However, throwing around random Marxist buzzwords like "hegemonic control" and "commodity fetishism", and accusing Jeff Atwood of being an "unapologetic white supremacist" for a post that could be best described as Anglocentric, is a really pretty awful way of convincing anyone but those who already agree with you.

It appears that the author, rather than trying to improve anything, is merely trying to improve her own social capital in Marxist academic circles.

First of all, these words are not random. They're being used exactly how they're supposed to be used. Source: I read lots of Marx. I can explain any individual one to you if you'd like.

Secondly, one man's domain terms is another's 'buzzwords.' Domain terminology has value because it allows you to get to the point, once there's some amount of shared understanding. You need that understanding first, though, which I think is causing the friction here.

> is a really pretty awful way of convincing anyone but those who already agree with you.

I don't disagree, but I don't think the blog post is trying to convince anyone. As it says at the top, it's attempting to add a certain frame to the previous article: in this case, a Marxist one.

I say "I don't disagree" because, well, I actually disagree with Marx, but that doesn't hurt my understanding of the article, because I understand the terminology. It actually helps me grok the author's point and where they're coming from, because I can draw on previous bodies of work to help me understand.

> It appears that the author, rather than trying to improve anything, is merely > trying to improve her own social capital in Marxist academic circles.

What I find amusing about this statement is that in some ways, she would agree with you: the thrust of the article is a simple assertion that 'unpaid' labor is paid, just not in {the money commodity,money}. It's paid through social capital. And ignoring the relationship between who has access to and can produce each different kind of capital misses an important part of the analysis.

I am familiar with the notion of hegemony, and the assertion that Richard Stallman has hegemonic control over anything is laughable. Yes, he does have a certain amount of power based on his personal social capital, but it could not be described as any sort of hegemonic control over anything. Hegemonic control implies that you have implied force or economic powers that allow you to have indirect control over many people; his only "control" is people's respect for him and the strength of his opinions (as well as some direct power at the Free Software Foundation and GNU project, but that's fairly marginal in the wider world of FOSS; there's far more software and people working outside of the FSF and GNU structure than within it). Describing him as having hegemonic power is like describing any influential academic as having hegemonic power; I suppose I can see the analogy, but there's a huge difference between a nation-state using its force and economic power indirectly to shape the actions of other nations and someone being intellectually influential. Using the notion of "hegemonic power" for a person who is merely intellectually influential merely waters down the idea.

And I further take issue with the concluding paragraph that the lack of diversity in FOSS should not be seen as a bug, bur rather as a feature. Yes, I see where she's going with the notion that there are people who use their existing power as members of various privileged classes to be able to exert more leverage and derive economic benefits from their contribution to FOSS. But that just means that it's a feature for certain people; like DRM, something that is a feature for a few is a bug for many more. Likewise, just because some people take advantage of their privileges in the FOSS community, doesn't mean that allowing such privileges to be leveraged actually is a feature.

Wikipedia is pretty okay too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_fetishism

Basically, commodity fetishism is the notion that economics is about relationships between commodities, not about relationships between people. It's called 'fetishism' as an allusion to religions in which dolls come to life. Marx asserts that economics is about relationships between people, but since we focus so much on things, the things come to life, like a fetish, and become just as much a part of our notions of economics as people are.

It relates to OSS because of 'the fetishizing of the F/OSS community itself': the dozens of articles about how OSS is the best way to make software, the only good way to make software, that those who do OSS are better than those who don't. We animate this social relation and put it on the same footing as actual people. They're expressed through objects.

Does that start to make some sense?

Stallman is an example in the article, not the controller of the hegemony. The hegemony is of the fetish of Open Source. Stallman is just one person (I am very much another) who stands to benefit from the hegemony.

I understood 'bug, not a feature' in a different way than you. What I got out of it was that it's a structural, not accidental aspect of the system. She was attempting to bridge the culture gap by referencing hacker pop culture. This kind of commentary is very common in Marxism.

I'm going to go eat lunch now, I'll check back in on this discussion later. Thanks!

My reading of the above is that Stallman is exerting hegemonic control, thus being the (or possibly one of) the controllers of the hegemony. I agree with the original poster that this assertion is laughable at best.

But since the free software model was so successful, many people worked hard to remove its political associations, creating the open source movement. I think the real hegemony is the collection of existing power structures, which will always work to assimilate successful models.

It's important to think about who benefits in social interactions, but a useful analysis requires understanding particular historical details like the animosity between idealists and pragmatists in the FLOSS community. It might have been more useful to state that despite its idealiatic origins and the continued participation of people who want to address social problems with software, old structures of privilege continue to determine who benefits from social interactions. Anyone who disagrees with these privileges must take care to decide how best to work against them, because the default benefit is always to those who have inherited privileges.

In my personal experience as a (white, male, etc) OSS developer, the software I'm writing from my privileged position is used by and contributed to by lots of people with non-white and/or female names. As such, I believe the fact that I'm able to do my work (and derive an income from) OSS rather than commercial software, and thus reduce both the financial and the cultural barrier for people who want to use it, acts as a (minor) privilege-equalizing force from the perspective of users.

Self-congratulatory OSS circle jerks (which are indeed kind of common) are dumb. But the very fact that a field is dominated by privileged groups does not automatically make it evil.

FOSS runs on human values. As an analogy, if your village doesn't have good drinking water, and BigWaterCo isn't doing anything about it, you get together build a well, and then you try to keep BigWaterCo from taking it over. It's that simple. Not every single actor in the vast ecosystem acts from those motivations, but that's why the movement is there. (With the addition of: Don't wait until the water is bad.)

Many people get paid to work on FOSS, while others volunteer or treat it as a hobby. It may or may not bring money or "social capital" (a term used to try to frame "respect" as "money" and any group of cooperating people as an overly materialistic economy). The author's perspective is shallow and cynical. I imagine them seeing, "Built a well" on a villager's resume and thinking they finally understand why they went to all that trouble. It's to look good, and turn that into money!

No, it's to have clean water to drink, now and in the future.

But I'm just your typical member of the "able, white, cis, hetero male" category, so feel free to view my answer through the lens of whatever stereotypes are supposed to apply to that category. (Sorry, couldn't resist!)

http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html

I will agree that they didn't provide very much argument there, and I'm not willing to say anything about Jeff's character, but demanding that people only speak English has a history.

I think a flag would have supported your point better than a comment that simply decreases the level of discourse here.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcolonial_literature

There's social capital and there's financial capital. If you have a lot of financial capital, your willingness-to-pay for social capital is higher. If you're poor, your WTP for social capital is lower.

However, if you take social capital off its pedestal (which this article attempts to do) it's value as a commodity decreases.

1) I don't feel that all or even most open source developers do it for social capital. There are plenty of people who do it selfishly to scratch an itch, to learn , or because they are passionate about a project. There are lots of people toiling away on obscure open source projects that will never see any kind of social reward for what they do. And the social capital generated by closed source success is just as big if not greater than open source. Bill Gates or Zuckerberg could cash a lot of favors surely.

2) I agree that privileged people with free time are more able to do open source. But isn't even just being a programmer the same situation? Not every human has a computer and the time to learn how to program. So I don't really follow that this same constraint makes open source oppressive, any more than programming itself is oppressive.

3) Is Stallman really the best example of someone cashing in on all of that social capital? I don't know him , but he seems to live a pretty modest life. Has he made more money than he would have if he never did open source and just became a professor after going to MIT. Also , not sure if I would describe him having hegemonic control over open source discourse. As lots of people dont always see eye to eye with him.

I get that these criticisms are popping up now due to some people requiring github profiles for jobs, which I agree is not good. But outside of the HN / twitter bubble , not many companies are actually doing that. As the # of programmer jobs are increasing greatly ( partially I would say due to open source projects like rails & linux ), the # of programmer jobs that dont require a github are increasing faster than those that do.

Alot of the criticisms in the article are more criticisms of society and the economy in general. I think the solution looks more like fighting for basic income or something similar vs fighting for closed over open source softwares.

In life, guilt is optional.

If you think you're expected to understand something you don't, it's not your problem. [0]

Finally, the world is full of different people with different value systems: if you don't share someone else's, you don't have to invalidate it, you can just choose not to accept it. No one can judge you without your permission.

[0] http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/01/13/LawOfConve...

I think you're missing the point very slightly. The point is not that RMS is living the high life; the logic goes like this:

  1. FOSS is unpaid labor.
  2. RMS only works on Free software.
  3. Money is needed to live.
  4. RMS is alive
  5. Contradiction: RMS must make money somehow, therefore, FOSS is
  not entirely unpaid.

I don't think that many people here would disagree with this, 'social capital' is a pretty well-understood concept.

So, pointing out that FOSS is paid labor is basically just attacking a strawman. I suppose that a few people seem to be mistaken in thinking that their FOSS work is unpaid, despite all of the economic benefits they derive from it (like DHH recently), but I don't think that this perception is particularly widespread or really very harmful.

I would agree with you if that was the entire attack, but it's not. The article isn't making an attack. The point is that it's important to think about _who_ has access to social capital, and _who_ can produce social capital.

So, what's to be done? Is the solution to give up on FOSS? That's what this article seems to be arguing: "All it has done is shift the details and, indeed, done a much better job of disguising its exploitation of people. All while presenting itself as a ‘solution’." The article seems to argue that FOSS actually causes more oppression than it solves, and I have a hard time buying that.

One thing that it completely ignores is class distinctions. One of the things that FOSS allows is for anyone to produce a product without substantial investment of capital. Proprietary software is an owner's dream; invest a small amount upfront in developer's salary, and be able to reap unbounded rewards, as there is no unit cost for sales. FOSS allows anyone, without capital upfront, to create a competitive business, opening up opportunities that wouldn't otherwise exist for people who are middle and lower class.

Now, those benefits can be most easily reaped by people who have social capital in the community. But it seems that rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater, it would be better to figure out why there are such barriers to entry to people who are underrepresented in the community. While there are some cases where there are clearly people pushing others away, I feel like there's a lot more of simply a lack of awareness of what it is that is keeping people from joining and contributing to the community, and being able to build up social capital that way.

> One of the things that FOSS allows is for anyone to produce a product without substantial investment of capital.

Absolutely! This is actually very in line with Marx's thinking.

After reading your last paragraph, I think your issue is that you want more than the article is attempting to give. I agree, we absolutely need these kinds of answers. I just don't think that it was ever intended to be presented here.

So it's not just that I want more than the article gives (though I want that too; I would prefer that more potential solutions were presented), I'm also uncomfortable with the way it's framing the debate, indicating that this is an inherent failure in the FOSS model as opposed to a bug that should be fixed.

Just because it mentions an unjust situation doesn't mean that's the thrust of the article.

In any case that's definitely not the main point of the article - just an example of sloppy reasoning that struck me on reading it, which doesn't necessarily invalidate the whole.

http://tech.mit.edu/V121/N59/59stallman.59n.html

I think the HN articles of the past few days "We only hire people with Github accounts" demonstrate that those social rewards are real.

I don't even think that these things are good or bad, they're just human. And in a way, FOSS has lost its innocence and goes the path of all human endeavours.

Beyond that, I'm not totally convinced by the argument that women are incapable of leveraging unpaid work to gain future economic advantages. The last 50 years has seen a massive increase in the number of women doing this - work done towards a degree in a university is not only unpaid, but you actually have to pay for the right to do it (in many countries). Despite this, the proportion of degrees awarded to women has consistently increased and in many countries there are now more female graduates than male on an annual basis[1]. The argument that women are capable of passing 3-4 year degree courses but incapable of maintaining a Github account needs some further explanation.

As a cis/hetero/white/male human, my opinion has always been that, yeah, life is pretty awesome. Open source software is great and I'm hugely empowered by it. However, I genuinely would wish to see those benefits extended as widely as possible, and open source software has the potential to be a good tool for this purpose. FOSS does lack formal barriers to participation and the culture is still young and malleable. One of the things that the OP does is attack the rhetoric of open source, on the basis that claims to "openness" or "meritocracy" (not mentioned in the OP but often raised in these discussions) are misleading. I would accept that but I think it would be best to see this as a failure to live up to our ideals rather than as a deliberate obfuscation that masks the hidden agenda of oppression. If we want to challenge hackers on their behaviour, point out that behaving misogynistically is un-hackerish, that our commitment to openness needs to be backed by actions, that our values are best served by giving everyone the best possible chances to thrive in our community. The OP takes the view that the straight white men of the tech industry are perfectly happy with excluding those who are unlike them, to which my initial response is unprintable on a family website and my more measured response is that this is a blanket assertion that does not match my experience. It is certainly true of some people, but I think it would be better to isolate and exclude them, rather than start from the assumption that they represent the mainstream view of the community and that hacker culture is inherently sexist.

[1]: http://www.theguardian.com/education/datablog/2013/jan/29/ho...

I'm genuinely curious as to why. I'm quite befuddled by the social justice rhetoric that is so popular today. It's not that there aren't legitimate equality issues in need of solving, but a lot of people do not focus on these anymore. Rather, they're willing to point out supposed misogyny everywhere they go. Even when there isn't any.

The concept of "privilege", while doubtlessly real, is barely ever noted by the ones it actually affects. Instead it's typically used as a tool of demagoguery by the same privileged people to instill guilt into others, or just to demonstrate their perceived moral superiority.

But for the love of me, I cannot comprehend why one would have such a vendetta against something as benevolent as FOSS. Something that is meant to strengthen community, to encourage freedom of information and empowerment. To everyone. Not just white males.

Ah, but since most people working on FOSS are "privileged white males", then we must demonize the entire effort. Most programmers are "privileged white males", so this is only a natural consequence. I don't see what the problem is.

All that is stopping you from contributing is your programming skills. Software does not discriminate on basis of race, class or anything like that. All that matters is: "Can you program?" Then you have other positions like raising awareness and activism, which do not necessarily require programming aptitude.

But most people will counter that the culture of programming is fundamentally male-centric and misogynistic. Male-centric it is, given that most programmers are male. The same way nursing is female-centric. Misogynistic? No. But, whenever something even mildly offensive is said or done by a programmer, it is swallowed, regurgitated, swallowed again ad nauseum by news and media. Sometimes for no good reason, as in the Adria Richards case.

It's fallacious to assume that just because arbitrary quota X is not met, we need to alleviate the "issue" immediately. Yet this is how most people see it: an "issue" that can be fixed through affirmative action and ideological changes. What ideology? There is no single programmer ideology.

You know what I think is misogynistic? Assuming that women are weak, fragile and whenever someone makes joke in poor taste (such as Titstare), that we should immediately go up in arms and do something about all the poor oppressed women that were offended by this.

This is what happens when people use their primal emotions to guide their thinking. There is nothing wrong with being emotional, but this is ridiculous.

I absolutely think that most women are perfectly capable of handing whatever sexism they may encounter on their way in a rational manner. But it's not an institutional problem in software, it's something that certain individuals may display, sometimes not even deliberately.

Asinine social justice rhetoric only serves to fuel unwarranted anger against microaggressions. It weakens us all. It makes people actively look for oppression and offensive material in places where there aren't any.

Aye. Back in the day, if someone tried to flirt with a woman on the subway, she would brush it off and move on with her life. Today, she would go back to her home, open up her $1,200 MacBook Pro and write a blog article about how all of womankind is being systematically oppressed by privileged white men daily.

Please.

But for the love of me, I cannot comprehend why one would have such a vendetta against something as benevolent as FOSS. Something that is meant to strengthen community, to encourage freedom of information and empowerment. To everyone. Not just white males.

This, I 100% agree with. That's how I see it too, and I think the same applies to many of the values of the hacker community. We have built a community that works well for the people in it, and there is no inherent reason why that community should not be open to more people irrespective of demographics. What I was trying to say at the end of my earlier comment is that there's no benefit in trying to attack the entire community when most (I assume, based on my social circle) of us are very much in favour of as many people as possible joining and participating in the community.

You know what I think is misogynistic? Assuming that women are weak, fragile and whenever someone makes joke in poor taste (such as Titstare), that we should immediately go up in arms and do something about all the poor oppressed women that were offended by this.

OK, I see your point and yes, there have been overreactions to specific incidents that have made people rightly suspicious of claims of offence, but the majority of complaints are genuine and correctly describe behaviour that should be considered offensive by most people. Whilst women can be strong and ignore things that they find offensive, that does not mean that they should have to keep doing this. Let me put it another way: as a nerdy kid who wore glasses, there was always someone who thought they could be funny by insulting me about this. It clearly did not destroy me as a person, and I now consider it to be a valuable part of my identity, but that's very different from arguing that it's OK for people to be bullied for their personality or physical characteristics, or that they should just get over it and not try to stop it happening to others. It's bad, and if we have the chance to stop it, we should. I think if we're clear about what is and is not tolerable behaviour, it will actually become easier to dismiss the silly mistakes or accidental misunderstandings that occasionally get blown up.

Back in the day, if someone tried to flirt with a woman on the subway, she would brush it off and move on with her life. Today, she would go back to her home, open up her $1,200 MacBook Pro and write a blog article about how all of womankind is being systematically oppressed by privileged white men daily.

So, this I don't agree with. The woman in your example is entitled to her opinion, entitled to state it freely and can make her own conclusions about the social forces at play. If enough people agree with her, social change will occur. For my part, I tend to find being hassled in the street annoying, so I'd probably be in agreement with her. I do take the point that simply blaming "men" is wrong, and the suggestion that we're all involved in some kind of straight white male conspiracy does not make sense, but I don't think many people really argue that.

EDIT: some downvoter getting a little angry about a microagression?

I want to help people and do good by people. I work very hard to try to recognize my own prejudices and try get over them and not let them impact my relationships with people. I especially try very hard to treat people as the individuals they are and not assign attributes to them based on group membership, regardless of what that group is. I try not to give a whole lot of credence to any non-corporeal entities, and there are a LOT of them in our society. Corporations, governments, religions, etc. A lot of people want to act like "The United States Government" is a thing, or "Apple Inc" is a thing, or "the Philadelphia Eagles" is a thing, or "Catholicism" is a thing, or "Art" is a thing, or "Entrepreneurs" is a thing, or "Native Americans" is a thing. They aren't. They are collections of other, real things called people, but they themselves are not real things. They're just ideas. The people are what matter. The United States Government is a particular person in the seat of the President, and his name is Barack Obama, and a particular person in the seat of Vice President, and his name is Joe Biden, and 100 people in the seats of the Senate and 435 people in the seats of the House of Representatives, and a-bunch-of-other-people-I'm-intentionally-skipping-over-for-expedience-so-bring-out-the-internet-pedantic-nitpicking, and all of their particular names can easily be looked up. The point is, we talk a lot about "The X" as if it is one thing, as if it has one conscience, but it isn't. It's hundreds, thousands, millions of people, all trying to get shit done and go home at the end of the day.

The ability to give everyone their due and to not deny opportunities to people just because their personal makeup differs from mine can only be a net benefit for everyone. There are a lot of people who feel just like me. I've had to know a lot of people who aren't at all that way, too. But when someone writes about "white, cis, hetero men", they are lumping us all together. "white, cis, hetero man" isn't a person. In articles and books and talks crying about <strike>the lack of the</strike>[1] "white, cis, hetero man's" attempts to deny the identity of other cultures, they are guilty of nothing but the same. It makes it sound like we are part of the problem.

And it's incredibly frustrating. I know the "white, cis, hetero men" they are talking about. I want nothing of them either. It makes me want to pack my bags and go become a hermit.

It also fails to suggest any sort of solution. Having been involved in a couple of organizations that have tried to "increase their diversity", nobody ever has ideas, or if they have ideas, they are patronizingly transparent and rather prejudiced in their own way. So what are we "white, cis, hetero men" supposed to do? Are we supposed to quit making open source projects? Are we supposed to stop giving software away for free and stop feeling good about the real good that free software is doing for the world? Are we supposed to literally take knowledge out of the hands of poor children?

To the people who write these sorts of articles: you are saying that we're on the inside and the door is closed, barred against The Others. I'm saying I'm on the inside and I'm not doing anything to lock the door. Those other people are not accountable to me. I don't really even know anything about them, I'm too busy paying attention to my own corner. Hell, when I'm not busy actually doing the making of things, I'll hold that damn door wide open. Come on in. Multiculturalism is valuable? I need value in my projects. Bring it. Get your ass in the door.

But no, I'm not going out there to drag you in.

[1] EDIT: need to review my posts before submitting to make sure I don't end one half of a sentence with the other half of a different sentence.