The hacker ethic is not an orthodoxy but a heterogeneous set of approaches that strives to continuously and creatively disrupt totalising narratives, whether they are expressed as politics or protocols. In turn, the critical hacktivist is truly critical in Foucault’s sense of an anti-foundationalist critique. Foucault said that any discourse of Truth has a normalising effect on subjects and is therefore a form of domination. So we can’t apply an alternative universal truth (even of universal rights) as basis for critique because that will only induce a new form of normalisation. The challenge that’s always thrown at this is how to act without a firm foundation. I will speculate that one answer is artizan science; an experimental activity that is critical in both senses (Freire and Foucault). It’s a flickering compass in the hands of its practitioners, an empirical method without pretensions to universality, without the need to deny the validity of all claims and practices other than its own.

Dan McQuillan at Journal of Peer Production. STRIATION

Via P2P Foundation

(via protoslacker)