[Reader-list] Knowledge/Power/Tradition/Medicine/Coding

[Shuddhabrata Sengupta]

Some thoughts arising from the debate around the .NEt/Hailstorm initiative

There are two ways of looking at any practice of knowing the world.

1. All the necessary knowledge about the world, about the body, about 
anything that needs to be known, already exists, all that is required is 
falultless transmission from one custodian of knowledge to the next. What 
we need are 'authorised and legitimate versions'

2. The practice of knowing the world is mutable and conscious of its own 
incompleteness.

Under Attitude 1, Anything, in order to be accepted as true, needs to rely 
on the authority of precedence.
This, the 'authority of precedence' - the valuation of something on the 
grounds that it has existed prior to the knower and the known, is another 
way of talking about 'tradition'. When a product or process  asserts its 
presence on the strenght of its trademark, its logo, its reputation, even 
on the basis of its loyal adherents - we could say that it is relying on 
its being 'traditional' for a greater acceptance of its validity.

Under Attitude 2, Anything in order to be accepted as true, needs to have 
its truth claim tested against observation, experience, or against 
experimentation under controlled conditions. Attitude 2, does not need to 
have any commitment to any given statement 'that such and such a thing is 
true'. All it needs to be committed to is the manner of producing and 
verifying any statements that are provisionally called true. Not to the 
statement itself.

Why am I saying this? Because sometimes, both the votaries of Microsoft and 
the enthusiasts of 'Free Software' seem to me to succumb to the seductions 
of basing their arguments on the ground of Attitde 1.

It seems to me that the freezing of code under a propreitary regime, fits 
closely with what I have described as Attitude 1. Once a 'release' version 
of a code, is marketed, no modification on it may be performed, nor any 
doubts about its efficacy entertained, except by those who 'legally' own 
the code.

Paradoxically, the counter-cultural practitioners who say, " value what we 
do, becase 'we' as opposed to 'they', do it' , rely also on the emotional 
investment of adherents in a given way of doing some thing.Their truth 
claims need to be tested constantly by practice. I am not saying that this 
not indeed the case, in the free softwae milieu. The presence of user 
gorups and responsive communities as opposed to corporations of coders, is 
signal to this fact. But there is a tendency, nevertheless, to build an 
element in the worth of free software, not on the basis of its demonstrable 
efficacy, but on the identity that accrues from being part of the free 
software community. Microsoft when it wants to play on this terrain, tries 
to build what it calls 'brand loyalty'. This means, roughly something like 
this - "I will stick to using MS or Linux, not because it works, but 
because the decision to use one or the other has become a part of my 
definition of who I am". WHile there may be ahost of personal, affective 
and even ethical reasons for such a decision, they are no more than that. 
They are not arguments that priviledge usage, practicality or operational 
extensibility, or even, the openness of a code. They may have started off 
as that, but somewhere along the line, loyalty and tradition, things it is 
difficult to have a reasonable arugument about,seem to have taken over

Of course, propreitory software, cannot welcome Attitude 2, because it 
would not make any sense for it to entertain its own obsoloscence.

Tangentially, what Jeebesh has rightly criticised in 'modern' allopathic 
medicine, (its closed explanatory framework, the separation and 
hierarchization of 'user experience' and 'expert knowledge') may actually 
be a result of what I might risk calling the 'traditionalization' of modern 
medicine. By this, I mean the freezing of the mutable, experimental, 
provisional truths of the sciences of medicine under an institutional 
umbrella that demands fidelity, not doubt ,from its practitioners and 
clientele.

This is precisely what marks the diagnostic and practice methods of much 
of  'traditional medicine'. A particular treatment method or potion or 
potion-ritual combination is resorted to not because there is necessarily 
any demonstrable, causal link between the ministration of the treatment and 
the alleviations of symptoms, but because it has the sanction of authority, 
scripture, or ritual. If the treatment works, it works because the 'truth' 
it was a part of was actualising itself, through the healer, into the 
patient, if the treatment did not work, it was because the patient was not 
deserving of the treatment. In either case, the code, or the knowledge 
itslef does not need to be held into question.

Much of the everyday practice of modern medicine, also follows this 
'time-honoured' principle, in its encounters with illness.

When pharmaceutical companies, or software giants, spend more, or as much, 
on public relations and on protecting their patents as  they do on 
research, it means that they need and are working with the 'medicine-men' 
and 'witch-doctors' of our times. Perhaps there is an  increasing tendency 
in contemporary culture, of  taking recourse to the authority of 
precedence, as an answer to constant and everyday crises of meaning.

In such circumstances there might be an added necessity to speak very 
carefully, and very precisely, whenever we speak, and especially when we 
deploy the charged categories of contemporariness, or tradition, or free or 
unfree.

All I ask for is a little caution.

Shuddhabrata Sengupta
SARAI: The New Media Initiative
Centre for the Study of Developing Societies
29, Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 052, India
www.sarai.net