet ones neighbours needs, and the freedom to expand this freedom
to fulfil ones whole communitys needs.
The FSF is born from and is still ideologically based in public democratic
organizing. The research culture of the university from which it sprang
depended on a different model of ascribing social and economic value to
information and resource attribution from that ascribed to by the capitalist
agenda of recent trends toward digital commodification. This public model
of knowledge sharing is indeed an important part of the formation of the
computer-networked organization of the Internet, but it is being overtaken
by a new understanding of knowledge creation and propagation based on
the flexible and market-driven economy.
The FSF idealizes the future in terms of a post-scarcity society, in which
the inequities of resource distribution and workload will be evened out, and
people will work fewer hours with more time for humanistic pursuits
(Stallman, 1999). In this sense, the organizational model of free software is
part of a vision and a plan anchored in a public vision of value and collective decision-making (Stallman, 1999). The overall purpose of the
movement is aimed at benefiting an imagined community, which is
consciously and consistently being worked towards. Those elements of the
operating system, for instance, which do not have a free software counterpart become priorities to be created and distributed. In this sense, the
projects worked on through the FSF are not necessarily based on the
cooking-pot model advanced by Ghosh (1998) or the cybercommunism
of Barbrook (2000) or even the bazaar model of Raymond (1998a), which
I will examine below. Instead, its creations of knowledge distribution might
tend more toward a hierarchical or directive organizational system, for the
explicit purpose of pursuing a particular path. In the same way, the FSF
creates, in a sense, a form of avant-garde to lead programmers and participants into the new utopia. The FSF position follows elements of public
sphere and social democracy in its participatory, community-building,
citizen-focused agenda; it also, however, replicates elements of representative elitism and the Leftist metanarrative of utopia, discipline and planning.
It was, most likely, this element of old democracy and its metanarrative
quality that led to the rethinking of the model for open software and
computer-networked communication. Another vision has developed, which,
instead of replicating the ideological counter-organization of the FSF and
free software, re-forms itself into open source software. The renaming of
free software to open software is a particularly important indication that
the organization of computer-networked communication as imaginative
formation is played on the discursive level and as a language war. Eric
Raymond, self-proclaimed spokesperson and media celebrity for the cause,
has argued that, with regard to the FSF, ideology is a handicap, a losing

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strategy: We need to be making arguments based on economics and

development processes and expected return (quoted in Leonard, 1998). The
expediency of open software, from this perspective, is what is important,
rather than any moral vision or worth. Open software thus speaks an economically viable language game which adds mainstream credibility to its
potentially subversive organizational mode.
For the movement does not abandon its potential elements of freedom
and resistance. The first line of Raymonds canonical exposition of the open
software movement, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, states Linux is
subversive (1998a). Furthermore, the participatory nature of open software
communities is readily embraced, as well as the potential empowerment to
be gained through the blurring of writer and reader, as users gain the ability
to become modifier-developers. Raymond echoes the arguments of
Barbrook and Ghosh in Homesteading the Noosphere (1998b) by maintaining that the open software culture is in fact a gift culture one that
perpetuates itself, while integrating with traditional capitalist economies, by
building up a system of reputation. Participants in the culture work together
as if in a bazaar, cooperating in self-motivated transactions, sharing information in a seemingly chaotic manner; however, the software results of the
bazaar form of organization are far superior, Raymond argues, than the topdown, directive, authoritarian model of the Cathedral (for instance,
Microsoft), where information is maintained within strict boundaries and
limits (Raymond, 1998a).
A central element of Raymonds argument, and the open source position
he represents, is that the democratic and liberatory benefits that may arise
from the movement are additional and not integral to its basic raison dtre
to create better, more effective, more reliable software. From a model
that is organized as explicitly ideological, and planned according to a
collective vision, the open software movement has evolved into an individualistic, pleasure-based, pragmatic and semi- or unconscious model.
Both models implicate a kind of community, but each understands it in
a different way. The free software model imagines community as socially
conscious and ideologically motivated, and participation in that
community as decisive citizen action. The open software model, on the
other hand, describes the community as a tribe, even an elite of particular reputation-based qualities, and participation in the community is based
on pleasure and pragmatism.
In particular, Raymond describes the primary motivation for collaborating on open software projects to be that of scratching a developers
personal itch (1998a). That this is the very first in a series of aphorisms
that Raymond provides about the open software movement is particularly
telling. The main ideological thrust of the open software model favours the
individual. Even though community is integral to the open software
movement, community here is a function of the network, one which,

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replicating the logic of techno-capitalism, links up a variety of individual

nodes, thereby compounding their own individual value. The raison dtre
of the project is not the planned, collective, motivated and integrated
planning of the FSF, but rather, the atomistic intersection of a variety of
interests that happen to increase their value through an intensification of
communicational ability via networking.
Subversive visceral democracy? The idea of gift culture
The open software movement and its political potential needs to be
examined in the context of the broader practices of computer-networked
communication, and in the context of interpretations that celebrate the
everyday practices of individual participants in the internet and the
construction of a gift culture. As Marshall (1997) has argued, the commodification of computer-networked space has consistently been challenged by
an online culture founded on university research, hackers, user groups and
shareware. And in response to the proclamation made by a new generation
of Internet hypesters that Without advertising, there wouldnt be an
Internet, Porterfield argues instead: Without freeware, there wouldnt be
an Internet (1997; emphasis in original). Indeed, without the free contribution of thousands of programmers and hackers to the development of
open standards and free software such as Apache (a web server which is
used by more than half of all websites), Perl (a programming language that
is used for most active content on the Internet) and sendmail (the handling
and delivery service used by most email transactions) among many other
examples the Internet would not exist.
Barbrook (1998, 2000) draws on examples such as these, as well as the
ordinary actions of people who voluntarily add content to the Internet
through personal web pages or discussions in IRC (inter-relay chat) chat
rooms and through newsgroups, to argue that the Internet is in fact based
on a new, subversive model of organization. These types of everyday practices form part of a gift culture that destabilizes the ideological stronghold
of techno-capitalism, or what he and Cameron label the Californian
Ideology (1996), originating as it does mainly in the Silicon Valley. Ecommerce enthusiasts, Wired editors and proponents of the Information
Superhighway, primed to turn the Internet into an electronic shopping
mall, are missing the point, Barbrook maintains, of a networked space that
is profoundly tied to an alternative to capitalism. His theory can be sourced
to a marriage between de Certeaus concept of the resistant activities of the
weak through their everyday practices (1984) and Mausss distinction
between gift and exchange cultures (1990). The result is a type of radical
freedom that actually works with and in the traditional order of capitalism,
based on the everyday exchange of gifts.
Ghosh (1998) also sees a new organizational model emerging through

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computer-networked communication, as the so-called knowledge economy

forces the rethinking of questions of scarcity and of value. As Barbrook
argues, the current regulation of intellectual property constitutes an artificial imposition of scarcity in an environment where information is, in
reality, abundant. Furthermore, Ghosh points out that the question of how
to maintain and calculate value today is problematized when computernetworked communication is being used for the purposes of giving so much
away, so openly. In gift culture, Ghosh argues, rather than being based on
the abstract commodification of information, each trans-action is potentially unique, based on the situated needs of individuals. When people
withdraw information from the Internet by, for instance, accessing a
website or reading a submission to a news group they are fulfilling their
own criteria of desire and need. However, they are also increasing the value
of the information they access, especially if they respond or contribute to
the information with their own opinion. The distribution of free information expands the value of that information, in that its potential
responses, contributions and additions expand as well. Thus, those elements
that are the most useful to the culture are recognized and improved in
proportion to their usefulness even if only a small proportion of computernetworked communicators participate in the return process.
Likewise, an open software project such as Linux increases in value the
more people obtain it, use it, comment on it, or develop/debug/modify it.
Open software is software where its source code is available to be examined
and modified; unlike proprietary software where value lies almost exclusively in that source code, as the central kernel of intellectual property, in
open software value resides instead in the community of developers and
their process for modification and improvement. The large developer and
user base of Linux, an open product, thus directly correlates with its
enhanced value. The value of this information is not standardized through
price either, but is based within the everyday practices of individual users
and their interests, desires and needs.
Ghosh and Barbrook suggest, then, that the model of the free market
capitalist economy could in fact be substantially challenged by this emerging
alternative. Similarly, Peter Lewis, editor of Workers Online, a New South
Wales Labour Council publication, argues that the new economy is not
necessarily in the long term interest of your big corporations and your
traditional capital. The conceptual nature of a network society is that the
centres of information are no longer as powerful (quoted in Background
Briefing, 2000). Within this understanding, then, the open software
movement demonstrates an alternative to digital commodification in the
form of visceral democracy, rooted in everyday practices, the fulfilment of
individual needs and pleasures, and the radical contestation of the commodification of information in favour of information sharing and gifting.
Although moving away from the conception of a unified or responsible

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public to which information should be freely available, the movement

encapsulates a significant re-writing of democracy in a way that seems to
be inherently subversive of recent trends toward techno-capitalism.
How significant an alternative?
However, we need to interrogate further this claim that the open software
movement is inherently subversive of digital commodification. Is a gift
culture or a gift economy indeed as radical an alternative to technocapitalism as it seems? The open software movement certainly, in some
ways, constitutes a challenge because of its ability to appropriate the power
of networking, to enable immersion in computer-networked communication in an active way that reforms relations of power/knowledge, and to
move beyond the simplified commodification of information to a more
complete engagement with its ultimately abstract and reproducible nature.
None the less, open software takes place in and through a direct involvement with the computer networking environment that has been moulded,
to a large extent, by contemporary techno-capitalist discourses. Open
software avoids positioning itself as exterior to trends toward digital
commodification and attempts instead to beat them at their own game: to
use the systems own resources, value system and tools to better it and thus
rework its central assumptions.
However, an immersion in CNC and the new economy to such a great
extent undoubtedly implicates an absorption of some of the assumptions of
the discourse that informs it. Furthermore, the propensity of visceral democracy itself toward individual pleasures and interests tends to replicate the
individualizing ideology behind digital commodification and the collapsing
of the collective. The implication of the open software movement in the
partial replication of the techno-capitalist logic can be illustrated through
an examination of how it draws from flexible work discourse, and celebrates the utopian collapse of worker and capitalist interests through
empowerment, passion and skill-building.
The open software movement is characterized by the assumption that its
programmers are able to increase their active participation in networking
culture, thus increasing their possibilities for greater creativity and job
satisfaction, and for greater decision-making or determination. This is
similar to the logic of flexible work, which discursively positions itself as
democratic by articulating itself to ideas about freedom, equality and the
renewal of participation. From different angles, both the open software
movement and flexible work discourse articulate an organizational and
visceral vision of democracy to a capitalist, information-based economic
discourse.
The similarity between the discourses is evident in Raymonds remarks
about the benefits underlying the open software movement. He echoes the

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flexible work discourses reasons occasioning the blurring of work and

pleasure, of passion and efficiency. He describes the project in terms of the
creativity and challenge that it promotes, which work to create, rather than
detract from, utility and efficiency: I think thats where much of the entrepreneurial world is going. People are developing business reasons to do the
stuff that gives them pleasure (Raymond, quoted in Taylor, 1999: 200). The
organization of open source software thus draws on the principle of
pleasure and increased creativity, and also on other elements characteristic
of flexible work: networking, knowledge sharing and the transience of
employment. Raymond discusses how an open source project, through its
intrinsic networking, capitalizes on the dispersal of knowledge and talent
throughout the world. Thus, as consumption in a networking culture
becomes ever more fragmented and niched, open source organization offers
a way to increase information sharing, and thus the chance of satisfying a
more diversified customer base: Adopting an open-source strategy and
inviting lots of brains to think along with you will increase the chances that
youll develop features that customers want to use (Raymond, quoted in
Taylor, 1999: 200).
Raymond also suggests that another advantage in relying on the
networked intelligence of the open software movement rather than
commodified information as property is that, in a flexible work environment, the chances are that a worker will change positions, jobs and
companies several times throughout a career. Thus, by freeing the source
code of software, a company is not dependent on the loyalty of those who
work within its walls, but can count on the development of a community
of programmers and users who will continue to upgrade the software. These
elements of flexible work, integral to open source organization, create an
environment not only of creative and passion-driven work, but also of
increased efficiency and utility. Raymond contrasts this environment,
indeed, with the drudgery and dead-end of bureaucracy: he proclaims
programmers are happiest when . . . theyre not overburdened with
inappropriate specifications of meaningless bureaucracies, and, later, so
you should not mistake expensive bureaucracy or corporate conventions for
rigour (quoted in Taylor, 1999: 200).
In flexible work discourse, a similar distinction is made between bureaucracy and empowered, creative, knowledge-intensive, flexibly organized
work. In fact, the language of change that du Gay (1996a) identifies as
driving this discourse is premised on the allocation of value in precisely the
type of organizational formation that is the antithesis of the stifling institutionalization of bureaucracy academic, state, public or any sort: namely,
the entrepreneurial vision of the capitalist organization. Value lies in the
realm of the economic and technological, especially inasmuch as they
produce progress and efficiency.
Open software embraces, then, certain digitopian (Lewis, 1998)

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assumptions about flexible work. In doing so, it aligns itself with technocapitalism rather than offers a significant challenge to it. In its desire to
move beyond the constraints of public democratic organizing, opening up
the possibility of individual pleasure and gratification in the context of capitalist networked relations, open software seems to neglect the criticisms of
the new economy and flexible work articulated by public democracy.
For instance, the problem with continual self-representation of a workers
skills and qualities is that work is never-ending. Workers internalize their
own value and self-discipline in a way that becomes imbricated with their
very being. The instability of work means that workers must constantly
follow the whims and fashions of technological society and the skills that
are of the moment. Furthermore, the passion and fulfilment that may be
experienced by some workers in great quantities, as worktime becomes
all times is balanced by a growing number of the unemployed or partially
employed. As Viviane Forrester argues, worse than exploitation is being
considered unexploitable (1999). And as Bogard suggests, even the unemployed are disciplined intensely in the era of flexible work as unemployment is always the highest and most intense form, and not just an effect, of
exploited work (1996: 107; emphasis in original).
Others argue that the inculcation of ideas about passion, empowerment
and fulfilment upon employees is, to a large degree, the result of persistent
attempts to control the productivity of workers. Instead of tallying, disciplining and regulating the physical movement of workers as prescribed by
Taylorism and scientific management, it is the subjectivity or worker
identity that is disciplined in the new knowledge economy and organization
(see du Gay and Salaman, 1992; Knights and Willmott 1989a, 1989b;
Willmott, 1993). Although this may not be the case for those lucky workers
such as computer programmers who specifically enjoy their areas of work,
not everyone in the knowledge economy falls into the realm of a digerati
whose work is highly valued because of its compatibility with the new
discourse. Much work, especially in the arts and humanities, is not
considered highly valuable, so that many people end up in the more
common drudgery of new service and knowledge occupations, and are most
likely to face the interpellating ideologies of corporate culture programmes
and their attempts at inculcating self-discipline.
Bogard (1996) affirms that the relaying of workers into the growing
cybernetic assemblage signals a dramatic intensification of the control of
labor (1996: 99), as the flexible worker works round the clock and online
everywhere (1996: 101). He goes on to argue that networked information
has furthered the abstraction of work, making it purely operational rather
than productive, and hence virtual. The ideal of the knowledge organization, as the complete connectivity of human intelligence and information,
is therefore the ideal of develop[ing] a closed system where all processes
can be translated and managed as flows from and back into information

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(1996: 30). Baudrillard (1994) pursues a similar line of argumentation by

suggesting that the new all-out operationality (1994: 106) and the creation
of these ultra-rapid communication networks immediately means transforming human exchange into a residue (1994: 78).
The trend of knowledge work, in essence, turns the individual into an
interactive, communicational particle, plugged into the network, getting
continuous feedback (Baudrillard, 1994: 106); flexible work is targeted
only by itself, a fully self-organised, self-referential mode of control
(Bogard, 1996: 101). Presence in the workforce becomes, through all these
processes, profoundly individualized. Hence, the new work arrangements
succeed in fragmenting labour power, as well as the public or state presence,
so that the only remaining force that is not atomized and particulated is
that of corporations. Workers are thus individualized in the placing of their
needs against those of organizations not a very balanced equation, as
Castells (1999) has argued.4
In a sense, however, the criticisms of public democracy face the same
problem as do the ideological standard bearers of free software in the face
of the rearticulated movement of open software. The weakening of collective power and bargaining strength of the new work formations is certainly
a significant problem, but it does not necessarily resonate as comfortably
or immediately as the individual pleasures and freedoms claimed by the
flexible work discourse and the possibilities of consumption. As several
commentators have pointed out, the new work discourse takes place in a
broader context of individualized politics. Leadbeater argues that in the past
decades, trust in the states ability to act on societys behalf withered. Its
interventions in the economy seemed an excuse for inefficiency. Its welfare
policies ensnared clients in a demeaning web of bureaucracy and delivered
poor quality services (1989: 139). Public democratic organizing thus
proposes to read individual interests directly off those of the larger collective and then creates institutional structuring to meet those perceived interests; its main weakness is that such a formation positions individuals as
powerless to determine their own needs and pleasures. Flexible work
discourse and its ideological individualism, in contrast, positions individuals
as the source of power, responsibility and freedom.
In fact, numerous attempts have been made to create an agenda of progressive or resistant politics centred on individuals in terms of their power to
define their own freedoms, pleasures, meanings and resistances. De Certeau
(1984) has suggested that everyday practices are often conduits to small resistances against hegemony, and to individual ways of creating meaning and
pleasure. In particular, corporate raiding is the activity whereby employees
gain small freedoms in the corporate structure by pilfering time and company
space for personal pursuits: employees wear la perruque, or a wig, which
disguises the pleasurable and personal nature of these activities, cloaking them
in the trappings of regular organizational process.

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Bogard (1996) also draws on de Certeaus ideas of la perruque as a

strategy to use in response to the operationality and hyper-surveillance of
flexibly networked organizational conditions. He argues that the resistance
cyborg employees offer to their new work conditions needs to mimic the
simulated nature of informational work through their own tactics of play
and pleasure, such as: Various hacking and viral strategies, recodings,
doublings, the staging of simulated readouts, electronic decoys, and other
moves (1996: 123). Organizational and networked environments may not
be complete webs of discipline and commercial imperative, therefore, as the
critics of corporate culture and flexible work may suggest, but instead may
offer avenues for visceral democracy in the form of freedom and pleasure,
which themselves constitute small, unconscious political resistances. Politics
in general may need to be recognized in terms of these small movements,
rather than in terms of overt and ideological positioning.
The acknowledgement and centring of individual experiences in flexible
work discourse is much more likely to resonate with personal experience
in contemporary culture than the overt ideological position of the corporate culture critics, just as the pragmatic approach of open software has
gained far more popularity over the free software position. This is particularly true when one considers, as Brunt (1989) has pointed out, the apathy
that seems to surround politics and the vast numbers who consider themselves apolitical. Even those who relate strongly to a political position are
constituted by a combination of other identities just as workers
constantly also always fill the roles of consumer, and so on identities
that may support, remain neutral or clash with political identities. The
sense that is inscribed in visceral democratic discourses such as open
software or flexible work is that freedom, responsibility, power and
pleasure can be personally and constantly pursued in a variety of forums,
and through a variety of outlets. In contemporary culture, which is
becoming more particulated and individualized, this form of low-maintenance, everyday, personal politics seems to be considerably more attractive than traditional collective or conscious forms of public democratic
organizing.

Conclusion
The open software movement draws significantly on the newer discourse of
visceral democracy. In this way, cultural politics becomes more participative, more everyday and more individual and in some sense, then, more
available, more common and potentially more radical than broader, organized public forms of politics. Yet, concurrently, this everyday form of
politics seems to abandon conscious formations of democracy in favour of
those that operate at a more subliminal, visceral or semi-conscious level. De

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Certeau himself theorizes his everyday practices as operating pre-symbolically, in contrast and in resistance to the structure of systems of social knowledge and discipline. As Lewis argues, the problem with theorizing political
participation and resistance as operating through these unconscious practices is that the radical assault on institutional power remains necessarily
latent, unfocused and invisible (Lewis, 2000: 155). Indeed, he suggests that
it is only theorists themselves who attach the potentially open-ended signifier of individual bodies and their actions to a particular, politicized meaning
of resistance. The open software model and the broader gift culture of
computer-networked communication more generally operate through a
similar type of subliminal politics. The participants in the exchange of information gifts or work are motivated by individual experiences and motivations of pleasure and the pragmatic orientation of identity creation and
intensification, rather than the conscious adoption of an alternative mode
of politics. In contrast, the free software model is indeed motivated by a
conscious, overt ideological position even by a sense of morality, which
Leadbeater (1989) argues characterizes old-style progressive politics. This
divergence is, perhaps, a defining element in the potentials of each organizational formation of democracy.
Everyday visceral democracy is constrained by this lack of consciousness, and hence lack of the benefits of intentional, deliberate human
organization. Thus, although much may be accomplished through the
chance intersection of various atomized particles the creation of
consistently reliable software, for instance, as Raymond points out there
is no guarantee that such organizational systems will be necessarily democratic, liberational, radical or resistant. The weakness of the free software
approach or of a collectivized, conscious organization of political
position more generally is also its strength. Although it faces the paradoxes and potential inequities of its own striving for a common or collective vision, which will necessarily standardize and exclude, it also provides
an organizational framework that is more able to formulate collective and
conscious cultural projects and redefinitions of the social and economic
value of information.
Furthermore, a democracy of everyday practices must recognize that the
everyday practices that are available to different participants in contemporary culture vary. The flexible work discourse may be appealing as an
individuated form of democratic lifestyle to certain select participants who
may enjoy a greater amount of power/knowledge because of shifts in the
social and economic value of computerized information. Thus, as Roberts
argues,
The hackers options for remunerated employment are variegated, giving
them the choice of salaried work, consultancy, subcontracting and entrepreneurship. This would confirm for them the consumerist myth of individual

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autonomy, largely unspoilt by the harsh realities that quickly disillusion the
building worker turned subcontractor or the academic choosing sessional
employment. (Roberts, 2000: 42)

Nevertheless, the discursive construction of flexible work as democratic,

and its imbrication with other discourses of visceral democracy, impels a
certain radical motion toward freedom that cannot be entirely contained.
As Roberts goes on to remark, Freed from the repressive bonds of
religion, nationality, class, the postmodern worker might take the myth
of autonomy a bit further than intended, decide what kind of society he/she
wants, and go about implementing it (2000: 42). Similarly, the open
software movement cannot be entirely dismissed as a significant alternative
to digital commodification and techno-capitalism, for although its radical
potential is not assured, every moment of everyday practice by its collaborating programmers might constitute it in some small way.

Notes
1 Open software is software in which the source code is made available to
anyone, rather than being kept undisclosed, as in the case of closed software,
where only the executable code is made available. Open software is not the
same as shareware or freeware, which is software that is available for differing amounts of time without cost. Open software does not refer to the price
of the software, but to the availability of the source code. Thus, open
software may be commodified, but it still remains open software because its
source code remains available. Open software will be used as the general term
for both open software and free software, which will be discussed below,
unless otherwise indicated. The open software movement refers to the
cultural and organizational forms revolving around networked collaboration
in order to create open software.
2 This refers to recent antitrust action against Microsoft, where a US federal
court has argued that the software company can indeed be classified as a
monopoly, and should be broken up (7 June 2000).
3 Linux is one particularly well-known and important example of open
software, the kernel of an operating system in competition with other operating systems such as Windows, Mac OS and Unix; however, many other
open software products and projects exist, many of which power the internet,
including Apache, sendmail and others (see below).
4 Thomas suggests, indeed, that the contemporary trend is toward the wholesale disciplining of world labour through the social extension of the
discourse of globalization, acceleration, informatization, risk, doubt and
state debilitation (2000: 127). Barney (2000) argues that individualization
of work is facilitated through networked technology that has enabled the

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deterritorialization of work, leading to lowering levels of unionization and

workplace regulation.

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KIRSTY BEST is Assistant Professor in the Department of

Communication at the University of Ottawa, Canada. Her work in the
area of the cultural politics of computer-networked communication and
mediated democracy has appeared in Television and New Media, Media
International Australia and Social Semiotics. Address: Department of
Communication, University of Ottawa, 554 King Edward Ave., Ottawa
Ontario K1N 6N5, Canada. [email: kbest@uottawa.ca]