I’m so pleased that David Berry came through with a response to the WordPress/Google Adwords controversy, and in double-quick time too. By way of introduction (filched from his homepage on the Sussex University website):

David M. Berry is a doctoral candidate at the University of Sussex, exploring the critical political economy of free/libre/open-source culture. The thesis is titled: ‘The Democratic Potential of the Internet: A political economy of open source and free software’. David also founded the underground electronica record label LOCA records. This experiments with copyleft and open-source releases on vinyl and CD influenced by the Free Software and Open Source movements. His latest project, together with Giles Moss, is the Libre Society Manifesto. This explores and researches issues around informational-capitalism and technology and the implications for society of a wider application of Free/Libre and Open Source ideas.

This is what David had to say on the relationships between FLOSS politics, ethics and the almighty dollar (neoliberal creative industries types be warned):

Open source and free software projects are built primarily on a shared understanding of certain norms of behaviour that mediate the disconnected and distributed nature of the projects. However, these norms are often unspecified, or rather like a ‘gentleman’s understanding’ or a ‘handshake’ have the assumption that all parties to a project share a set of beliefs and values, which is often little more than a myth. The Internet is a diverse and globally heterogeneous ethical space that somehow the technology dampens in our day to day dealings. Perhaps through a crystallisation of technologists ‘non-ethics’ ethics shaping code or a seemingly ‘neutral’ technology mediating interactions seeming to disconnect ethics and the technical. When issues like the word-press debacle occur, suddenly the whole unstable foundation of a globally distributed open source community will be thrown open, and unsurprisingly a complete plethora of ethical positions and warring parties suddenly appear. One could call this, following Carl Schmitt, a technical ‘state of exception’, a situation under which the normal functioning of an open-source project is thrown into disarray and there is no clear way of making a decision about what should be done. For Schmitt, this is when the true sovereignty is discovered, when the real power behind the discourse of community, freedom and democracy are uncovered. Thus if the lead developer simply over-rules the community, perhaps deletes the forum and wiki’s and centralises control then we realize that it was never the kind of community project it was purported to be (e.g. the Benevolent Dictator of some open source projects). If on the other hand the community of users and developers’ deliberations are taken seriously and implemented then the sovereignty lies with them (the idea of ‘Our’ project perhaps). It will be interesting to see how this ‘event’ develops.

But first it is important to be clear. Neither open source nor free software lies outside of capitalism. The pressures of necessity mean that we are forced to go out and work for a living. Consequently the pressures on developers and website owners to commercialise, or to allow portions of their blogs to be colonised by capital is extremely high. Indeed, it is through the action of necessity that we are enslaved and forced to compromise ethics. There is no outside of capital anymore (as Hardt & Negri argue in Multitude), and the pressures of corporations to make a profit and to subsume any other values to the market will be powerful. The notions of a shared ethic in relation to many online sites are a developing area, constantly being pulled to and fro, as it is transformed from a commons of peer-produced content to a consumer market where everything is for sale. Asking whether sites that get involved in ‘gaming Google’ should or should not be penalised by an imagined community of the Internet is beside the point, we should be asking whether the Web is worth fighting for as a commons, a shared space of interaction and communication, of common human intellect and social life. These ‘crises’ act as signifiers, denoting a much more malign and dangerous transformation ? the continuing and intensifying commercialisation of the web, the way that big business is seeking to undermine and shape the protocols that structure online life (e.g. code, tcp/ip) and the communities that develop from them, and finally the privatisation of our social life so that instead of mediated through love and friendship it is mediated through contract and money. These developments can only be halted and reversed by action in the ‘political’, reinvesting our communicative lives with the power to take decisions on issues within the world. As Arendt argues, it is only through Action, the political, that a World can appear.