Felix Stalder on Wed, 15 Oct 2008 18:44:22 +0200 (CEST) |
[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]
Re: <nettime> Zittrain's Foundational Myth of the Open Internet |
On Tuesday, 14. October 2008, Florian Cramer wrote: > Coming back to "openness", I see the cybernetic beliefs attached > to it less rooted in libertarianism than in classical liberalism. > The blueprint of the concept to be found in Karl Popper's "Open > Society and Its Enemies", a book that might well be called an > 'implicit cybernetics' in that it determines a systemic framework > for methods of steering a.k.a. policies. A serious historical, > critical discussion of "openness" would have to start with Popper > and try to determine whether his "open society" is indeed the model > which all or most players in the field of "open technology" and > "open media" implicitly subscribe to. I doubt it makes much sense to see Popper as crypto-cybernetic nor does there seem to be any substantive connection between Popper's notion of an "open society" and current notions of "open technology/open media", except in one aspect which I will come back to. In "Open Society and its Enemies" Popper really makes a very simple point. For him, the central question of political theory is not the one concerning the ideal form of government nor the one concerning the best leader. Both are essentially unanswerable questions (we cannot know what or who is best, for a variety of reasons). Trying to answer such questions leads to totalitarianism since once you (claim to) have found the ideal form of governance all critique can be suppressed because it can, by definition, make things only worse. The overwhelming part of the book is spent attacking what he sees as the forefathers of totalitarianism (Plato, Hegel, Marx) because each of them proposed an ideal government. For Popper the central question of political theory is a negative one: How to get rid of a bad government. And this, and this reason alone, is why he favours democracy because it has an inbuilt mechanism to get rid of a bad government. You simply elect another one. Beyond that, Popper was not particularly political a thinker and he was happy to praised by the left and right a like. Popper's main point was an epistemological one. We cannot have certain knowledge about the truth. We have to formulate knowledge claims so that they can be falsified and thus corrected. The same, in a nutshell, is his idea of an open society: one that has mechanisms to foster and make use of substantive criticism. Now, the only connection I see between Popper and open technology is in the way most free software projects handle bugs. Starting from the assumption that all software is buggy, developers have created ways to turn bugs into a productive element by publishing them actively, rather than a destructive element that needs to be hidden and ignored as much as possible. Yet, most web2.0 projects are closed in Popper's sense of openness. Hidden behind some amorphous notion of community (a new kind of fundamentalism, really) much of the governance structure is actually opaque, unaccountable, and without any mechanism to substantively question and change its workings. That does not mean that they cannot change, but it means there is systemic way to influencing this change and make it accountable. I would not like to have your political systems to function like Wikipedia. Thus, I don't think a fitting critique to see these "open media" as continuation of the liberal projects because they aren't (I kinda would prefer if they were). Rather, they seem to exemplify a new corporatism where the group (be it a community or a corporation) is always right and very steep hierarchies are masked behind a shallow egalitarianism. Felix --- http://felix.openflows.com ----------------------------- out now: *|Mediale Kunst/Media Arts Zurich.13 Positions.Scheidegger&Spiess2008 *|Manuel Castells and the Theory of the Network Society. Polity, 2006 *|Open Cultures and the Nature of Networks. Ed. Futura/Revolver, 2005 # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org