Course Description:
This course deals with models of cultural practice and production based on distributed authorship and exemplified in the contemporary world by open source software development. While such models have often been affirmed as pointing to a utopian “democracy of the multitude,” there are also accounts associating them to the need of late capitalist assemblages to be flexible and rhizomatic in coping with fast-changing market situations. We will review major theorizations and develop a new understanding based on related theories of time, mediation, and futurity (Bergson, Deleuze) as well as attempts to connect open source culture to an economy of contribution where its utopian elements become “pharmacological” (Stiegler).