Week 4 “strategies and tactics” explores the relationship between the abstract author and subject. Aronowitz points to the collective literary production of Bakhtin circle, while Foucault preferences the readers over the author. Oliver’s witnessing also gives preference to the context of the witness rather then historical accuracy or the anthropological pursuit of representation.

Witnessing

I certainly agree with Olivers argument in which witnessing and love are necessary for dealing with our subjectivity in relation to others and thouse that have been marganizlied opressed.

The choice of a holocaust survivor as a means of investigation the destroyed subjectivity was productive. The paper could have talked a bit more about worthy vs unworthy victims. By worthy and unworthy victims I am referring to the ideas proposed by Herman and Chomsky in manufacturing consent. Referenced in the intro to “A little matter of Genocide” by Ward Churchill we can see how certain victims have a greater possibilty for shared witnessing while others do not. This is not to imply that Survivors of the Nazi holocaust were not horribly subjugated even after the war was over, only that the ideological weight of the primary form of the oppressor had for the most part been destroyed and eventually their was some context for some witnessing. The point being that the context for witnessing might not be available to those subjugated by existing power structures. While witnessing does propose a way of understanding that is not reinforced by power structures I guess I have questions or am confused about how it works in more complicated power relations.

Ron Eglash
Appropriating Technology

Eglash clearly establishes a framework for how low order social power positions co-opt or reinvent technology to serve their marginalized social positions which are otherwise neglected by traditional power positions of technology producers.

My criticism of the Eglash text would question the traditional power positions of technology producers. For a text written in 2004 it seems to neglect to mention open source technologies and how they would fit into the power position graphs. From an open source developer perspective the technology is developed to facilitate maximum appropriation and reinvention. It is difficult to apply Eglash’s second technological feature of adaptation to the open source philosophy. The requirement of a violation of the technology’s intended purpose downplays technologies designed to be as open as possible. How could you appropriate Linux if you had to violate its original propose which was to be appropriated in as many ways as possible?

Another criticism of The Eglash text would question the high social power low social power dimensionality to appropriated technologies. I would argue that often high profile appropriations are enabled by people from many different social power positions. Take the “cracking” of the xbox game consol which enabled many unintendedusesofthesystem. The person who reversed engineered the xbox was a MIT student by the name of Andrew Huang, this person is clearly not of low social power position but his work enabled many others of a variety of social power positions to write software for the system.

Finally to give credit to Eglash, his text does explore the space of appropriated technologies in an interesting way and his broad approaches is inclusive of many social phenomena’s. This is in contrast to free book recently released by MIT researcher Eric Von Hippel. Hippel’s Democratizing Innovation seem to address the same issues of the appropriated technology piece by Eglash but looks for how commercial entities can engage in recuperation as well. Hipples text is interesting in its explanation of user centric innovation but proposes a more commercial friendly framework in which to understand these “violations” on commercial produced technologies. This form of recuperation of user centric innovation will likely be of the dominate metaphors for future products. One can already see this relationship being tested on computer videogames. We have development sites such as “valve collective” that adopt many organizational structures used in the mod scene prior to its corporate recuperation.

Corporate entitles that better recuperate the adaptations of lead users will achieve competitive advantages. (Hippel)

Soon it will be an economic imperative to support re-adaptations, how will we define the violation of an open system?

Machinima was a lot more interesting as an appropriation then a recuperated collaboration. Machinima was a lot cooler before people were giving presentations on how to license such projects.

Here is a short sub clip of a modern Machinima animation. The clip has High production value and is link to from the game company’s homepage. The animation is no longer a violation of the games original design rather the game supports these type of projects both in design and though personal. This clip was selected because it points to the complexities of appropriated work in open systems. I also chouse this clip for its meta commentary; the powerful Orwellian figurehead questions his own authority to dictate the “reproduction” rights of the citizens of his virtual world. The full video is availible here