Bring Back Grimmy

As I get feedback from various people and have more extensive conversations about my Exit Strategy piece, I am beginning to realize what really bothers me about the novel. The primary thing that disturbed me (which is also in my analysis) is the fact that the novel was already published in its complete form before it was "open-sourced" and that the users were only able to add comments and make no substantial changes to the main text, for sure. I feel that my objection for the use of the term "open-source" for this project may be because I have hung out with hackers (in the true sense of the term) too much lately due to my research, and I got a bit specific about my understanding of the terms  hacker and hack, and developed a keen understanding of what an open-source project might mean. I realized this when I was talking to a colleague last week from journalism/telecommunication and saw a bunch of books on hackers on his shelf. He told me that he too was doing research on "hackers." Surprised, I asked him what he could be possibly using them for. I mean, journalism, online journalism… Hackers might come up only in a few occasions, such as election results getting hacked or something. And he told me that he was using this term very generally as someone who is proficient in using electronic technologies and someone who has a more comprehensive understanding of their use. Well in that case, I am a hacker too! For some reason, without knowing why, I got a bit defensive about it. Perhaps another term would be much more effective and less objectionable. Why this term, as sexy as it is?

When I was talking to a hacker friend of mine from Second Life asking if my understanding of the term open-source was wrong and whether Linux worked differently than how I thought it did, he too had a similar reaction to the idea. Well, he was a bit more conservative than I was. He simply said that an open-source novel ceases to be a novel because it would be more like a scenario or a story. For him this idea is impossible. I, on the other hand, would beg to differ, but I would object to this novel being one. When I inquired more, he explained that the novel is a finished product, like a house. He said that even if a bunch of people worked on finishing the house, it wouldn’t be an open-source house, it would be a house that is collaboratively built, and that for him, is all together a different story. For open-source to work, he said, individuals should be able to make changes to the blue-print, modify it for different purposes (appropriate), and redistribute it freely onto others for different uses, who in turn, will do the same thing. So the house itself can’t be open-sourced, but its blue print can… As far as I can tell, none of this has happened in Exit Strategy. It wasn’t appropriated differently by its readers or distributed onto others who do not own the copyright.

So there is a semantic slippage between collaborative writing and open-sourcing. When I was reading Douglas’s interview on Assignment Zero and crowd sourcing (a concept which he finds problematic, rightfully I might add) I sensed a similar slippage. So this point will be included in my revision of this section.

My next post will be on Eric Rice’s Saijo City in Second Life, he has more of a open-source approach to fiction writing. But I need to look at it more in detail… So stay tuned.

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