
FOSS and the sublimation of commodity fetishism - lukaseder
http://blog.satifice.com/2013/11/16/foss-and-the-sublimation-of-commodity-fetishism/
======
lambda
So, the social and economic context of FOSS, especially in light of things
like DHH's article about how he doesn't believe in paid contribution to FOSS
(despite, well, being paid to contribute to RoR) and Chris Anderson's post
about requiring a GitHub account is certainly a worthy topic of discussion.

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.

~~~
steveklabnik
> throwing around random Marxist buzzwords

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.

~~~
lambda
So, I'm not terribly familiar with the idea of commodity fetishism, but for
the sake of argument, I'll buy that it's domain terminology that has value. If
you could explain how it helps describe the situation in the FOSS community,
that would be helpful.

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.

~~~
steveklabnik
Primary source on commodity fetishism:
[http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm#...](http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm#S4)

Wikipedia is pretty okay too:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_fetishism](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!

~~~
blotto
"Given that he is still alive and has a thriving career based on exerting
hegemonic control over F/OSS discours"

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.

~~~
ewzimm
If Stallman were able to exert hegemonic control, we would not be using words
like FOSS, and software development would focus on solving social problems.
Stallman is vocal about his Socialism and spends most of his time addressing
political issues. Anyone can see this clearly on stallman.org.

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.

------
marijn
First, I agree that using an OSS portfolio as a hiring filter is sure to
reinforce existing privileges. But I do find articles like this which try to
attach a stigma of oppression and exploitation to OSS as a concept rather
distasteful.

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.

------
dgreensp
The author objectifies and distorts FOSS quite a bit in order to shape it into
a target for a critique of capitalism. You can criticizes anything as being
soulless if you remove the soul!

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!)

------
davexunit
What a garbage article. Several articles likes this have been posted here
lately. The idea that FOSS is a tool for oppression by privileged, white men
is laughable.

~~~
steveklabnik
DH0, then DH3. You can do better!

[http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html](http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html)

~~~
davexunit
I would be inclined to agree with you. Yes, my post was reactionary, but I
don't really feel like expending much effort on an article that calls Jeff
Atwood a white supremacist. Sometimes my patience runs thin.

~~~
steveklabnik
Of course, that's just a footnote. But they're calling forth a long tradition
of an entire academic field, 'postcolonialism,'[1] which specifically
discusses things like how currency, culture, and language were used by
colonialist powers in order to subjugate native peoples in their colonies.

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](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcolonial_literature)

------
grimtrigger
I think the article points to an important point, but also a fundamental
conundrum.

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.

------
utnick
Here are my rambling thoughts on the article, happy to discuss.

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.

------
nateabele
To anyone who feels attacked by this article, here are three things to keep in
mind:

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...](http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/01/13/LawOfConversation)

------
sethev
The strangest bit of this article for me was the choice of RMS as an example
of profiting from open source. And the evidence of that is that he's not
homeless and he hasn't died of starvation. By that logic wait-staff at the
Waffle House are also enriching themselves.

~~~
steveklabnik
> By that logic wait-staff at the Waffle House are also enriching themselves.

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.
    

Note that this works for the Waffle House as well, but there's no
contradiction, as their waged labor is obviously paid, so Step 1 is different.

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

~~~
lambda
I don't know who really still believes that FOSS is unpaid labor. It is
generally paid in the form of better jobs available based on your record, paid
support, being paid to do it incidentally as part of your job, or even being
paid directly to work on it.

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.

~~~
steveklabnik
> pointing out that FOSS is paid labor is basically just attacking a strawman.

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.

~~~
lambda
OK, so the FOSS community consists primarily of people in already privileged
groups (white English speaking men), and they are best suited to be able to
take advantage of it.

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.

~~~
steveklabnik
I don't think this article attempts to provide solutions, only to 'add
framing' to the problem.

> 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.

~~~
lambda
Well, I think the article is explicitly going in the wrong direction,
criticizing the basic idea of FOSS for causing these problems. The article
seems to claim that because FOSS relies on labor that is unpaid upfront but
rewarded by social capital, that it is inherently going to produce worse
outcomes for less privileged groups. And I don't buy that.

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.

------
droob
If a bunch of folks pitch in to build a communal well, are they being
exploited by perceived "social rewards"?

~~~
vkou
The point this article makes, is that FOSS are not exploited - but rather,
that FOSS is a very effective way for the privileged and financially secure to
gain social capital.

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

~~~
steveklabnik
To be clear: within a Marxist framework, the only way to gain capital is to
exploit others. So your second half is correct, but your first half is wrong,
unless (which I suspect you are) that you're using a different definition of
exploitation than the article.

------
rjknight
I don't find too much to disagree with in the observations made in the post,
but I'm not sure what useful conclusions emerge. It's clear that women are
under-represented and this needs to be addressed. The OP doesn't really
suggest how this might be done and appears to be more interested in assigning
blame (which is not actually particularly Marxist thing to do; after all, it
was Marx who said that "the philosophers have only interpreted the world in
various ways - the point is to change it").

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...](http://www.theguardian.com/education/datablog/2013/jan/29/how-
many-men-and-women-are-studying-at-my-university)

~~~
vezzy-fnord
_It 's clear that women are under-represented and this needs to be addressed._

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.

~~~
sanskritabelt
Go back to Reddit.

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

~~~
vezzy-fnord
Excuse me for not putting a "trigger warning", as seems to be the recent
trend.

------
moron4hire
I throw up a huge red flag (and usually just bomb out of the article
completely) whenever I see someone using the word "cisgender", because
experience has taught me that all it has in store is a lot of complaining
about something without any suggestions of fixes. Here is why:

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.

