Citation: Eglash, Ron and Banks, David. “Recursive Depth in Generative Spaces: Democratization in
Three Dimensions of Technosocial Self-organization”. Information Society, forthcoming.
Recursive Depth in Generative Spaces: Democratization in Three
Dimensions of Technosocial Self-organization
ABSTRACT
Kelty’s “recursive public” is defined as a binary: whether or not ownership of intellectual property
is legally in the public domain. We propose a broader continuum of recursive depth, which
spans the range from shallow constrained generative spaces (e.g. photo memes) to the deeply
open collaborations of “Critical Making” communities. Recursive depth is assessed by the
capacity for transformation across three distinct continuums: public/proprietary, virtual/material,
and high/low social power. Transformations across all three continuums is not always necessary
for deep recursion (as Kelty and others note for many cases of Open Source), but we argue that
paying attention to all three, and treating them as continuums rather than binaries, allows a
better evaluation of the capacity for democratizing the technosocial landscape.
Introduction
A tired software developer, despite her long day at work, begins a volunteer session of
coding for an Open Source1 project. A devoted Arduino2 enthusiast uploads an improved circuit
for sensing soil moisture, hoping it will inspire others in their “digital gardening.” A Black
classical music composer, concerned about the public’s misperceptions, begins a Wikipedia
entry on classical musicians of African heritage. What do all three have in common? All three
are examples of what we might call, using the terminology of Jonathan Zittrain, a “generative
1
We are using the term Open Source here, but recognize that Free Software is preferred by many
advocates for legitimate reasons, as noted in the discussion of Ubuntu Linux below.
2Arduino is an Open Source microprocessor that has spawned a surprisingly large community of lay and
professional users across the world.
1
space”: the network of digital devices and human ingenuity that allow freedom of innovation.
But not all generative spaces are created equal. Facebook, for example, has strong restrictions
limiting what users can exchange to a shallow “skin” of text and images. At the other end of the
gradient, Kelty (2008) describes Open Source Software as an especially deep form of
generative space: a “recursive public” in which the non-proprietary nature of its code contributes
to increasing expansions of publicly shared innovations. Building on Kelty’s term, this essay will
introduce the concept of “recursive depth”: a gradient that ranges from shallow exchanges that
do not advance innovation, to deep recursion that can expand the users’ generative capacity.
Although it is not a deterministic relationship, we aim to show that typically, deeper is better.
Deeply recursive systems tend towards more democratic control of our technosocial
environments; they tend to foster more socially just and materially sustainable ways of living.
Kelty’s “recursive public” is defined strictly in terms of whether or not the ownership is
legally in the public domain. We believe it is too narrow, in two respects. First, the either/or
binary – either it is purely located in a recursive public or not—is insufficient for describing the
variety of systems that lie on a continuum between deeply recursive systems that offer powerful
generative possibilities, and shallow facades that only offer a thin veneer of user-generated
content. Second, this broader construct—the continuum of “recursive depth”—will be more
useful if it is conceived as a gradient whose variation from shallow to deep depends on other
dimensions in addition to public ownership. The number of dimensions could be changed to suit
the focus of analysis; for the purposes of this essay we add two additional dimensions, drawing
on Ratto’s (2011) “Critical Making” framework.
Ratto notes that there is something special about our experiences with open-ended
technological construction: by providing the materials which encourage sufficiently powerful
forms of “tinkering” or “messing about,” we open the potential for an evolving bandwidth of
experience that allows profound exchanges between social, natural, and artificial worlds
(Bamberger, 1998; Caporael, Panichkul, & D, 1993; Ito et al., 2010; Resnick, Bruckman, &
2
Martin, 1996). Our passing mention of Arduino above is no accident; the entire global DIY
movement has been greatly empowered by Arduino: in part, to be sure, due to its Open Source
status (as Kelty would predict), but also because it lends itself to sufficiently powerful forms of
material tinkering.
Second, the process by which “critical making” occurs matters as much as the outcomes
or products. Ratto and others in the participatory design tradition (e.g. Schuler and Namioka
1993) are referring to specifically to workshops in which lay citizens apply the design experience
to investigate social questions; Agre (1997), Harding (1991) and Sengers et al (2005) focus on
experts incorporating critical perspectives; and still others combine these approaches (Bowen
2010); but we can expand that to refer to any design process advancing social justice aspects,
including the role of participant diversity. This stands in contrast to Kelty’s position that the
predominance of white males in Open Source development is irrelevant to defining a “recursive
public”. We agree with Kelty, insofar as he is providing the definition of a recursive public, but
that is precisely why we need a broader analysis in the case of recursive depth. Systems which
are more inclusive with respect to social justice--whether that is in terms of Ratto’s emphasis on
investigating social questions, or in terms of identity (as implied by our Black musician example
above), or in terms of some other basis--are “deeper” in the sense we define it here.
Thus our analysis examines recursive depth in three dimensions: transformations
across a public/proprietary divide (as Kelty notes for Open Source Software); transformations
across a virtual/material divide (as in our Arduino example above), and transformations across a
social power divide (as in the Black musician example above). While we do not claim that this is
an exhaustive list, we posit that an assessment of recursive depth along these three dimensions
provides a useful analytic tool in understanding the potential of generative spaces to provide
more democratic technosocial arrangements. The most deeply recursive systems--see for
example the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science (Wylie, Jalbert, Dosemagen,
3
and Ratto 2014) discussed in this volume--will be those that offer transformations across all
three dimensions.
[figure 1 – Recursive depth in three dimensions]
Recursive depth and the public/proprietary continuum
Recursion can be generally defined as a circular flow of information. Kelty’s phrase
“recursive public” was inspired specifically by recursive programming3 in computer science, but
3
In programing it is common to call a procedure to perform some operation. In recursive programming, a
procedure calls itself. Examples of recursion outside of programming abound: the Quaker Oats cereal box
4
we can think of it in the more general sense using analogies such as “self-sustaining
community,” “positive feedback loop” or any other way of thinking about a system that generates
its own conditions for flourishing. Kelty begins with the following:
“A recursive public is a public that is vitally concerned with the material and
practical maintenance and modification of the technical, legal, practical, and
conceptual means of its own existence as a public; it is a collective independent
of other forms of constituted power and is capable of speaking to existing forms
of power through the production of actually existing alternatives. Free Software is
one instance of this concept, both as it has emerged in the recent past and as it
undergoes transformation and differentiation in the near future” (P. 3, italics in
original.)
Lets see how this works in one specific “cascade” of development. In 1983, Richard
Stallman announced his GNU operating system project, eventually creating the General Public
License (GPL) for the purpose of providing legal protection that would keep it and its variants in
the public domain. In early 2000, Guido van Rossum took a new language his team had
developed, Python, and after “long wrestling discussions with Richard Stallman”4 placed it under
the “The Python Software Foundation License,” which added flexibility to open source status
restrictions under GPL: it allowed proprietary products to result from modified versions of the
open source code. At Lawrence Journal-World in 2003, developer Adrian Holovaty and intern
Simon Willison decided to use Python to create a new web application server called Django,
and eventually convinced their employers that both the corporation and the public would benefit
by releasing it as open source. In 2010 the Information for Community Oriented Municipal
picturing a breakfast table on which we see the Quaker Oats cereal box; DNA as a “self-replicating”
molecule, and so on.
4 See http://python-history.blogspot.com/2009/01/personal-history-part-2-cnri-and-beyond.html.
5
Services (ICOMMS) group at University of Cape Town in South Africa collaborated with a
variety of rural groups to envision low-cost technology for water monitoring. Based on these
results they combined Django with their own (Open Source) cell phone app to create the Water
Quality Management System for serving low-income communities (Champanis & Rivett, 2012).
What makes this Open Source developmental sequence different from some other
historical sequence of innovations? Doesn’t every creative act, including those with proprietary
intellectual property, make use of a chain of prior developments? There are three important
characteristics we can illuminate that distinguish recursive depth from other cascades of
invention.
Deep layers versus shallow chains
Consider a trivial chain of innovations such as an Internet “meme”; for example one in
which users provide many different captions for the same photo, such as the popular “Hilary
Clinton on her cell phone” image. It is true that such a photo meme sequence might spawn
other sequences, innovations or activities, but taken by itself,
we have only the same single photo of Hillary Clinton in
which the caption has been modified and re-modified
hundreds of times (see Figure 2). It may be open in the
sense that users contribute, but there is little sense of depth.
In other words, depth is not a function of the number of links
in an innovation chain. Rather, depth is built in layers, each
with the potential for generating capacity for innovation. Even
in the case of performative Internet memes, such as “planking” (wherein someone lies face
down in strange and unique locations and shares photographic evidence of the act on the
Internet), new capacity for self-expression is not being created; the creativity necessary for
planking in a new or unique place does little (except up the ante) to enable others
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to creatively express themselves (Banks 2011). Stallman’s original GNU project has had little
direct use because it was overshadowed by Linus Torvalds’ release of Linux, but Torvald’s
contribution was originally just the operating system “kernel;” there was actually far more GNU
code in the Linux system than code created by Torvald.5 The layers of recursive depth allow for
mutations that evolve. A shallow chain such as photo memes might “go viral”, but it's an
evolutionary dead-end.
Even shallower than photo memes are services that may provide entertainment and give
the option of sharing a creation within the confines of the system, but they do not give the user
any access to changing the components of system itself. Zynga’s FarmVille is a good example.
FarmVille invites users to build a farm and share it with fellow users in a social network. Users
can make countless permutations of cows, corn, and fences but users cannot upload new
objects or images, create links, or in any way inject their own creativity other than re-organizing
the pre-made components. It is important to recognize that FarmVille is recursively shallow for
this reason, and not simply because it is proprietary. In contrast, Google’s App Inventor can
produce similarly simplistic games, but allows users to build and share a wide variety of things
and functionalities, and even sell them commercially if they so desire. A sociotechnical system
can have recursive depth in the sense we are using here, but still produce proprietary products.
Finally, we note that sociotechnical systems with increased recursive depth are not
always and automatically powerful change agents. Something that has significant recursive
depth can be used for trivial purposes (e.g. an Arduino watering house plants), while something
that does not go beyond a shallow chain can play a significant role in changing the world [see
for example Maureen Dowd’s (2012) feminist analysis of a Hillary Clinton photo meme]. But we
do mean to suggest that there is a general tendency: the deeper the recursion, the greater the
opportunities for significant social change.
5
See http://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html.
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Deep but also broad
What is perhaps most striking about Open Source is its ability to build “upon itself” into a
semi-autonomous alternative arrangement; one with a synthesis of legal, technical and social
attributes that can flourish even when interacting with more dominant competing forms. This
relationship, between the burgeoning alternative and the surrounding status quo, is so
fundamental to radical change that even a Marxist like David Harvey can agree with an
anarchist (David Graber) when he says,
“Temporary bubbles of autonomy must gradually turn into permanent, free
communities. However, in order to do so, those communities cannot exist in total
isolation; neither can they have a purely confrontational relation with everyone
around them. They have to have some way to engage with larger, economic,
social or political systems that surround them. This is the trickiest question
because it has proved extremely difficult for those organized on radically
democratic lines to so integrate themselves in any meaningful way in larger
structures without having to make endless compromises in their founding
principles.” (quoting Graeber, 2009; Harvey, 2012, p. 126)
It is no short or uncertain leap to apply this to, for example, Ubuntu Linux. On Ubuntu’s
“about us” page is a quote from the Free Software Foundation’s “What is Free Software”
document. It states,
▪
The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
▪
The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing
as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
▪
The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
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▪
The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By
doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes.
Access to the source code is a precondition for this. (“What is free software?,” 2012)
As Ubuntu competes with proprietary operating systems like OS X and Windows, they
must find ways to offer access to less-than-open software offered by Facebook, Apple, and
others. As an open source project, it must strive to keep its code open. But as a company (and,
as one could argue, social movement) interested in growing its “install base,” it must find ways
to give users access to popular services that run counter to their stated philosophy. This
tension, between visionary beliefs and pragmatic action, adds a kind of “breadth” aspect of
“recursive depth.” The deeper the recursion in any given example (as we will demonstrate), the
greater the potential for generative activity that reaches outside the confines of the original
system. Failure to provide that breadth produces an isolated silo which might be admirable in its
purity, but ineffective in offering a platform for broader technosocial change.
Depth and transformations across a continuum
The third characteristic is the relation of this recursive depth to potential transformations
across a divide. Without these transformations, the divide can perpetuate social inequity, nonsustainable relations with the environment, or other undesirable configurations. Enabling these
transformations will also enable the self-generative activity that sustains them. Advocates for
open source, for example, are concerned with the public/proprietary divide: if ownership of a
technology or resource is strictly proprietary, but the need it fulfills is public, the divide can
prevent its self-generative use as “public that is vitally concerned with the... means of its own
existence as a public.” Here we support the contention that this is a critical divide to be
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concerned with, but add the caveat that it is not the only divide. As we move across the gradient
from restrictive divisions to free transformations we increase the potential for recursive depth.
Maintaining the material and practical means of a group of like-minded people is a
prominent theme in classic as well as contemporary social theory. Marx, for example, was
concerned not just with the struggle of the working class, but their tendency, as workers, to
maintain the very material conditions that classified them as such. For Marx, capitalism is a
recursive anti-public; a self-reinforcing condition in which workers endlessly labor to generate
value they do not own, and thus reproduce the conditions which keep them ensnared. But the
Marxist credo, “seizing the means of production” offers too narrow a conception of how to
reverse this process. Authoritarian regimes like the USSR showed how it is possible to have
workers laboring under miserable conditions in “the people’s factory.”
Open Source advocates, on the other hand, have a more complex relation to capitalism:
recall that van Rossum’s licensing innovation was to both keep Python as open source, but
allow innovators the option to develop new modifications or extensions of Python as proprietary
forms. Had the proprietary option been lacking, the developers at Lawrence Journal-World could
not have justified working on Django--but it was this same flexibility that helped them convince
their employers to release it as Open Source, and thus make it available to ICOMMS’s lowincome community technology. Such dynamics suggest a more expansive vision for the
relations of production, rights and civil life than the Marxist framework; one that is more
reminiscent of the anarchist tradition.
The earliest town planning literature, written by the anarchist Ebenezer Howard, was an
attempt to organize the built environment in such a way that it fostered economic and social
relationships that reflected radically democratic politics. Howard saw himself as an inventor, not
a planner; his “Garden City” vision was meant to balance individual freedom with the sort of
social organization necessary for a just allocation of resources. Not merely the “thin democracy”
of voting for representatives, but a “strong democracy” (Barber, 1984) in which citizens--not
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unelected power brokers such as corporate CEOs--could control the basic conditions of their
lifeways. As Giovanni Sartori (1987) notes, a strong democracy would consider not only the
“input side” of democratic decision-making, but also the “the output side”: a society without
protection against minority discrimination, deprivation in economic and educational opportunity,
vast health disparities and other symptoms of social failure cannot be considered a successful
democracy. The challenge of this deeper sense of what it means to “democratize” such basic
features of life without state ownership is at the heart of many anti-authoritarian social
movements.
If this seems like too great a burden to place on the single issue of the public/proprietary
continuum, then you correctly understand our argument. Recursive depth is accessed by its
ability to facilitate transformations across three important continua. The open source movement
has identified the public/proprietary continuum as one that is critical. In the next section we will
introduce two that are equally important: the virtual/material continuum, and the social power
continuum. Our claim is not that these three continua (public/proprietary, virtual/material, and
social power) are exhaustive; but we do maintain that together they make up a powerful whole,
and that their distinctions provide a strong basis for analysis.
Recursive depth and the virtual/material continuum
Returning briefly to the original example--the open source water quality cell phone app
for use by low-income rural communities--the three continua would appear as follows. As Open
Source code, it facilitates transfers across the public/proprietary continuum, motivating the large
community of contributors and allowing free access to the required technologies. As a response
to issues in rural African communities, it facilitates transfers across a social continuum, bringing
resources such as enhanced monitoring capabilities to underserved groups. But it is the third
continuum, in which water quality information is brought “online,” that allows the first two to
come together.
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In one sense, the third continuum is simply about facilitating transfers across the
material/virtual divide. At the shallow side, we can think of the virtual and material as strictly
divided; at the other end, devices such as GPS, motion sensors, environmental sensors,
augmented reality overlays, haptic interfaces, servomechanisms, appliance control modules,
and smart materials fuse bits and atoms together. But this sense that the virtual and material
are strictly divided is problematic to begin with. It tends to lead to what Jurgenson (2012)
describes as “digital dualism.” Using the term “augmented reality” (originally introduced to
describe virtual overlays of physical environments), Jurgenson describes the difference in
perspective by comparing two popular science fiction films:
“…digital dualists conceptualize the Web similar to the film The Matrix (1999)
where the on and offline are separate spaces. Alternatively, the augmented reality
perspective holds that our reality is the blurring of the on and offline, perhaps best
exemplified in film by Cronenberg’s body-horror film Videodrome (1983) that
illustrates the implosion of technology, media and the material body.” (Jurgenson
2012, p.85).
Jurgenson’s argument that the virtual and material are (to paraphrase Derrida) “always
already” fused certainly avoids digital dualism, but it does so at the expense of losing the ability
to describe what is special about innovations that deepen the generative capabilities such as
citizen sensing and Arduino microcontrollers. Incorporating Jugenson’s critique into our model,
we can then posit that at the shallow end, virtual/material relations are over-determined or
“fixed” in highly restrictive ways. Facebook is indeed “material” in many aspects—for example
its $700 million dollar server farm has to be located next to a hydroelectric dam for cooling—but
such material-virtual relationships are not available for user transformations. Arduino, at the
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other end of the continuum, is remarkable precisely because it offers such profound flexibility for
how its users configure its relations of atoms and bits.
Movements along this continuum between rigidly fixed virtual-material relations, and those
that are open to user transformations are not always at the will or to the benefit of all involved. In
the recent Occupy movement, for example, civil libertarians emphasized the advantages of
transparency and documenting action, while those more oriented towards subversive political
actions and/or the privacy of historically oppressed groups are less inclined to have their actions
recorded (D. Anderson, 2011; Jurgenson, 2011). Recursion is essentially a feedback loop from
the self, back to the self: helping artists take charge of their own creations, giving medical
patients more information about their treatment, giving workers control over their labor
conditions, communities more say about their environment, and so forth. The nature of
democratization--and hence recursive depth--is inherently one of dealing with conflicting
agendas, perspectives and motivations.
As we noted previously, FarmVille is shallow because of the nearly complete lack of
generative capacity; photo memes are slightly deeper because users can apply their creativity
to the caption. Allowing users the ability to generate and share their own photos opens up new
“bandwidth” to user creativity. Hence the significance of “planking”--the practice of posting a
photo of someone (usually the poster) lying stiff like a plank. The profusion of creative variations
on this simple theme has been impressive: planking across the back of two camels, atop a
police car, inside a supermarket freezer, and so on. But there is little building of depth; the
creative acts may be competitive but generally remain separated. In contrast, Chris Anderson
(2011) notes that some user communities have built innovative depth through YouTube
exchanges: skateboarders, for example, learning new tricks, techniques and challenges--which
in turn have offered new social opportunities; e.g. alternative forms of masculinity (Yochim,
2009). Greater recursive depth across the virtual/material continuum is not necessarily a matter
of “media bandwidth”: consider, for example, RepRap, an Open Source project for home-built
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3D printers. Most of the sharing is lower bandwidth than YouTube--essentially just text files with
many lines of CAD code. But it has impressive generative depth across the continuum between
fixed and transformable virtual/material relations: the machines can render physical versions of
virtual designs ranging from fly swatters to desk handles, and (most recursively) is even capable
of creating most of its own parts.
Another advantage to thinking about this dimension as a continuum from inflexible
divisions to reconfigurable transformations is that it helps us look deeper into the deceptively
simple contrast of online and offline. The first use of "online" was in 1926, where it was
introduced to describe something that was "situated on the route of a railway line" or "in use on
a railway line" (Oxford English Dictionary 2013). We still tend to think about the online/offline
distinction as this type of rigid dichotomy, but the reason it is a continuum rather than a
dichotomy should be obvious to anyone in the case of the Internet: most users are well aware
that a slow or spotty connection only leaves you “partly online,” unable to access media or
services requiring large bandwidth. In many of the developing nations of the world, “security
concerns” make PayPal and other financial services unavailable, even for fast connections
(Burrell, 2012).
Making virtual/material relations available in more flexible, fluid ways can offer a profound
generative depth. Consider the Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Newtork (CUWiN).
Founded in 2000 with a small group of local volunteers, CUWiN has gained a global following
that combines researchers and community activists. The generative layers characteristic of
recursive depth are prominent: the organization has built “several next-generation
communication networks that allow people to share bandwidth, publish media, and disseminate
information by creating mesh, ad-hoc wireless networks throughout a geographical area using
off-the-shelf wireless hardware” (Meinrath, 2005, p. 228). Exhibiting breadth as well as this
generative depth, CUWiN has now morphed into the Commotion Wireless Project; a “platform
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that integrates users’ existing cell phones, Wi-Fi enabled computers, and other wireless-capable
devices to create community- and metro scale, peer-to-peer communication networks”
(“Background and philosophy,” 2012). This sociotechnical system exists at the “more
transformable” end of the continuum, where its flexibility for virtual/material relations allows an
expanding user base to increase the generative capacity.
Finally, we note that this concept of virtual/material continuum, with fixed relations at one
end and fluidity at the other, need not be confined to digital systems. Moving between the world
of virtual representation—speech, text, diagrams, paintings, blueprints, etc.—and the world of
physical rendering is a ubiquitous feature of human society, and many have mastered the
flexibility needed for generative capacity. Lansing and Kremer (1993) describe how Balinese
rice farmers combine spiritual beliefs, ecological knowledge, and representational forms such as
the wooden “tika” calendar to collaboratively schedule interlocking irrigation patterns. Despite
the potential for conflict over water, this adaptive synthesis of virtual and material aspects allows
them to do so without any centralized authority. Orstom (1990) found many cases of such
“common pool resources”--herding livestock, distributing water, etc.-- in which traditional
societies avoid an ecological “tragedy of the commons”6 by collective-choice arrangements that
combine egalitarian participation with mutual monitoring, similar in spirit to many Open Source
communities. Ecologically sustainable resource management requires deep recursion7, or as
Orstom puts it, layers of “adaptive governance” achieved over many generations but constantly
renewed and revised.
Historic examples of a “tragedy of the commons” are actually rare, and when they occur it is often due to
abuse of authority, not its lack. Colin Ward (1997) for example has noted that private property rights
instituted under Franco disrupted or completely supplanted the traditional communal control over water
rights in Spain that had previously ensured reliable access to water.
7 In some cases this indigenous recursion is physically apparent (Eglash 1999); in others it is only visible
through modeling (Lansing and Kremer 1993).
6
15
Thus we can best understand this dimension of recursive depth as shallow at the end in
which virtual/material relations are in fixed, rigid divisions, and deep at the end in which
transformations of virtual/material relations are easily facilitated, whether that is bringing more
grazing area “online” to a community’s common pool resources, more people online to
participate in collective action, or other varieties of generative capacity through technologies that
offer new forms of virtual/material hybridity.
Recursive depth and the social power divide
So far we have discussed the ways in which recursive depth can facilitate
transformations across the public/proprietary divide (using the case of Open Source), as well as
across the virtual/material divide (in the case of CUWiN). In this section we consider
transformations across the divide between low social power and high social power.
The public/proprietary distinction is well defined thanks to the legal profession, and even
virtual/material can be nailed down when we measure technological specifics such as sensor
resolution. But the social worlds we inhabit are very diverse: a single individual can have high
social power with respect to wealth, low social power with respect to sexual orientation,
somewhere in the middle regarding race, and so on. Nor do we need to think about social power
solely in terms of personal identity: some institutions have more power than others, some
geographic communities have more power than others; and so on.
Traditionally social scientists have followed Weber in defining social power as the ability
to control the behavior of others (with or without their consent), with a focus on formal authority.
More recently the influence of theorists such as Foucault and Lukes has added emphasis on the
informal, intangible aspects of power; for example the ways in which our “common sense”
beliefs and norms create forms of obedience. Gene Sharp’s From Dictatorship to Democracy
(2012), which outlines the ways in which nonviolent struggle can use the power of disbelief, has
been an important influence on anti-authoritarian movements ranging from Eastern Europe to
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the Arab Spring (Stolberg, 2011). It's hard to imagine a better case for transformation across a
social power divide.
Eglash et al (2004) describe a specific class of transformations across the social power
continuum under the rubric of “appropriated technologies.” These are cases in which some
technological artifact or scientific practice is created by professionals (generally with high social
power), and then reinterpreted, repurposed, or reinvented by laypersons (generally with lower
social power). Our analysis here of recursive depth in relation to social power is broader than
that, but it is useful to start with cases of appropriation and see how the three attributes of
recursive depth play out. For example, how are the ideas and practices of nonviolent revolution
in revolts such as the Arab Spring enabled or constrained by appropriation of Information and
Communication Technologies (ICTs)?
The appropriation of ICTs is a particularly profound area to examine transformations of
social power, even previous to the Internet age. The 1989 Tiananmen Square protesters, for
example, utilized a Pixilator, which allows video transmission over a phone line, an 8mm
camera hidden in a shoebox tied to a bicycle, and a portable satellite uplink left over from CNN
coverage of Gorbachev (Fang, 1997). Similar appropriations of ICT for social transformation
have occurred during the 1992 "fax revolution" in the Seychelles, the distribution of video
cameras to residents of South African black townships during apartheid, the use of church copy
machines by East German dissident groups, et cetera (Comor, 1994; Jones, 1994; Lazar,
2008).
While it may seem that little technological modification is taking place in some of these
cases, Eglash et al (2004) note that appropriation is not restricted to physical reinvention.
“Reinterpretation” is often conceptual and symbolic; an empowering change in meaning. For
example, consider how Latina cultural theorist Gloria Anzeldua (1987, p. 184) described her
writing practice: “I sit here before my computer, Amiguita, my altar on top of the monitor with the
Virgen de Coatlalopeuh candle and copal incense burning.” The computer itself is physically
17
unchanged, but its presence in the home has been conceptually (and spiritually) appropriated.
Even when physical changes are required for some local adaptation, they can be easy to
overlook. In the historic case cited above of East German dissident groups using church copy
machines, a range of strategic adaptations were required to disguise the suspicious delivery of
additional paper. The authors have some experience with the creative adaptations that are
required to bring laptops to low-tech indigenous communities: places for public gathering
(including schools) are usually lit with sunlight, which means laptop screens are very difficult to
see; security is suddenly an issue in ways it was not previously; the distance between the place
where the laptops are used and where electricity is available can be a significant challenge; and
the rickety wooden tables that are standard in rural schools in developing nations can rapidly
convert netbooks into useless bricks.
In many accounts of the Arab Spring revolutions, we tend to see either skepticism that
ICTs made any difference at all (Béchir Ayari, 2011; Gladwell, 2011), or claims that the shallow
recursion of Facebook and twitter was all the added ingredients needed. But with an eye
towards the deeper recursion of appropriated technologies, we get a better understanding of the
relations between social change and ICT systems. Rather than a spontaneous viral spread in
response to the immediate events of 2010, a better starting point for the 2011 Arab Spring
revolutions would be 1998, when a small group of Tunisians began a website call “Takriz”
(which roughly translates to the British “bollocks to that”). Their mix of aggressive irreverence
and demands for open Internet access brought the wrath of dictator Ben Ali, and by 2000 their
website was blocked and many members went into exile (Graziano, 2012). The censorship and
repression merely inspired more ICT adaptation and appropriation, as explained by Sami ben
Gharbia, co-founder of Nawaat, an early Tunisian citizen journalism website:
18
The role of the Internet in the Tunisian revolution, and building the spirit of protest
and change, is the work of at least a decade. After the blocking of the first
Tunisian websites in late 1990s, Tunisian activists who then became bloggers
were engaged in defending online freedom of expression. They were very
creative in using technology in countering the propaganda of the state and to
raise their hands against the lies and the corrupted system. They used many
tools, tactics and strategies and were very good at building networks inside the
Arab world. These networks helped, at least during the Tunisian protests, to
create a support and solidarity movement within the Arab web-sphere (quoted in
Randeree, 2011).
Thus the self-generative layers indicative of recursive depth were certainly present8.
Breadth extending from these layers was also critical. Takriz, for example, formed an alliance in
1999 with groups of extreme soccer fans called “Ultras,” hosting a web forum that helped to
spread a more politicized form of soccer fandom to youth in other North African nations (Pollock,
2011). Thus the outpouring of some of the youth into street fighting against police and military
during the Arab Spring has largely unacknowledged connections to creative adaptations of ICT.
But this breadth of the layers includes nonviolent activism as well. Following his online support
for an Egyptian textile strike on April 6, 2008, engineer Ahmed Maher was arrested and beaten.
Undeterred, he founded Academy of Change, an Arabic online group promoting nonviolent civil
disobedience, which sent a representative to train in Serbia. He returned with a copy of Gene
Sharp’s From Dictatorship to Democracy, as well as an Open Source game for nonviolent
regime change, which was quickly converted into an Egyptian version. Other outward
Many of these appropriations were “interlacing” layers of shallow recursion: patiently searching planespotter sites to create an exposé of the dictator’s wife Leila using the presidential jet to go shopping;
adding videos of human rights testimony to the YouTube layers of Google Earth and Google Maps; and
charting Tunisia's prisons.
8
19
extensions of the self-generative layers included artists such as “El Général,”” a middle-class
Tunisian rapper who streamed ““soundtracks for the revolution,” and Tamer Shaaban, an
Egyptian-American film-maker whose January 2011 video montage of violence against Egyptian
protesters went viral.
Thus what appeared to be a spontaneous media-fueled revolution--the shallow recursion
of a “freedom meme” (Howard et al., 2011) virally spread by Facebook and Twitter--was actually
the outcome of a decade of networks which leveraged the power of recursive depth for
transformations across the social power continuum.
Of course, as we noted in the introduction to this section, social power is highly multidimensional: what might be a win against dictatorship is not automatically a win for feminism,
tolerance of religious minorities, etc. Indeed we consider the Takriz promotion of physical
violence to be disempowering in many ways9, and Takriz itself is still highly critical of the postrevolution Tunisian government, which it sees as harboring repressive ideologies similar to its
predecessors. Other examples of the use of recursive depth in transformations across the social
power continuum might have greater ideological clarity. The US women’s health movement of
the 1970s, for example, linked a self-generative accumulation of knowledge, practices and
technologies that revolutionized the gender politics of medical care (Weisman, 1998). In the last
two decades, the rise of social entrepreneurship has accomplished impressive development
feats and perhaps even hint at the possibility of alternative formations of capitalism (Santos,
2009). But the decade of ICT “creative misuse” leading to the Arab Spring, despite its political
ambiguities, also stands out as an interweaving between recursive depth and social
transformation in unforgettable ways.
Conclusion
9
For example, the more violent a protest action or resistance movement, the less it invites democratic
participation by all citizens.
20
In proposing the concept of recursive depth, we seek to contribute to discussions of
technosocial systems in two ways. On the one hand, it offers a simple, intuitive term for
describing the difference between deep generative spaces such as Open Source, and the
shallow playing field of something like Facebook. On the other hand, we believe that by
breaking down recursive depth into 3 attributes, and showing how it is applied to
transformations across 3 continua, it can be used as an analytic tool to compare and contrast
the nuances between different systems, and perhaps even offer some prescriptive
recommendations.
Two comments from Kelty’s Two Bits were the inspiration for creating our concept of
recursive depth, and thus we close with them. The first was his caution against confusing social
media with recursive publics: “In the last few years, talk of ‘social software’… has dominated…
discussions: Wikipedia, MySpace, Flickr, and YouTube, for example…. But they are not (yet)
what I would identify as recursive publics.” Recursive public tends to be a binary dichotomy-either you are one or you are not--in part because it is based on legal definitions that require
decisive categorization. Recursive depth, on the other hand, is deliberately conceived as a
gradient: thus Open Source is deeper than Wikipedia, which is deeper than Flickr. Wikipedia
does have layered generative capacity, but in ways that are vastly more constrained than Open
Source. However even shallow chains of innovation, such as Flickr’s photo sharing, can
become a layered component in a deeper recursive system.
That is the case in the generative capacity of the Arab Spring ICT appropriations: recall
that in order to post photographic evidence of the first lady in her luxury shopping trip they
scoured websites created by “plane spotters,” whose recreational activity is focused on taking
unauthorized photos of commercial aircraft (Koppel, 2008). Thus a relatively shallow recursive
chain of photo sharing allowed the Takriz group to generate politically powerful transformations
across the virtual/material continuum; one layer in the accumulation of a deeper recursion. One
drawback to such “recursive ad-hocracy” is that the depth--its growing repertoire of techniques
21
and practices--is tenuously patched together by the agency of particular individuals. In contrast,
if Richard Stallman or Linus Torvalds died tomorrow, the GNU/Lunix software would live on. But
this difference in “obduracy” (Hommels, 2005) is a matter of degree: even Open Source
software must be constantly updated to keep pace with changes in the Internet ecology, and
those who discover that their code is no longer compatible with a popular browser, plug-in or
operating system must either rally the human resources to update the code, or risk destroying
the crucial breadth requirement of recursive depth.
The second comment from Kelty was regarding the role of recursive publics in facilitating
transformations across the social power continuum:
Concepts of the public sphere have been roundly critiqued in the last twenty
years for presuming that such “equality of access" is sufficient to achieve
representation, when in fact other contextual factors (race, class, sex) inherently
weight the representative power of different participants. But these are two
different and overlapping problems: one cannot solve the problem of pernicious,
invisible forms of inequality unless one first solves the problem of ensuring a
certain kind of structural publicity.
To Kelty’s credit, it does at first seem reasonable to posit that powerful tools against
social inequality need to exist prior to using them. But to cast tools versus the social effects they
create as a linear sequence puts us on the slippery slope of “ends justify the means.” It is better
to view the relation as chicken and egg. From Emma Goldman10 and Ghandi to M.L. King and
Gene Sharp, the anti-authoritarian tradition has opposed this separation of ends and means. It
is for this reason that recursive depth deliberately includes “transformations across the social
10
In her early years Goldman did not show any disapproval of revolutionary violence, but she later came
to realize its self-defeating nature: “Even if it accomplishes what it sets out to do — which it rarely does —
it brings so many evils in its wake as to defeat its original aim” (1923, letter to Bayard Boyesen).
22
divide” as one of the 3 continua it in which it is accessed. Indeed the very notion of recursion
should problematize the thinking that sees chicken and egg as a paradox. The acronym “GNU”
stands for “GNU’s Not Unix.” What does the acronym “GNU” represent in that defining
sentence? It stands for “GNU’s Not Unix”--and so on “down the stack.” Recursion means more
than just “many iterations”; it is a way of understanding self-generation as a fundamental
principle of self-governance: one which can be deliberately “engineered” for making things more
public, democratizing access, and facilitating transformations across all social continua.
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Figure 2
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