I have to confess I’ve become an economics and political science junkie. Obviously, a lot of it has been prompted by the set of crises we are globally facing now: economic, social, political, ecological...and there is no sharp boundary among them: thus we defeat a long Western tradition of thought that distinguishes A from B from C and envisions the social as distinct from, say, the ecological, and so on.
(To be sure, there have always been efforts to braid the threads, and many are represent quite well-known efforts, and arguably any ideological account always does this, as it strives to narrativize the seeming incidental as the consequence of a primary cause, however complex. But I refer less to early ideological efforts--not sure if there are any now, and I certainly don’t hold by any--nor far more sophisticated Foucautian or New Historicist accounts as to the daily politico-economic speech of imagining boundaries around the social, political, ecological, economic, etc., as if what happens in one does not necessarily affect the other, and the processes of A work more or less in isolation from those of B and of C and so on. A straw man, yes, no one is so simplistic, I hope, but showing surprising life.)
So, how does this relate to OpenOffice.org? (For I feel the compulsion to speak of OOo in a blog whose general title is “OOo-speak.”). I guess I could escape that and say that given the above, all would relate to it :-). But here’s a more particular way.
Foss is, I’ve been arguing, sustainable, in that it (ideally) does not depend for its sustenance on the injection of cash or resources from afar but rather develops local business, academic, financial ecosystems. Obviously, not all Foss projects do this and in fact most probably do not. Nevertheless, that is the goal--what I and others have also called “informatic autonomy”--and it’s a worthy one. It also differs from “independence,” in that I see no real virtue in being fully independent and in fact see that as a fetish and an illusion. No one and no thing is independent, we--individuals, groups, nations--all interdependent, like it or not. To imagine otherwise is dangerously foolish.
Lacking informatic autonomy, and thus a sustainable program of development and distribution, means that the polity is determined by the interests of others. Sometimes this does not matter, a there might be happy agreement over the determinations. But say that a disagreement occurs or that a calamity of one sort or another changes the balance.
But how to calculate the balance between international efforts and local ones? It’s not a question of “should” but of “how,” for what we’ve seen is that insularity (a form of independence) can’t work now, at least not if the issue in question has national effect, as a lot of Foss does. Of course, the answer lies in the vary nature of Foss, which is famously structured as a distributed and geographically unspecified “community.” And in conceiving that structure, or rhizome, to be more accurately descriptive, a modularity is also imagined, so that a contributor working on one element or module can do so more or less independently, and it is only when finally compiled and the (chosen) modules integrated that the assemblage can assert its identity as a specific thing, a whole, fully articulated by the efforts of the locally autonomous groups who work under the banner of a license that grants them what I’ve elsewhere called horizonless collaboration.
But what happens when modularity is not present? How then is the local autonomy and for that matter, the articulation of effort to produce the whole? (And with that tease, I’ll leave off this entry and go on a bike ride while it’s still light and unrainy ouside. A glorious spring here in Toronto--we’ve moved from the yellow season of early spring to the lilac, and even those are fading in favour of the iris.)
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