Tiziana Terranova (2002), ÔThe degree zero of politics: virtual cultures and virtual social movementsÕ, Film-Philosophy, Feb 06.

Felix Stalder and Jesse Hirsh (2002), ÔOpen Source IntelligenceÕ, First Monday, volume 7, number 6, June, http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue7_6/stalder/index.html


In analysing the emergence of network-organised forms of political organisation, Tiziana Terranova sees mail lists as crucial to this development. They allow for connectivity and afford users the 'possibility to continuously formulate and reformulate the types of problems they wish to address on the basis of collectively produced information.' (2002) In this way, she argues that the Internet materialises 'general intellect': 'a collective assemblage of bodies and machines where connectivity implies the release of a surplus value of potential.' (2002) Of relevance to this argument is the early internet as a reinvention of the public sphere, as a participatory media, in turn to be recuperated to a greater or lesser degree. Terranova cites the independent news work of Indymedia in this regard, as an example of a relatively open force reflecting the needs of activists at the time of the protests in Seattle in 1999. This composition of this, and the protests in general, rejects the centralised of mainstream broadcast media for a position based on a rejection of a unified position.    
Terranova says: 'Calls for political unity under a single signifier are regularly opposed by those claiming that this unrepresentable diversity is the strength of such movements.' (2002) Networked technologies both reflect and serve this purpose as an extension of what the autonomists call a 'social factory'. Terranova is concerned with the split that occurred between cultural studies and political economy, and the notion of a 'stalled dialectics' in which the working class no longer can be seen to be the agents of social change. The challenge for intellectuals, and those working in Universities, is to engage in the public sphere without simply falling into the research and enterprise culture of capitalist renewal. This is where the concept of general intellect is useful arguably.

Although initially applied to the development of software, the collaborative gathering and analysis of information is somewhat reflected in the open source movement and what Felix Stalder and Jesse Hirsh call 'open Source Intelligence (2002). They point to open source principles of peer review, the free sharing of products, and flexible levels of involvement and responsibility - all derived from practice and the technical possibilities of the internet technologies in general (not merely the www) that facilitates free and easy information sharing among peers. In turn this relates to what Lawrence Lessig calls an 'innovation commons,' which partly explains the fast and effective growth of the internet itself (2001). The effectiveness of 'open source intelligence' is clear to see even under economic terms. Stalder and Hirsh's examples are more varied in scope: from the 'collaborative text filtering' of the nettime mail list itself running on the open source list package 'majordomo', to 'Wikipedia' the free encyclopedia built on open source principles and the technological platform of Wikiweb in which users can see the source code but also freely edit the content that is also archived and published under the GNU Free Document license. The link between social and technological structures are evident here suggesting that teh better and more open use of technology is both a requirement and reflection of society at large.