The Disruptive Time of the Gift: (Radical) Imagination at Work in Free and Open Source Software

Michael Truscello1
Abstract In this article, I explore the notion of making time for a radical imagination; in particular, I consider the gift culture of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in terms of poststructuralist understandings of gifting, which posit the gift as a form of deferral, a structure of uncertainty, and the temporal basis of subjectivity. Critics who reduce FOSS to either a utopian discourse or the neoliberal property regime negate the temporal dislocation from capitalist regimentation and the imaginative opportunities made possible by FOSS. The technosocial discontinuity enabled by FOSS software development is a form of kairos, or opportune moment, for radical imagining. This article traces the concept of the gift from Mauss and Batailles to poststructuralist thinkers such as Derrida and Bourdieu. It crosses their theories with analyses of the FOSS phenomenon, to show the limitations of popular technolibertarian readings.

"Imagination at work." slogan for the General Electric Company2

Introduction: Taking Time Away From Capitalist Technological Drift To imagine takes time, especially time away from work. A radical imagination arguably requires even more time than quotidian dreaming, because the habitus, or acquired sensibilities, in which such reflection occurs orients the imagination in the direction of ideological misrecognition.3 In other words, radical imagining must contend with the ebb of supporting mechanisms and the flow of the dominant culture. Our imaginative orientation is further shaped by our technological entrenchment, or what Langdon Winner calls "technological drift."4 Technology heavily influences the constraints of our choices in industrialized landscapes; it "enforces limits upon the possible and the necessary."5 For Winner, such constraints on our necessities and desires become
Michael Truscello, The Disruptive Time of the Gift: (Radical) Imagination at Work in Free and Open Source Software, Affinities: A Journal of Radical Theory, Culture, and Action, Volume 4, Number 2, Fall 2010, pp. 141-172.

142 "highly specific" once a "particular technical form" is adopted as a general social form,6 which produces a condition of "necessity through aimless drift." 7 Todays ubiquitous computing in the West is an example of a specific technical form often dictating necessities and delimiting desires. In order to help us map the question of the radical imagination in a digital age, I posit the congregation of these two properties of contemporary industrialized life, the timely demands of (digital) work and the condition of technological drift, as both the greatest barrier and the most prolific opportunity for radical imagining today. The radical imagining both annulled by and berthed by technological drift is consonant with Alex Khasnabish's Deleuzian vision of contemporary resistance to the status quo: committed resistance to the status quo and the active building of alternatives to it do not emerge as a consequence of singular events that provoke them, they emerge out of a confluence of events, inspirations, encounters, imaginations, desires, movements, and individuals.8 The scale and capacity of the internet and other massive, complex contemporary technosocial systems contribute to the production of "rhizomatic networks of connections amongst 'the real' (individuals, movements, systems of power) and 'the more-than-real' (imaginations, languages, and repertoires embodying new political horizons)";9 such technosocial systems also create a condition of "necessity through aimless drift," in which the radical imagination is significantly delimited by the confluence and contraction of physiological needs and technological imperatives. While we imagine alternatives to global technocapitalism in many forms and directions simultaneously, most of our desired futures are curbed, captured, or co-opted by the technological infrastructure in which we imagine. Reflecting on the absence of a real resistance to the rise of the Nazis in the 1930s, German journalist Sebastian Haffner (pseudonym of Raimund Pretzel) wrote, "It was just this automatic continuation of ordinary life that hindered any lively, forceful reaction against the horror."10 To begin to imagine radical possibilities in "the technological society"11 involves, first, rhizomatic technosocial discontinuities in everyday life, breaks from the "automatic continuation" that syncopates our lives. These discontinuities need not constitute an anarchoprimitivist longing for the obliteration of the technological society; rather, they provide the temporal dislocation, or making time, from technocapitalist dressage, or training, necessary for the alternatives to be considered and constructed.

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In this article, I explore the notion of making time for a radical imagination; in particular, I consider the gift culture of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in terms of poststructuralist understandings of gifting which posit the gift as a form of deferral, a structure of uncertainty, and the temporal basis of subjectivity. Critics who reduce FOSS to either a utopian discourse or the neoliberal property regime negate the temporal dislocation from capitalist regimentation and the imaginative opportunities made possible by FOSS practices. This disruptive "gift of time," however, remains circumscribed by the technosocial constraints of our current moment of hypercapitalist globalization. Thus, to make time for radical imagining is only a small but essential part of the success of radical politics. And while FOSS gifting is not a comprehensive and radical solution to contemporary forms of oppression, it is one place for radical imagining to occur, and it is a place that proliferates transversally across the technological society because so much of our landscape is encoded by globalized networked systems. The trajectory of FOSS development must look beyond the current cottage industry of at-home programming-for-profit and toward a more radical future in which the success of FOSS sets in motion ontological proclivities in everyday life that become "transversal tools [clefs]" through which "subjectivity is able to install itself simultaneously in the realms of the environment, in the major social and institutional assemblages, and symmetrically in the landscapes and fantasies of the most intimate spheres of the individual."12 The opportunity exists to program progressive habits of communication, cooperation, and collaboration into these transversal tools. Such a radical project begins by taking time away from capitalism. Theorizing FOSS: Recent FOSS Scholarship The FOSS movements have become central social developments in the computing world and beyond. Advocates of FOSS promote the accessibility and distribution of software source code for operating systems and software applications, which not only allows these programs to be distributed free of charge but also changed, enhanced, adjusted and reprogrammed by competent users. Today, FOSS represents a crucial part of the software-design scene around the world, not only providing free alternatives to brand-name computer programs (like Open Office and Linux) but supplying crucial if unseen elements of global network and computer infrastructure. While often taken together, there are differences between Free Software and Open Source movements, largely defined by the sort of software "license" associated with their products. Free Software activists tend to equate the transparency of source code with an egalitarian society and believe that software should be free to access, modify, and redistribute, regardless of price. Open Source advocates, alternatively, tend to see software licenses as a The Disruptive Time of the Gift

144 pragmatic engineering choice, not an ethical one, and often permit combining nonproprietary (i.e. open source code) and proprietary (closed source code) software. Obviously, the generic definitions of FOSS are limited in scope and misleading. Open Source advocates represent Open Source Software as nothing but a pragmatic choice, because the licenses associated with it are more flexible than Free Software licenses and allow for ownership. They also characterize Free Software as a "political" or "ideological" or "moral" choice, because it does not allow the source code to be taken private under any conditions. The distinction raised between Open Source and Free Software creates a false impression that one is ideological and one is not, when both are clearly ideological because both engender particular social formations and advocate for particular rights on behalf of users. A different set of terms is required to demarcate the implicit politics of FOSS. A useful place to begin is with Matthew Fuller's definition of FOSS as "a socio-technical pact between users of certain forms of license, language, and environment." He continues that "the various forms of free or open-source software are developed as part of the various rhythms of life of software production."13 Thus, the assemblage of FOSS computing is not simply an expression of a property regime or utopian thought, but instead should be considered in transversal terms, that is, existing within a complex web of social and technological relationships that affect one another in complicated and dynamic ways. Much excitement has greeted the rise of FOSS practices in the past decade as a means to overcome and undermine the power structures of our current moment by undermining or circumventing the major bastions of corporate computing and stifling intellectual property rights and ushering in a new age of unmediated communication and digital possibility. Most critics today, however, agree that early optimism about a whole global society contributing to and shaping their software has given way to a reality of online FOSS scenes which, while globe-spanning, are relatively limited to professional and semi-professional programmers or geeks and their advocates and supporters. Early commentator Steven Weber suggests the "success of open source is a political story" 14 that "has reframed and recast some of the most basic problems of governance,"15 while renowned scholar, copyright activist and FOSS advocate Lawrence Lessig proclaims "code is law," and that the "regulability of behavior in cyberspace [] crucially depends on whether the application space of cyberspace is dominated by open code."16 At least three recent books have attempted to refine and expand our understanding of FOSS, since Weber and Lessig articulated their popular analyses: Samir Chopra and Scott D. Dexter's Decoding Liberation: The Promise of Free and Open Source Software, Christopher Kelly's Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software, and Johan Soderberg's Hacking Capitalism: The Free and Open Source Software Movement. Michael Truscello

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Collectively, these texts foreground several key insights about FOSS: FOSS licenses promote the anarchist ideal of community without coercion; the relevance of FOSS extends beyond property regimes and engineering practices and has broad implications for emerging social trends; the political (gift) economy of FOSS is situated within (and often contradicts) market exchanges and state copyright laws; the gift (economy of FOSS) is context-dependent and not part of a gift/commodity binary; networked capital disaggregates centralized labour power, but this centrifugal movement may become the basis for making capital redundant as labour begins to use the available technologies to exclude capital from the processes of production. Chopra and Dexter admit their book is "partly an expression of a utopian hope, partly an expression of the fear that a liberatory moment is slipping away." 17 Of interest to them "are the political, artistic, and scientific freedoms" enabled by FOSS,18 a worthy embrace of various lines of flight often ignored in FOSS research. Ultimately, they argue "for transparency in governmentality in the information age," and believe FOSS "embodies the anarchist ideal of eliminating the indiscriminate, opaque application of power."19 They partially exclude Open Source from this anarchist ideal because, unlike Free Software, the "rhetorical thrust of the open-source community is an invitation to co-optation,"20 witnessed quite explicitly in the corporate celebration of Open Source but not Free Software. Chopra and Dexter therefore rightly note that the "ideological differences" between Free and Open Source software are crucial.21 More problematic is their claim that FOSS communities are "devoid of coercion: authority figures emerge at the will of the community, and the ever-present possibility of forking renders their authority contingent."22 Perhaps it would be more accurate to say the discursive bases of FOSS communities impede coercion, but that ultimately subtle forms of psychological or sociological coercion exist apart from the constitution of the software license. Chopra and Dexter make another key observation, one echoed by gift economy theorists to be discussed below: The free software political economy is not cleanly separable from the larger political economy in which it is situated; neither is impervious to the influence of the other. The changes promised by the FOSS economy will remain only partially realized so long as software, a good that sits uncomfortably in any taxonomy of goods and products, is misconstrued as a commodity, and so long as the fundamental source of alienation, the failure to recognize a programmer's knowledge as the true source of value, remains in place.23

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146 This is where many theorists go astray: They fail to recognize the gift economy of FOSS as situated and susceptible to the agonisms of the current social order of late capitalism, and they enthusiastically idealize FOSS gifting as the realization of liberatory politics. In addition to their recognition of the contested terrain of FOSS gifting, Chopra and Dexter also justifiably understand FOSS software licenses "as providing social structure and a set of values that regulate their respective communities,"24 a distinction for the licenses that articulates the social transversally beyond the limited discourse of property regimes or engineering practices. "Rhetorical choices in framing manifestos," they write, "are not merely linguistic ones; they have long-term implications for the communities they define."25 This is another reason why Open Source proponents who frame their practices as merely pragmatic are incorrect: FOSS constitutes a transversal social assemblage, especially in a world of pervasive computing. There are "implications" of FOSS beyond the immediate gaggle of technophiles who share code. "Because the cyborg world brings to life new legal and political structures, as code merges with law," write Chopra and Dexter, we can see in its fundamentals the glimmerings of a new, transparent society, one that by making participation in it voluntary attains the true meaning of a compact, one achieved without coercion. When code is opened, we have the power to view the machinery of authority.26 Such an analysis is a suitable beginning for understanding the potential of FOSS. But beyond its "roots of power"27 in technology there are the identities and imaginations of FOSS practitioners that are typically absent from the discussion of technology as these are intersected by gender, race, disability, sexual orientation, colonialism, and so on. Even in its prominence as a shaper of the social, technology never escapes the social. When Chopra and Dexter write "to free software is to free our selves," they have committed a common form of hyperbole in the literature on FOSS, one that elides the very real social power relations that haunt software, free or not. A similar form of technodeterminism informs Christopher Kelly's Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software. Kelly hopes "to show how geeks do not start with ideologies, but instead come to them through their involvement in the practices of creating Free Software and its derivatives."28 Where Chopra and Dexter place too much emphasis on technology as the "root" or prime mover of the social, instead of being co-constructed with the social, Kelly situates technology as pre-ideological. FOSS programmers are part of what Kelly calls "recursive publics," or publics concerned with the ability to build, control, modify, and maintain the infrastructure that allows them to come into being in Michael Truscello

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the first place and which, in turn, constitutes their everyday practical commitments and the identities of the participants as creative and autonomous individuals.29 Kelly's framing of FOSS emphasizes the technical materiality of the gift economy, and sees radical political philosophies lacking similar analyses: Geeks gather through the Internet and, like a self-governing people, possess nascent ideas of independence, contract, and constitution by which they wish to govern themselves and resist governance by others. Conventional political philosophies like libertarianism, anarchism, and (neo)liberalism only partially capture these social imaginaries precisely because they make no reference to the operating systems, software, and networks within which geeks live, work, and in turn seek to build and extend.30 While some anarchist authors and activists have "captured these social imaginaries" by referencing the tools of the FOSS trade in their analyses, there is a danger in the form of ideological causality promoted by Kelly (similar to the form of causality registered by Chopra and Dexter) that would imagine that FOSS practices will create the conditions of inevitable politicization, or that this politicization will be liberatory in nature. In addition, Kelly does not believe FOSS represents "an ethical stance," but instead is simply a "practical response" to technical "problems," and "the best way to understand this response is to see it as a kind of public sphere, a recursive public that is specific to the technical and moral imaginations of order in the contemporary world of geeks."31 But as I will suggest below, if we take the question of the gift seriously, FOSS is certainly an ethical form of knowledge/practice. While I disagree with Kelly's ethical/ideological framing of FOSS, I find his positioning of the FOSS gift economy (or "sharing economy" in his words) a refreshing antidote to popular thought on the matter. He writes that while UNIX, the forerunner to Linux and the basic architecture of the internet, was the seminal Free Software project, it "was never entirely outside of the mainstream market,"32 and FOSS remains similarly situated between its own economy of free labour, prestige and cooperation and the broader neoliberal capitalist economy. To suggest that [the FOSS gift economy] represents some kind of "outside" to a functioning economic market based in money is to misperceive how transformative of markets UNIX and the Internet (and Free Software) have been. They have initiated an imagination of moral and technical order that is not at all opposed to ideologies The Disruptive Time of the Gift

148 of market-based governance. Indeed, if anything, what UNIX and Free Software represent is an imagination of how to change an entire market-based governance structurenot just specific markets in thingsto include a form of public sphere, a check on the power of existing authority.33 Of course, Kelly is denying a truly radical imagination for FOSS; instead, he sees a liberal vision of FOSS as a reformative mechanism rather than a radical one. However, his initial observationthat FOSS gifting has never been entirely "outside" market economiesremains valid. Finally among recent books about FOSS, Johan Soderberg's Hacking Capitalism: The Free and Open Source Movement sees the "chief accomplishment" of FOSS as its "novel approach to arranging labour power."34 Specifically, FOSS demonstrates, contra Kelly, the place of the politics of "play": "Play is a showcase of how labour self-organises its constituent power outside the confines of market exchanges."35 Indeed, Soderberg claims that "the hacker movement is part of a much broader undercurrent revolting against the boredom of commodified labour and needs satisfaction."36 Soderberg believes the computer "hacking" (by which he means intensive and obsessive coding, not only illegal digital breakand-enters) typical of FOSS programming "undermines the social division of labour as the regulating principle for technological development."37 He sees the type of collaborative "production" that happens in FOSS communities as "disjointed from capitalist circulation."38 This type of playcomputer hacking "sets the hacker movement apart from the 'gestures of protest' of more traditional political organizations." He suggests that the "repercussions" of the powers-that-be against this type of hacking play "guarantees that a class consciousness is passed on from generation to generation."39 Unlike Kelly, Soderberg argues the essential radical and generative quality of FOSSwhich he sees as "in continuation with more than two hundred years of labour struggle"40is that it sits "outside" market exchanges, even as "FOSS developers are deeply embedded in the capitalist society."41 Kelly, Chopra and Dexter taint their analyses with elements of technodeterminism but Soderberg's claims are largely about the organizational qualities of FOSS: The FOSS movement is unique only because, in exploiting the failures of the capitalist system, it has demonstrated a prototype for struggle that is generic. It will be argued that self-organised labour can outrun firms in all sectors where the concentration of fixed capital (i.e. large-scale machinery) and the division of labour (specialised knowledge) is not an insurmountable threshold.42

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Importantly, however, Soderberg argues that, while the hacker prototype for struggle may be generic, the specific instantiation of struggle in the contemporary FOSS communities has yet to realize its radical potential because it is steeped in technolibertarian thought that prizes an individualist notion of freedom rather than any sense of collective liberation. For Soderberg the concerns of most hackers"mainly free access to information"are less important, though related, to broader "social, labour, and environmental concerns."43 Soderberg's astute analysis identifies other possible sites of radical imagining as FOSS use expands, notably "labour relations, the standing of developing countries, and gender issues."44 Against these radical possibilities, Soderberg sees networked capital as a force that largely serves to disaggregate centres of labour power, arguing that "networked capital turns every point of production, from the firm down to the individual work assignment, into a node subject to circumvention."45 More generally, "digitalisation is consistent with capital's quest to disband workers and uproot the remaining strongholds of organised labour."46 He proposes a solution that takes advantage of this disaggregation of labour power, one that attempts to make capital redundant: "Since all points in production have been transformed into potentially redundant nodes of a network, capital as a factor of production in the network has itself become a node subject to redundancy."47 In other words, at a moment when the digital economy and computerized, globalized management has rendered workers disposable and interchangeable, workers are now in a position to use those same technologies to organize themselves and their work outside of the dictates of capitalist accumulation. FOSS and Empire At first blush, the chief sociological feature of FOSS programming may resemble what French theorist Michel de Certeau called "la perruque," or "the wig." De Certeau explains that: La perruque is the worker's own work disguised as work for his employer. It differs from pilfering in that nothing of material value is stolen. It differs from absenteeism in that the worker is officially on the job.48 La perruque is a tactic that "diverts time"49 from the factory and capitalist accumulation. In a similar way, Open Source capitalizes on the voluntary efforts of programmers, many of whom are formally employed writing software for large corporations. Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, is a perfect example of someone with little capital (cultural or otherwise) who, as a student, mobilized his technical skills to become a project leader of sorts, inviting hundreds of programmers around the world to divert their time towards developing the Linux The Disruptive Time of the Gift

150 operating system. However, Open Source is not coextensive with la perruque because most of this time is being diverted from other leisure activities and not "the factory." But Open Source does remain a tactical manoeuvre that exists outside an institutional enclosure. Once corporate America discovered Open Source en masse around 1998 it was even more likely that the proceeds and developments of la perruque digitale went straight into the company coffers. The central question is: Can the FOSS gift economy be recuperated by alterglobalization forms and trajectories, given its contemporary deployment for profit? Influential radical theorists of globalization Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri frame FOSS, specifically Open Source, as a realization of what they call "the multitude," a form of politics based in the emerging possibilities for affinity, resistance and solidarity and that "stands between sovereignty and anarchy."50 But the inscription of FOSS within the central mechanisms of capitalist sovereignty (immersed in copyright and patent laws, embraced by IBM, Oracle, and SAP, for example, and widely used by the U.S. Department of Defense and other government bureaucracies) renders the analogy of "open-source" in Hardt and Negri's discussion of multitude problematic. They write: The open-source movement, which strives to make software free and accessible for modification without copyright, offers a more radical example [of the multitude]. Software code is always a collaborative project, and the more people who can see and modify it, the better it can become.51 They include an endnote in which they attach "open-source movement" to Richard Stallman's collection, Free Software, Free Society, immediately raising the problem of the distinction between Open Source and Free Software. More problematic, however, is the claim that "open-source" software may be modified "without copyright," a claim that is untrue; one of the paradoxes of FOSS is that it depends for its existence on copyright, or, in the case of Free Software a mechanism Stallman calls copyleft. Ironically, if FOSS software were not so protected it would be public domain and susceptible to proprietization by corporate interests. Arguably, Free Software and the copyleft "General Public Licence" (GPL) are more compelling examples of the emerging "common" tendency than Open Source because of the way sharing is inscribed in the license. Open Source is the more capital-friendly alternative because it does not proscribe profiteering. But Hardt and Negri wish to make the analogy with the multitude quite specific, and they use techno-libertarian Eric Raymond to do so: We might also understand the decision-making capacity of the multitude in analogy with the collaborative development of computer software and the innovations of the open-source Michael Truscello

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movement [.] Programmers had thought of their programs, as Eric Raymond puts it, as pristine cathedrals created by individual geniuses. The open-source movement takes the opposite approach [.] Raymond calls this, in contrast to the cathedral style, the bazaar method of software development, since a variety of different programmers with different approaches and agendas all contribute collaboratively [.] One approach to understanding the democracy of the multitude, then, is as an open-source society, that is, a society whose source code is revealed so that we all can work collaboratively to solve its bugs and create new, better social programs.52 After confusing Open Source with Free Software, Hardt and Negri champion the ideas of Eric Raymond, whose right-wing libertarian leanings are legendary and evident throughout the essays collected in his influential book The Cathedral and the Bazaar. Obviously, however, Hardt and Negri are primarily interested in FOSS as a model of generic open collaboration. But without exploring the particulars of this social assemblage, describing FOSS as analogous with the multitude is inaccurate. FOSS as it actually exists, in theory (in the writings and programs of Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, and Eric Raymond) and in practice (in IBM's billion-dollar commitment, and in the more than 230,000 FOSS projects and over 2 million registered users at SourceForge.net, the preeminent FOSS clearing-house and meeting point) is not a multitude. The FOSS gift economy has a place in opposition to what Hardt and Negri call "Empire," but not in the way it is idealized by Hardt and Negri. In order to move beyond these more limited treatments of the politics of FOSS and the radical imagination it stems from and contributres to, I turn now to read the gift economy through the lenses of several poststructuralist thinkers. In this way, FOSS gifting may be recuperated as what I am calling a kairotic technosocial assemblage. The History of the Gift The classical definition of the political economy of gift culture provided by Marcel Mauss in the early twentieth century situates the gift as a direct precursor of commodity exchange. The Maussian notion of the gift arrived at the birth of structuralist thought in Europe but also became problematic for structuralist readings of exchange because its pivotal term, the Maori notion of hau or "spirit of the gift," placed the central mechanism of gift exchange in the realm of the mystical, rather than the purely material. Structuralists who sought to reduce the complex and diverse gift practices of non-Western cultures to mere functionalism could not account for its depth of meaning and seemingly The Disruptive Time of the Gift

152 illogical patterns of commerce. But Mauss recognized that the gift was part of a larger social system, and it is the systemic feature of the giftits "total prestation" as an economic, social, juridical, and aesthetic phenomenonthat poststructuralist thinkers have utilized to examine the role of gift exchange in the construction of subjectivity not only within cultures of conspicuous gift-giving, but as a part of all human relationships. The gift is an indicator of relationality, demarcated from a commodity only by the context in which exchange occurs, and positions of submission and domination are similarly contingent. For example, Yunxiang Yan discusses a Chinese village in which there is an "asymmetrical gift that flows up the ladder of society," and, contra Mauss, "the recipient not only ignores the obligation of return but also remains superior to the donor."53 As Marilyn Strathern says, "The basis for classification does not inhere in the objects themselves but in how they are transacted and to what ends." 54 And according to the feminist reading of the gift by Hlne Cixous, "all the difference lies in the why and how of the gift, in the values that the gesture of giving affirms, causes to circulate; in the type of profit the giver draws from the gift and the use to which he or she puts it."55 The "cultural turn" in FOSS development is revealing the prescience of this observation, as FOSS procurement departs from the parameters of its masculinist and technolibertarian origins, beyond the simple heuristics of transparency, and out into the agonistic sociality of subjectification, where the differences of the "how and why of the gift" are front and centre. Mauss also suggested the gift imposed a time limit on the obligation to reciprocate; he factored temporality prominently in the political economy of the gift. A gift cannot be reciprocated immediately: time must pass before a "counter-service" can be offered. This second central componentthe temporality of the giftis particularly important to the radical quality of FOSS because the discretionary moment of deferral necessitated by a FOSS license is a significant part of what separates the social assemblage of FOSS from that of the proprietary license tied to the rhythms of capitalist cycles. This discretionary part of FOSS gifting can influence significantly the reasons why one gifts, as the entire process can be disjointed from economic cycles and imperatives. The distinction is similar to, though not analogous with, Henri Lefebvre's differentiation of linear and cyclical rhythms, where linear rhythms are produced by the social (the rhythm of work), and cyclical rhythms are products of the natural (the rise and fall of the sun, various physiological rhythms, and so on). "The cyclical is social organisation manifesting itself," writes Lefebvre, "the linear is the daily grind, the routine, therefore the perpetual, made up of chance and encounters."56 While the deferral enabled by FOSS development does not make FOSS development an essentially cyclical rhythm, it does make the development process less rhythmically linear and artificial. Even subtle distinctions such as the ability of local culture to freely modify software to operate using an indigenous language produce a less arrthymic technology.57 Michael Truscello

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Of course many FOSS projects are deeply integrated with economic cycles, and this further complicates the matter. Instead of proving that human subjectivity is reducible to ultimately selfish or ultimately altruistic behaviour, or that a clear separation of gift and commodity exchange is possible, or that uninterrupted motives and calculations subtend specific forms of interaction (all of which tend to be the conclusion of reductive studies of the gift), the notion of the gift serves rather to expose disciplinary limitations in the demarcation of social behaviour, to abolish the dichotomies of vertical forms of social categories, and to give concrete but temporary expression to social assemblages. The gift stabilizes a set of transversal social relations, transversal relations that unbind the disciplinary categories of economics and construct the gift as "the space or figure that impels ethical and political considerations, even for a regime of economic value."58 Mark Osteen takes the ethical demand of the gift even further, calling the gift "a dangerous phenomenon because it involves risk: the risk that one may give without reciprocation; the risk that one may accrue burdensome obligations; the risk that one may never be able to repay a gift; the risk of the loss of freedom."59 Slavoj iek, following the lead of Marshall Sahlinswho framed the gift as "destructive" of the normative social bond because of its inherent ambiguity and seemingly vindictive logic, expands this notion of the gift as a dangerous phenomenon by calling it "the zero-level of civility, the paradoxical point at which restrained civility and obscene consumption overlap, the point at which it is polite to behave impolitely."60 All of these potentialities that make the gift a "dangerous phenomenon" also gesture at the reasons why radical imagining, something afforded by gifting, is such a rare and powerful act. The act of radical imagining makes an ethical demand with substantial risk and potential loss of freedom. In the most pedestrian sense, gifting represents the invocation of trust in human affairs. What makes gifting dangerous, then, is that trust may be rebuffed or exploited by an unsympathetic partner or community. What makes gifting powerful is that it can interrogate, escape, confound, circumvent, or reverse oppressive social arrangements whose authority is predicated on substantial forms of economics, militarism, racism, ableism, and so on. Often, the relationship between risk and freedom is directly proportional: the greater the potential risk, the greater the potential freedom. Giving It Away: A Capital Idea The principal accounts of gifting in Open Source Software are Eric Raymond's essays "Homesteading the Noosphere" and "The Magic Cauldron," extensions of his ethnographic survey of "parallel debugging" (what would come to be known as Open Source) in The Cathedral and the Bazaar. "Homesteading the Noosphere" suggests that Open Source programmers operate within a postThe Disruptive Time of the Gift

154 scarcity gift economy based on ego-boosting and reputation. "The Magic Cauldron" examines how Open Source functions within a broader exchange economy, concluding that because most paid-for programming work involves the maintenance of in-house software, Open Source will not kill the market for programmers but instead will create more demand, even as competition could drive down the price of proprietary software. In fact, Raymond writes that "ultimately, the industrial/factory mode of software production was doomed to be outcompeted from the moment capitalism began to create enough of a wealth surplus that many programmers could live in a post-scarcity gift culture."61 Raymond's assumptions in these essays are explicitly essentialist with regards to a competitive concept of "human nature" and based on his rightwing libertarianism, and often presume too strongly that Open Source culture is somehow pure and unobstructed by the social agonisms that shape every other facet of society. "Most gift cultures are compromised," he writes, either by exchange-economy relationships such as trade in luxury goods, or by command-economy relationships such as family or clan groupings. No significant analogues of these exist in the opensource culture; thus, ways of gaining status other than by peer repute are virtually absent.62 The motivation for programmers to contribute voluntarily to a public good such as FOSS is, in Raymond's eyes, a product of inherently selfish behaviour: "Human beings have an innate drive to compete for social status," he writes, "it's wired in by our evolutionary history."63 The desire for status is matched with a need to adapt to scarcity, which is accomplished in three ways: command hierarchy, exchange economy, and gift culture.64 In the presence of abundance, Raymond argues, command hierarchies do not work, but gift cultures do, because in these "social status is determined not by what you control but by what you give away."65 By this definition, Open Source is a gift culture in which there is an abundance of computing power, and the only way to distinguish oneself as a programmer is by earning a reputation by the assessment of one's peers. Raymond extends this discussion of innate drives and the inevitability of capitalism, to explain the homologous organization of Open Source Software and academic culture: I suspect academia and the hacker culture share adaptive patterns not because they're genetically related, but because they've both evolved the one most optimal social organization for what they're trying to do, given the laws of nature and the instinctive wiring of human beings. The verdict of history seems to be that free-market capitalism is the globally optimal way to cooperate for economic efficiency; perhaps, in a similar way, the reputation-game gift culture is the globally optimal way to Michael Truscello

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cooperate for generating (and checking!) high-quality creative work.66 Raymond's technolibertarian predilections turn the gift economy into a filter for economic determinism. Of course, what FOSS developers are doing is gifting: they are voluntarily donating code toward a project they do not own and for which they will receive little credit outside their own circles. But Raymond takes a context-specific activity such as gifting and imposes on it a host of determinations about human nature and the inevitability of capitalism. In many ways Microsoft (the company at whose anti-trust trial Raymond would not testify against because he believed the issue of its monopoly was for the marketplace to decide) is pursuing the same form of economic determinism. Though Microsoft's proprietization of the source code would seem to contradict the pragmatism of Open Source programmers, in theory some Open Source licenses, such as Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) licenses, allow for the source code to be taken private (this is greater "freedom" than Free Software allows, they would say). Both Raymond and Microsoft portray "the market" as a self-contained, self-sustaining, self-regulating entity, when in reality even the most unrestricted markets in history have been thoroughly mediated by multiple overlapping non-market power relations. But, in reality, there is nothing natural or essential about gifting or its effects. There is no invisible mechanismwhether ecological equilibrium or economic rationalismguiding social organization under the rubric of software development, or capitalism, or whatever. To understand the implications of gifting within the socially ascribed boundaries of FOSS, it will take an unwrapping of the gift and its implications for software and everyday life. Given Time: Derrida For theorists such as Mauss, Jacques Derrida, and Pierre Bourdieu temporality is a central component of gift culture ontology, but in different ways. For Mauss, gifts circulate in obligatory fashion as part of a total social system, a reciprocity that definitionally operates within an "obligatory time limit." The gift cannot "be reciprocated immediately," because that would take the form of a rejection of the gift as a gift and reduce the social intercourse to mere exchange; rather, "time is needed in order to perform any counter-service."67 While the obligation to give (back) is essential to Maussian gifting, the deferral of counter-service is a crucial ontological necessity for the gift to function. Derrida extends the notion of the "obligatory time limit" to challenge the very possibility of gifting in the first place. The gift, for Derrida, is only possible if time (impossibly) stops. In Given Time I: Counterfeit Money, Derrida argues that the idea of economy, "the problematic of oikonomia," implies "the idea of exchange, of circulation, of return"; but the gift stands outside the circulation of exchange and interrupts The Disruptive Time of the Gift

156 economy.68 The gift is that which "opens the circle so as to defy reciprocity or symmetry." So in order to have a gift one must have the absence of reciprocity, the negation of return to the origin. The gift, then, only becomes possible with the impossible interruption of all circulation.69 The aporia created by the gift "consists of the fact that the condition of the gift's possibility is simultaneously the condition of its impossibility." This aporia opens an interrogation of the limitations of structuralist categories and disciplinary boundaries that are based on a more strict and unproblematized notion of the gift, "highlighting in particular their inability to accept undecidability in the social, to understand that society is always more and less than its structures and that these structures are themselves performances."70 This poststructuralist critique of the gift separates the concept from a Maussian essentialism and subjectivism (in the Westernized appropriation of the Maori concept of the hau in particular) and the structuralist critique of Mauss, specifically fellow anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss's complaint that the mystical hau as an ultimate explanation for exchange shifted the analysis of exchange from an objective to a subjective register. Derrida explodes the Maussian figuring of the gift by harnessing the centrifugal force of its temporality: The gift is not a gift, the gift only gives to the extent it gives time. The difference between a gift and every other operation of pure and simple exchange is that the gift gives time [....] What it gives, the gift, is time, but this gift of time is also a demand of time. The thing must not be restituted immediately and right away. There must be time, it must last, there must be waitingwithout forgetting.71 In the context of FOSS, temporality is a central dynamic because FOSS projects need not develop according directly to the rhythms of economic cycles, and the initial justification for a FOSS project may emerge from non-institutional, idiosyncratic desires and situations of their diverse collaborators, in stark contrast to the corporate management of programmers time in the mainstream software industry. The deferral of the giftthe time givenmay offer a contemplative discontinuation of the software development life-cycle that promotes forms of software more synchronous with a radical imagination. The FOSS development cyclewith its moment of initiation, design of features, code implementation, testing, debugging, and beta releasesis continually subject to programmatic prorogation, to time given and time demanded, in ways the rigid demarcation of economic cycles and the privation of profit simply cannot justify. In light of the temporality of FOSS collaborative programming, there is an opportunity to reconsider the full potential of the sense of "giving time." Technocultural volunteerism becomes ontological latency. Why program today for Microsoft what you can program tomorrow for liberty, resistance, or creativity? Why is there no feminist word processor or ethical search engine? The radical potential of FOSS remains mired in the legalistic and economic concerns of those who profit from code and the primary authors of code. How can the Michael Truscello

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broader radical community convince some programmers to give their time for the benefit of gender justice, environmental restoration, and labour solidarity, instead of simply for the efficiency of their professional endeavours? The Liminality of Habitus: Bourdieu Bourdieu situates the gift within the liminality of habitus, his term for everyday dispositions and practices. Like Derrida, he shifts focus of the gift economy away from whether "generosity and disinterestedness are possible" and toward "the political question of the means that have to be implemented in order to create universes in which, as in gift economies, people have an interest in disinterestedness and generosity, or, rather, are durably disposed to respect these universally respected forms of respect for the universal."72 In other words, he shifts the frame of the gift away from innate drives and towards the conditions that dispose people to generosity. Under what conditions will generosity be rewarded? Is FOSS, for example, simply the necessary practice of people operating under software oligopolies, and are FOSSs affiliated conceptsopen access, open law, and so onsimply public sector responses to the encroachment of private sector initiatives to control and contain software development and its social extensions? Bourdieu explains where his theory of habitus differs from other major demarcations of gifting: The analysis of gifts that I put forward in Outline of a Theory of Practice and The Logic of Practice [...]departs from previous theories, in particular the phenomenological and structuralist ones, on three fundamental points: it makes room for time, or more precisely, for the time lag between gift and counter-gift, and for uncertainty; it brings in a theory of the agent and of action that makes the dispositions constituting the habitus, rather than consciousness or intention, the basis of practices; and it relates gift exchange to a quite specific logic, that of the economy of symbolic goods and the specific belief (illusion) that underlies it.73 The importance of the first pointthe deferral between gift and counter-giftis similar to that of Mauss and Derrida, but for Bourdieu the function of time in everyday practice is to "reintroduce uncertainty" and the rhythm of learned, habituated gestures and dispositions into a theoretical model of social interaction.74 Whereas Mauss assumes the triadic structure of gift giving, gift receiving, and gift reciprocation possesses a transparent sense of agency (an uninterrupted flow of social commitments in which there is no such thing as a free gift), Bourdieu's notion of habitus challenges the continuity of this model, the certainty that one always knows when one is giving a gift, when one is receiving a gift, and the direct reciprocation that must follow. Who is to say when an act The Disruptive Time of the Gift

158 of generosity becomes something else? Reading intent into a social interaction is always post facto. Instead, Bourdieu focuses on early education and lived experience and the way they inculcate certain dispositions "constantly demanded and reinforced by the group, and inscribed in the postures and gestures of the body."75 He explains: To be truly objective, an analysis of exchange of gifts, words, or challenges must allow for the fact that, far from unfolding mechanically, the series of acts which, apprehended from outside and after the event, appears as a cycle of reciprocity, presupposes a continuous creation and may be interrupted at any stage; and that each of the inaugural acts that sets it up is always liable to fall flat and so, for lack of a response, to be stripped retrospectively of its intentional meaning (the subjective truth of the gift can, as has been seen, only be realized in the counter-gift which consecrates it as such).76 Instead of the continuity of reciprocity, presumed after the event, Bourdieu reintroduces into the theory of the gift the uncertainty of each interval, each deferral of the gifting process, and he illustrates how the temporality of uncertainty exposes the misrecognition of the gift as such. As discussed above, an immediate response to the gift would expose a misrecognition of what the gift is all about: "The interval between gift and counter-gift is what allows a relation of exchange that is always liable to appear as irreversible, that is, both forced and self-interested, to be seen as reversible."77 In this deferral, then, is "the deliberate oversight, the collectively maintained and approved self-deception, without which the [gift] exchange could not function." 78 But for Bourdieu, this is intimately tied to power relations.Through this misrecognition, the dominant class perpetuates its dominance not by forced submission but by economic and cultural capital, symbolic power, which is reproduced through institutions and practices. The notion of habitus removes an individualistic notion of intention from the gifting formula and works instead with the production of dispositions that individual subjects are "spontaneously inclined to produce"79 because they are dispositions that subjects assume will be rewarded and become ingrained in the body by repeated practice. Such an analysis can help us understand FOSS practices with more nuance and political attention. Gabriella Coleman, for example, contends, in spite of a general "political agnosticism," FOSS hackers' propensities for "expressive rights" (based on libertarian desires to act and speak as one wishes online) "are compelling to programmers because they hold affinities with their technical habitus borne from 'practical' (as in meaningful, embodied, and collective action) experiences formed around the pragmatics of programming and the aesthetics of technical architectures."80 While Coleman's use of habitus echoes Michael Truscello

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Kelly's "recursive publics," the central flaw of these thinkers is their limited sense of habitus as simply the immediate technological encounter and the digital social sphere of FOSS programmers. But the application of habitus to FOSS programming reminds us how making time for radical imagining can be configured as a step away from habitus, from those postures we are "inclined to produce," if only to produce a moment of self-awareness. The everydayness, the taken-for-grantedness of our social reality, what Bourdieu calls the doxa, is the misrecognition of the power disparity and the concurrent reproduction of class-based dispensations that entrench inequality in social intercourse and peoples self-perceptions and bodily existence. And it is the embodied misrecognition, the internalized structures of the habitus, that combine with articulations of symbolic capital and the uncertainty of lived experience to shape the relational framework of the gift. In other words, the gift is never a pure or simple thing but always caught up not only in social power relations but also the way those power relations recreate and are recreated by bodies and subjects. This is a framework that draws attention to the field of social positions in which the grammar of the habitus produces dispositions toward certain forms of distinction. "In other words," he says, at the basis of generous action, the inaugural gift in a series of gifts, there is not the conscious intention (calculating or not) of an isolated individual but the disposition of the habitus, which is generosity and which tends, without explicit and express intention, toward the conservation and increase of symbolic capital.81 For the early development of FOSS language, licenses, and practices, Coleman's explanation seems agreeable: most FOSS practitioners probably learned to champion expressive rights, even as they proclaimed political agnosticism, largely based on the dispositions encouraged by their immediate technological lifeworld. But the expansion of the programming ecology beyond Western universities and corporations has created forms of habitus whose symbolic capital has less to do with Raymond's purified world of technological proficiency and more to do with what Geert Lovink characterizes as a "cultural turn" in FOSS. What was once a political agnosticism borne of relatively enclosed and homogeneous programming ecologies (dominated by middle-class, university-educated mostly white men in Silicon Valley) increasingly becomes with the spread of pervasive computing and the integration of software with politics, aesthetics, economics, and various other social fields an ecology of a global digital moment where software is no longer the plaything of a small fraction of society but an intimate part of the fabric of social life for billions of people. Exposed to a wider or at least different social space, FOSS programmers will have different unconscious investments, a different sense of their place in The Disruptive Time of the Gift

160 the greater ecology, and as a result will produce different practices and perceptions. The current moment, especially in the rhetorical liminality of software, reflects a transformational state, from Raymond's world of individualistic "homesteading" on the digital frontier to a much broader battle over the "commons" as the digital world becomes more tightly interlaced with the physical and social world. A radical imagination is required to bridge the transformation of FOSS computing from technolibertarian stock market bubbleblowing to anti-capitalist pin prick. Accursed Code: Bataille One of Raymond's central contentions is that the gift economy of Open Source satisfies the needs of social organization by satisfying the innate egotistical needs of the participants, a biological determinism that extends the principles of scarcity and competition to a variety of social fields beyond technology. But Mark Osteen, following Georges Bataille and Georg Simmel, argues the opposite: the gift is an expression of human freedom because it frees "givers and receivers from ego boundaries and rationality."82 Similarly, Antonio Calari describes this as the way in which the gift is "neither in economy, nor out of it, but in excess over it."83 While Raymond and the technolibertarians would reduce everything to competitive economy, the gift may more properly be said to operate beyond economy as a form of irreducible excess, or what Osteen describes as the gift's "superfluity": we cannot understand the gift if we persist in the idea that gifts are given and reciprocated by autonomous individuals. The superfluity that I earlier posited as an essential quality of the gift applies to personhood as well, because in giving and receiving we expand the self, paradoxically, by firmly attaching it to social relations. In so doing we render economic concepts of loss and gain inadequate.84 The excess of the gift destabilizes simplistic demarcations of selfish and altruistic behaviour because it expands the relational field of the self, disrupting the notion of any stable individual identity. This occurs in ways familiar to denizens of both the network society and poststructuralist thought. Invocations of scarcity economics must be bisected transversally, to assemble seemingly disparate categories and relations of subjectivity with the limiting disciplinarity of neoclassical economics. As Bataille argues in The Accursed Share, "economic science merely generalizes the isolated situation; it restricts its object to operations carried out with a view to a limited end, that of economic man."85 For Bataille, we must take a much broader view towards what he calls a "general economy" of the inexhaustible abundance of life and energy whose main problem is not the management of scarcity but the organization of waste Michael Truscello

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and excess. Raymond's determinism "merely generalizes the isolated situation" of (one side of) the talented technophile, assuming it to be the eternal human norm. The subject of a programmable everyday lifeworld would be better equipped to understand the full form and capacity of software by recognizing the larger ecology of its development and deployment. Ultimately the function of the gift's "superfluity" or "excess" suggests a concept of postmodern orientation that emerges from beyond the debate over proprietary versus nonproprietary software, the terms of which are still soundly entrenched in the legal and economic machinery of a system that favours corporate mobilizations over individual creators. This is where a demarcation of software that predicates the superfluity of the gift (in the most general sense, the very idea that meaningful exchanges occur routinely outside the prescribed rational boundaries of the commodity) could transform the discussion of software in a timely fashion. Aside from boosting a programmer's reputation within a narrowly defined subculture, gifting software creates excess that rearranges the constituents of the subculture: "For gifts are not only made by subjects but also make subjects; and all transactions are imbricated in the complex skein of made and withheld exchanges through which our fluctuating, convertible social identities are fashioned."86 In other words, the act of the FOSS gift does not stem from the isolated will of the hacker, nor is it merely a reflex of the FOSS subculture but, in addition to this, is inspired by the hackers whole habitus as it is intersected by environmental, social and economic power relations. In turn, the gift of FOSS not only transforms the software, it transforms the hacker, the entire FOSS ecology as a whole, and the broader world of which it is an increasingly important part. A recognition of this transversal power is an act of the radical imagination and could offer new means to radicalize and politicize the important though problematic sphere of FOSS activism. The question of the gift and its demarcative boundaries redounds across categories of software and everyday life. As software becomes ubiquitous, the circumference of its influence grows. The context for gifting in the development of FOSS expands concomitantly with the application of FOSS across the digital landscape more broadly. Contrary to many treatments of the book, Allan Stockl notes that George Batailles The Accursed Share is not a conventional Cold War document because it does not focus on the containment and defeat of the Soviet Union. Rather, "it recognizes the kinship of the U.S. system with that of the Sovietsthe individual has been subordinated in bothand it also affirms the necessity of the pressure the Soviets bring to bear."87 Stockl emphasizes the social and cultural effect of Batailles notion of the general economy, and wonders, "Is it possible, in the post-cold war context, to think of gift giving in these terms, as Bataille did in the early cold war context?"88 As FOSS spreads throughout the world, such a The Disruptive Time of the Gift

162 consideration of the cultural effects of free software gifting will not only become possible, it will become necessary. Indeed, Steven Weber suggests that the way in which Open Source "relies on a set of organizational structures to coordinate behavior around the problem of managing distributed innovation," none of which is "entirely new, unique to open source, or confined to the Internet," has "potentially broad consequences for economics and politics."89 Bataille's post-war elaboration of the principle of the general economy for the polis imagines the conflict between the U.S. and the Soviet Union as a clash of economies and not "the struggle of two military powers for hegemony." He goes on to suggest that "the Marshall Plan offers an organization of surplus against the accumulation of the Stalin plans."90 The Marshall Plan contributed $13 billion to the reconstruction of 16 European nations from 1948 to 1952, a century-defining act of international (capitalist) cooperation. While it may have been motivated by a fear that the Soviet Union would take advantage of devastation in Europe for the spread of communism, the Marshall Plan proved beneficial to the growth of international capitalism, the burgeoning U.S. economy, and its hegemonic apparatus. Whatever its precise motivations (and they were complex), the Plan had very significant geopolitical consequences: America's "return to Europe," if you will, which included a military presence in the form of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Bataille concludes The Accursed Share with a prophetic prediction based on the early implementation of the Marshall Plan: Mankind will move peacefully toward a general resolution of its problems only if this threat [the Soviet Union] causes the U.S. to assign a large share of the excessdeliberately and without returnto raising the global standard of living, economic activity thus giving the surplus energy produced an outlet other than war [.] But if the Americans abandon the specific character of the Marshall Plan, the idea of using a large share of the surplus for nonmilitary ends, this surplus will explode exactly where they will have decided it would.91 Will FOSS become the stateless Marshall Plan of this era? Will its distribution of surplus technological innovation and notions of property based on "the right to distribute, not the right to exclude"92 become the foundation for a politics of increased cooperation between individuals, as Bataille had hoped the Marshall Plan would? To answer that question, we must consider the actual contribution of the Marshall Plan. With hindsight, some observers, in particular Alan Milward in The Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1945-1951, have suggested Europe would have recovered on its own and the role of the Marshall Plan is overstated. The recovery of Western European economies was already under way in 1947, he argues: "In Michael Truscello

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purely technical terms, then, the Marshall Plan was not redundant but it was not the most vital single element in Europe's post-war reconstruction."93 And yet the Plan still contributed, for example, to the separation of Western and Eastern Europe, because Eastern Europe was prevented by Stalin from accepting aid, and it contributed to the decades of capitalist prosperity in Western Europe that followed. However, Tony Judt argues the real importance of the Marshall plan was, to use a term I attach to technicity and gifting, kairotic: The Marshall Plan was important not so much for its substance as for its timing (as its designers understood). The Marshall Plan [] was not just economic and political; it was also and perhaps above all psychological [.] Overcoming [this] widespread sense of gloom and incipient disaster and restoring public confidence was the first order of business [.] To that extent, the psychological boost provided by the Marshall Plan was much more important than the dollars themselves and was without a doubt absolutely necessary.94 It is in this sense that FOSS may become an analogous social phenomenon: the timing is right. Already observers have suggested perhaps the most important effect FOSS has had on the software industry is less economic than psychological, because for the first time in years a legitimate threat to Microsoft and co.'s dominance seems practical.95 Outside North America, several governments have sponsored FOSS initiatives and many of these initiatives explicitly intended to reduce the influence of American technocultural hegemony. Whatever the material reality of FOSS, its psychological impact is real and profound, and its public exposure has arguably coincided with a surge and consolidation of what Hardt and Negri call Empire. FOSS has emerged as an international rhetorical ecology in the wake of unprecedented technological dominance by American software companies, and an accelerated enclosure of the commons through increasingly (neo)liberal intellectual property laws. While many FOSS observers and advocates (such as Raymond) measure its success by the initial public offerings of for-profit companies spun-out of FOSS initiatives, the real gauge of its public is its initial offerings as disruptive gifts. The transversal trajectory of FOSS governance has the potential to produce dispositions within an everyday habitus that orient a greater number of people toward the symbolic power and reward of generosity. The key is the everyday category of repetition. It is central to the idea of habitus, and to what Michel Foucault and Henri Lefebvre call "dressage," or training. As FOSS becomes politicized and FOSS projects find their way into peoples everyday digital lives, there is hope that its sense of governance will affect greater numbers on the

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164 level of lived experience. This is different from education, but related. Lefebvre writes: To enter into a society, group or nationality is to accept values (that are taught), to learn a trade by following the right channels, but also to bend oneself (to be bent) to its ways. Which means to say: dressage. Humans break themselves in [se dressent] like animals. They learn to hold themselves. Dressage can go a long way: as far as breathing, movements, sex. It bases itself on repetition.96 The concept is very similar to Bourdieu's habitus. What this may mean for a vision of the "GPL society" is not necessarily a society in which the GNU General Public License or some derivative of it governs all spheres of life explicitly, but a society in which the dressage we now associate with FOSS, that of the transversal gift, governs the everyday organization of time, the everyday orientation to generosity, the everyday context in which other systems (capitalism, democracy, etc.) may continue to function but may be perceived as incongruent with the new popular disposition. To reiterate Bourdieu's thoughts, quoted earlier, the objective is "to create universes in which, as in gift economies, people have an interest in disinterestedness and generosity." This transformation need not take the form of a "plan" or licensing, though this has been tried with initiatives such as the Creative Commons project. It is something that becomes embodied and, in a sense, extra-political. As Lefebvre says, "Dressage puts into place an automatism of repetitions. But the circumstances are never exactly and absolutely the same, identical."97 Conclusion The negotiation of incommensurate concepts in the act of giftingshall I give/receive/sell/buy this gift/commodity as present/poison?is entirely situational and grounded in the habitual. But in charting the relationship between FOSS software and everyday life, temporality becomes an essential component and is typified by habit and lived experience. The programmable is repetitive by nature, but how it conforms to the rhythms of its context is another matter. How the programmer approaches the gift of FOSS cannot be prescribed analytically: It must be conceived actively, pragmatically, experientially. The gift, because it is an object of relationalitypart of a process of exchanges, obscures the relationship between cause and effect and therefore depends for its grounding and orientation on social demarcation. The primary distinction of FOSS from proprietary software, of course, is that the FOSS project can emerge at any time, for any reason, and need not be attached to corporate visions and capitalist cycles. In this way the impetus for FOSS project gifting begins in an undecidable moment, a discretionary moment, Michael Truscello

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of intersubjectivity, a publicly constituted moment more open to the radical imagination than the moments occurring in grey cubicles. By actively engaging software production at the level of everyday life and its rhythms and social heterogeneity, FOSS gifting must ground itself in an undecidable situation composed of gifts or commodities, presents or poison, sometimes giving, sometimes taking, depending on circumstances. It is this "dangerous phenomenon" that makes radical imagining in the technological society both possible and necessary. Mass forms of cooperation and communalism have existed and thrived in the past, and they may do so again.98 In the broadest sense, gifting matters to the current moment because our world has been subjected to decades of aggressive neoliberal economics and the cult of selfishness with which such an economic model is imbued. As social scientist Aafke E. Komter notes, "A culture or society deprived of all acts of gratitude will inevitably break down."99 Capitalist societies are breaking down. The collapse is most visible in the externalities of capitalist wealth creation: the ongoing environmental collapse is the most general indicator. The collapse will not be evident to most who live within the hegemonic boundaries of capitalism, so powerful is the spectacle that commits bodies to its miserable consensus, and the collapse will not be lamented by the victims of capitalism, so persistent has been their suffering. The FOSS project and its affiliated ideas must be seen within this context of a social war of attrition in which the first casualty is the ability of human beings to trust each other. FOSS gifting is among the easiest and more replicable forms of gifting, given that the primary sponsors of it are middle class programmers who often risk only their time. Radical possibilities may emerge, however, if the transversal gift of time becomes embedded in the social habitus, whether by desire or by necessity. Activists and theorists must turn their attention to the "how and why" of the FOSS gift, beyond the antiseptic dichotomy of "proprietary versus non-proprietary software," if a general ethic of generosity is to take hold in the political imagination of capitalist societies. More specifically, as Richard Day writes alluding to the work of Simon Critchley and Diane Elam, "These subtle currents of affinity and disaffinity point to the need for an ethic of infinite responsibility that pushes the basis for groundless solidarity to ever-greater levels of complexity and commitment."100 Endnotes Michael Truscello is an assistant professor in the departments of English and General Education at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. His publications have appeared in journals such as Postmodern Culture, Technical Communication Quarterly, and TEXT Technology. Currently, he is writing a book about technology in the anarchist tradition. He is also developing a
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documentary film called Capitalism Is The Crisis: Radical Politics in the Age of Austerity (www.capitalismisthecrisis.net). 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5q31ICQuFo 3 I extend an enormous amount of gratitude to Max Haiven for his astute and prolific editorial comments, which improved significantly the original draft of this article. 4 Winner, Langdon (1978) Autonomous Technology: Technics-Out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (p.88). 5 Ibid., Winner, p.81. 6 Ibid., Winner, p.84. 7 Ibid., Winner, p.89. 8 Khasnabish, Alex (2008) Zapatismo Beyond Borders: New Imaginations of Political Possibility. Toronto: University of Toronto Press (p.8). 9 Ibid., Khasnabish, p.8. 10 Quoted in Scott, Peter Dale (2007) The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press (p.243). 11 Ellul, Jacques (1967) The Technological Society. Trans. John Wilkinson. New York: Vintage Books. 12 Guattari, Felix (2001) The Three Ecologies. Trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton. New Brunswick, NJ: Athlone Press, (p.69). 13 Fuller, Matthew (2003) Behind the Blip: Essays on the Culture of Software. New York: Autonomedia, (p.24). 14 Weber, Steven (2004) The Success of Open Source. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, (p.3). 15 Ibid., Weber, p.vii. 16 Lessig, Lawrence (1999) Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. New York: Basic Books, (p.100). 17 Chopra, Samir, and Scott D. Dexter (2008) Decoding Liberation: The Promise of Free and Open Source Software. New York: Routledge, (p.xvi). 18 Ibid., Chopra and Dexter, p.xvi. 19 Ibid., Chopra and Dexter, p.xviii. See also Author (2003). 20 Ibid., Chopra and Dexter, p.28. 21 Ibid., Chopra and Dexter, p.33. 22 Ibid., Chopra and Dexter, p.170. 23 Ibid., Chopra and Dexter, pp.34-35. 24 Ibid., Chopra and Dexter, p.62. 25 Ibid., Chopra and Dexter, p.67. 26 Ibid., Chopra and Dexter, p.172. 27 Ibid., Chopra and Dexter, p.173. 28 Kelly, Christopher M. (2008) Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, (pp.7-8). 29 Ibid., Kelly, p.7. Michael Truscello

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Ibid., Kelly, p.77. Ibid., Kelly, p.306. 32 Ibid., Kelly, p.307. 33 Ibid., Kelly, p.308. 34 Soderberg, Johan (2008) Hacking Capitalism: The Free and Open Source Software Movement. New York: Routledge, (p.2). 35 Ibid., Soderberg, p.3. 36 Ibid., Soderberg, p.44. 37 Ibid., Soderberg, p.4. 38 Ibid., Soderberg, p.9. 39 Ibid., Soderberg, p.18. 40 Ibid., Soderberg, p.49. 41 Ibid., Soderberg, p.115. 42 Ibid., Soderberg, p.27. 43 Ibid., Soderberg, p.48. 44 Ibid., Soderberg, p.30. The gendering of FOSS communities, and computer science more generally, deserves further study, not only because of the overwhelmingly male constituency, but also because of the many ways in which computational devices are integral to the co-constitution of gendered subjectivity. 45 Ibid., Soderberg, p.142. 46 Ibid., Soderberg, p.72. 47 Ibid., Soderberg, p.142 (italics in original). 48 De Certeau, Michel (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, (p.25; italics in original). 49 Ibid., Certeau, p.25. 50 Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri (2004) Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin Press, (p.336). 51 Ibid., Hardt and Negri, pp.301-302. 52 Ibid., Hardt and Negri, pp.339-340. 53 Yan, Yunxiang (2002) "Unbalanced reciprocity: Asymmetrical gift giving and social hierarchy in rural China," in The Question of the Gift: Essays Across Disciplines. Mark Osteen, ed. New York: Routledge, (p.68). 54 Strathern, Marilyn (1988) The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, (p.xi). 55 Cixous, Hlne (1997) "Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays." The Logic of the Gift: Toward an Ethic of Generosity. Alan Schrift, ed. New York: Routledge, (p.159). 56 Lefebvre, Henri (2004) Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life. S. Elden and G. Moore, trans. London: Continuum, (p.30).
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My presumption that technology can somehow become more rhythmically in tune with everyday life is in direct contradiction with Lefebvre's presumption that "Technologies kill immediacy (unless the speed of cars, planes or automatic cameras pass for a return to the immediate; but that isn't saying much). The impact of technological conquests does not make the everyday any more alive; it nourishes ideology" (Rhythmanalysis 53; italics in original). I would say that any number of advances in medical and assistive technologies make the everyday "more alive" for a great number of people. More generally, though, by essentialising technology as inherently a carrier of ideology, capital, and alienation, Lefebvre ignores the many ways in which technology produces or mimics the natural (in the form of bioinformatics, or, say, a pacemaker), and he does not acknowledge the ways in which technology makes new forms of immediacy possible, even if they are forms of immediacy that are, paradoxically, mediated (such as the telephone, or the facets of computermediated communication). 58 Amariglio, John (2002) "Give the ghost a chance! A comrade's shadowy addendum." The Question of the Gift: Essays Across Disciplines. Mark Osteen, ed. New York: Routledge, (p.271). 59 Osteen, Mark (2002) "Introduction: Questions of the Gift." The Question of the Gift: Essays Across Disciplines. Mark Osteen, ed. New York: Routledge, (p.13). 60 iek, Slavoj. (2008) In Defense of Lost Causes. New York: Verso, (p.26). 61 Raymond, Eric S. (2001) The Cathedral & the Bazaar. Sebastapol, CA: O'Reilly and Associates, (p.109). 62 Ibid., Raymond, p.85. 63 Ibid., Raymond, p.80. 64 Ibid., Raymond, pp.80-81. 65 Ibid., Raymond, p.81 (italics in original). 66 Ibid., Raymond, p.107. 67 Mauss, Marcel (1990) The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. Trans. W.D. Halls. New York: Routledge, (pp.35-36). 68 Derrida, Jacques (1992) Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, (pp.6-7). 69 Ibid., Derrida, p.9. 70 Callari, A. (2002) "The ghost of the gift: The unlikelihood of economics." The Question of the Gift: Essays Across Disciplines. Mark Osteen, ed. New York: Routledge, (pp.249-250; italics in original). 71 Ibid., Derrida, p.41 (italics in original). 72 Bourdieu, Pierre (1997) "MarginaliaSome Additional Notes on the Gift." The Logic of the Gift: Toward an Ethic of Generosity. A. Schrift, ed. New York: Routledge, (p.240). 73 Ibid., Bourdieu, "Marginalia," p.231 (italics in original).
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Bourdieu, Pierre (1997) "Selections from The Logic of Practice." The Logic of the Gift: Toward an Ethic of Generosity. A. Schrift, ed. New York: Routledge, (p.192). 75 Ibid., Bourdieu, "Selections," p.196. 76 Ibid., Bourdieu, "Selections," p.197. 77 Ibid., Bourdieu, "Selections," p.198. 78 Ibid., Bourdieu, "Selections," p.198. 79 Ibid., Bourdieu, "Selections," p.201. 80 Coleman, Gabriella (2004) "The Political Agnosticism of Free and Open Source Software and the Inadvertent Politics of Contrast." Anthropological Quarterly 77.3 (p.511; italics in original). 81 Ibid., Bourdieu, "Marginalia," p.233 (italics in original). 82 Ibid., Osteen, p.27. 83 Callari, Antonio (2002) "The ghost of the gift: The unlikelihood of economics." The Question of the Gift: Essays Across Disciplines. Mark Osteen, ed. New York: Routledge, (p.258; italics in original). 84 Ibid., Osteen, p.33. 85 Bataille, Georges (1988) The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy. Vol. 1: Consumption. Trans. R. Hurley. New York: Zone Books, (p.23; italics in original). 86 Osteen, Mark (2002) "Gift or commodity?" The Question of the Gift: Essays Across Disciplines. M. Osteen, ed. New York: Routledge, (p.240). 87 Stockl, Allan (1997) "Bataille, Gift Giving, and the Cold War." The Logic of the Gift: Toward an Ethic of Generosity. A. Schrift, ed. New York: Routledge, (p.251). 88 Ibid., Stockl, p.245. 89 Ibid., Weber, p.224. 90 Ibid., Bataille, p.173. 91 Ibid., Bataille, p.187 (italics in original). 92 Ibid., Weber, p.1. 93 Judt, Tony (2001) "Introduction." The Marshall Plan: Fifty Years After. M. Schain, ed. New York: Palgrave, (p.6). 94 Ibid., Judt, pp.6-7. 95 Wilcox, J., A. Gilbert, and M. Riccuiti (2002) "Open Source Closes in on Microsoft." ZDNet 14 October 2002. Available online: http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-961903.html. Downloaded: 15 October 2002. 96 Ibid., Lefebvre, p.39. 97 Ibid., Lefebvre, p.40 (italics in original). 98 Curl, John (2009) For All The People: Uncovering the Hidden History of Cooperation, Cooperative Movements, and Communalism in America. Oakland, CA: PM Press.
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Komter, Aafke E. (2005) Social Solidarity and the Gift. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (p.8). 100 Day, Richard J.F. (2005) Gramsci is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements. London: Pluto Press, (p.199).
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Fuller, Matthew. (2003). Behind the Blip: Essays on the Culture of Software. New York: Autonomedia. Guattari, Felix. (2001). The Three Ecologies. New Brunswick, NJ: Athlone Press. Hardt, Michael, and Negri, Antonio. (2004). Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin Press. Judt, Tony. (2001). "Introduction." The Marshall Plan: Fifty Years After. M. Schain, ed. New York: Palgrave. 1-12. Kelly, Christopher M. (2008). Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Khasnabish, Alex. (2008). Zapatismo Beyond Borders: New Imaginations of Political Possibility. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press. Lefebvre, Henri. (2004). Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life. S. Elden and G. Moore, trans. London: Continuum. Lessig, Lawrence. (1999). Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. New York: Basic Books. Levi-Strauss, Claude. (1997). "Selections from Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss." The Logic of the Gift: Toward an Ethic of Generosity. A. Schrift, ed. New York: Routledge. 45-69. Mauss, Marcel. (1990). The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. Trans. W.D. Halls. New York: Routledge. Osteen, Mark. (2002). "Gift or commodity?" The Question of the Gift: Essays Across Disciplines. M. Osteen, ed. New York: Routledge. 229-247. Osteen, Mark. (2002). "Introduction: Questions of the Gift." The Question of the Gift: Essays Across Disciplines. Mark Osteen, ed. New York: Routledge. 1-42. Raymond, Eric S. (2001). The Cathedral & the Bazaar. Sebastapol, CA: O'Reilly and Associates. Scott, Peter Dale. (2007). The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Schrift, Allan. (1997). "Introduction: Why Gift?" The Logic of the Gift: Toward an Ethic of Generosity. A. Schrift, ed. New York: Routledge. 1-24. Soderberg, Johan. (2008). Hacking Capitalism: The Free and Open Source Software Movement. New York: Routledge. Stockl, Allan. (1997). "Bataille, Gift Giving, and the Cold War." The Logic of the Gift: Toward an Ethic of Generosity. A. Schrift, ed. New York: Routledge. 245-255. Strathern, Marilyn. (1988). The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Weber, Steven. (2004). The Success of Open Source. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP. Wilcox, J., A. Gilbert, and M. Riccuiti. (2002). "Open Source Closes in on Microsoft." ZDNet 14 October 2002. Available online: The Disruptive Time of the Gift

172 http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-961903.html. Downloaded: 15 October 2002. Winner, Langdon. (1978). Autonomous Technology: Technics-Out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Yan, Yunxiang. (2002). "Unbalanced reciprocity: Asymmetrical gift giving and social hierarchy in rural China," in The Question of the Gift: Essays Across Disciplines. Mark Osteen, ed. New York: Routledge. 67-84. Zizek, Slavoj. (2008). In Defense of Lost Causes. New York: Verso.

Michael Truscello, The Disruptive Time of the Gift: (Radical) Imagination at Work in Free and Open Source Software, Affinities: A Journal of Radical Theory, Culture, and Action, Volume 4, Number 2, Fall 2010, pp. 141-172.

Michael Truscello