Re: <nettime> Bridging the Gap between Technology and Progressive Politics in Europe

[Emery Hemingway <ehmry@posteo.net>]

On Tuesday, December 4, 2018 8:37:46 AM CET, Geert Lovink wrote:
> ... what can we still expect from the geek class? Why are social
> media alternatives never on the agenda of the big hackers' meeting? 
> Why are they solely focused on surveillance and privacy issues 
> that are the quintessential expression of the neo-liberal self?

While I would certainly agree that the open-source and hacker
communities are too individualistic, reinforcing antisocial
tendencies within the "technical vanguard" has its justifications.

To quote Melvin Conway, "organizations which design systems ...
are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the
communication structures of these organizations"[1]. For this
reason teams that develop security software are willing to
operate as isolated individuals under the rule of a dictator to
produce software that operates under total control of the user.
Conversly, Facebook built the worlds largest open office[2]
because its goal is to produce pervasive software without form
or boundary.

Producing progressive social software will take a body of designers
to define the structure and flow of interactions between users in
abstract terms. This body will need to restructure itself to reflect
successive design iterations. Implementation of course requires
engineers, but engineers need to organize themselves differently
from social designers for purely technical reasons. Unfortunetly
it is simply not practical to gather engineers, designers, and
users under the same organizational principles.

E.

1. http://www.melconway.com/Home/Committees_Paper.html
2. 
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/11/30/what-these-photos-of-facebooks-new-headquarters-say-about-the-future-of-work/
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