Hacking the Networked Society.

Abstract: The dynamic between free-software and open-source is often misunderstood by social and political theorists. As a consequence it is also under-theorised within socio-political theory. In this paper, I show how philosophies of free/libre, open-source and commons regimes have engendered new forms of socio-political consumption and new political economies of meaning. My emphasis on the interplay between the local and the global/structure and agency, shows new ways of ‘thinking’ the cosmopolitan, sedimented in the interconnected networks of the technical age. My thesis is concerned with our present moment of opportunity. I believe that positive possibilities for politics and political economy are presented in the philosophies of free/libre, open-source and commons regimes. In this paper I will demonstrate the contribution of these new socio-political categories and the new politics that is being ‘made public’ because of free/libre hacking.

Available online as web/HTML, as PDF (6×9 format, sorry, A4 coming) and as printed book from lulu.com. I also plan to put this up on my wiki.

I am going to continue my research and writing in this area over the coming year. I’m particularly interested in exploring free/libre and peer production, Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful economics and Benkler and Nissenbaum’s notion of virtue in free/libre (see Commons-Based Peer Production and Virtue).

I’ve converted some of my recent papers into web pages for easy reading online. I hope that others find them of some use, if only for the bibliographies!

Here is my New Radical Political Economy paper on social, peer-to-peer, participatory financial models. In the paper I contrast traditional banks and interest bearing capital transactions to these emergent models. Here is the web HTML version, and this is the PDF version for download.

For the Liberalism and Its Critics course I wrote a paper on Communitarian criticisms of liberalism. The paper considers the various arguments with liberal theory and liberal practice that communitarian critics hold. My view is that there are indeed a number of strong communitarian critiques of liberal individualism, critiques that are more than an expression of dissatisfaction by disaffected liberals. Here is the web HTML version, and this is the PDF version for download.

I’ve just finished a paper on social, peer-to-peer, participatory financial models. In the paper I contrast traditional banks and interest bearing capital transactions to these emergent models. I’ve been looking at three different examples of these new business models, Zopa, Kiva and Open Capital, considering to what extent these organisations are challenging established practices.

The full paper is available as a PDF. As soon as I’ve got my LaTeX/HTML conversion working I’ll post that too.

I’ve been investigating the feasibility of collecting and publishing final year dissertation projects in book form. I think that this will make a great reminder of our time of study, our political alliances and the friendships that have grown over the years at Goldsmiths. Also it’s such an indulgent, gratuitous act: So Fucking Goldsmiths. My plan is to gather together our dissertations and publish a book (ISBN record and everything) of our works to have it printed and ready for graduation in September.

Print On Demand / Short Run printing is readily accessible and affordable. A run of 100 works out at a per book cost of around a tenner. The result is a quality product too. There are POD books currently on sale in the college bookshop (look for Media Mutandis in Media/Culture) that you can take a look at to see what the finished result would look like.

I hope that I can drum up enough interest to make the project viable as solo-publishing my dissertation would be lonely!

I’m beginning to suffer election fatigue what with GCSU, America, shortly London and ULU as well. Well damm representative governance, that’s what I say.

ULU do get several points awarded for a sensible and secure electronic voting mechanism. You can vote from this page, online and confidentialy, assuming that you have got a username and password that have been emailed to your ULU College Email account.

How did they do such a thing you may ask… “Some colleges in the UoL will provide ULU with a database of the students who are eligible to vote in the elections from that college. This database includes the first name, last name, student ID number and college email address of these students.” So now you know… Here is all the info on the ULU voting procedures for the elections and here are the candidates for your consideration.