After another day of discussing open access and open peer-review, I come home to find Oakland looking like Tahrir Square on livestream. How do we evaluate our tools, on- and off-line, as the situation changes and as the state becomes more and more willing to use force? Once again, it’s time to think of Audre Lorde’s injunction “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”

Oakland

Oakland Commune

Today was advertised as “move-in day,” when Occupy Oakland was to reoccupy an abandoned building. Looking at the streaming pictures, first impressions are that the police were forewarned of their target and came heavily armed with smoke bombs–some say tear gas–and there are reports of rubber bullets after they declared “unlawful assembly.” So much for the First Amendment, then.

From what I have seen the Occupy people have been non-violent–although abusing the police is being classified as “assault” these days. No doubt the media will report a “violent” clash with arrests, if they report it at all. The situation is still unclear but it looks as if there won’t in fact be a reoccupation. Infiltration by police agents was a better tool today than occupation. On the other hand, the excessive and almost casual resort to force may give Occupy as a whole a new impetus.

Net choices

I’m getting much of my information on Oakland from Twitter, as has become the norm over the past year. Yesterday, however, Twitter seemed to take a far more cautious position in relation to internal censorship than it has in the past, promising to abide by local laws in countries where there are “different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression.” What has become a critical tool of horizontal expression seems under threat.

By the same token, we were all struck at the peer-to-peer meeting when every person present cracked open a Mac to begin work. Given the latest revelations of appalling working conditions at Apple’s Chinese factories, some are now calling for a boycott. And then there are the phones that we use to coordinate activities: the same reports show that all major phone brands are made at places like Foxconn in China and that there are no phones made to decent labor or environmental standards. The long-standing call for open-source software seems to need a hardware counterpart that would require resources that only a state could mobilize. How about it Finland?

In the likely continued absence of such hardware options, how about software tools? In our discussions today, a distinction emerged between open access and open review. The latter might not be in the end too much of a disruption to current vertical patterns of gatekeeping. There’s an argument that it might even increase requirements for seemingly permanent review of everything by everyone.

Open access is different. When we see a company like Oxford University Press giving established writers contracts deeming their work “for hire,” and thus totally the intellectual property of the press, it’s time for a change. Steven Shaviro, the writer in question, points out the convergence at work across the “knowledge economy”:

Writers would become “knowledge workers” whose output belonged to the press that published them (or to the university at which they worked, in another variant of the scenario) in the same way that code written on the job at Microsoft, Apple, or Google belongs to those companies, and not to the writers themselves.

The conclusion he came to, along with many others on Facebook and elsewhere, was not only that one cannot write for such presses but also that we should not assign their books. Oxford’s UK counterparts Cambridge University Press have taken to renting articles on a daily basis–no printing permitted.

The alternative is free publication, using open source software and online distribution. Open Humanities Press is the model. Yet even OHP has retained the double-blind peer review. Today, some felt that for the humanities monograph, there was as yet no real alternative. If that’s right, which it may well be, I suspect that’s because the “master’s house,” the vertical university, has no space for alternative tools. Just as in other areas of economic activity, the rhetorics of scarcity and austerity are used to sustain and reinforce intense competition among the aspirant workforce.

It’s an open question as to whether there’s one last “bubble” in the post-2008 economy: higher education. The very noticeable extent of participation in Occupy by graduates and post-graduates suggests that for the user, it already has done. We need to prepare our tools not for an ever expanding system but for one that places value on equality.