rejon.org is Jon Phillips.

This is an excerpt from my forthcoming book, CVS: Concurrency, Versioning, and Systems:

I prefer to exist in close proximity with various networks of interaction and structures of participation which enable people to understand complexity and relate to one another. The modern Western world, and particularly, American sentiment of the self-made individual, the epistemic subject and the myth of individual author is a dominant theme of the twentieth century. [1] This has been famously critiqued by Herbert Schiller in the 1970s as a primary media myth of the modern consumer’s “individuality” structured by mass media. [2] Also, Jack Stillinger in his book Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius notes that “the Romantic notion of single authorship is so widespread as to be nearly universal.” [3] This still echoes into these first years of our new era. The view espoused in this text however is both a practiced critique and a reshaping by network of the present hegemony of sole authorship; for it is provided in this book that all authorship is collaborative. This critique does not deny the importance of strong individuals. Hence, why I state that I, emphasis on self, prefer to exist closer to these networks of interaction. While a standard book might have one person’s name embossed onto the cover, or an artwork might be signed by an artist in Duchampian recognition of final versioning rights, this is an obfuscation of the multitude of events and associations providing the emergence of one version of a shared project, typically called a “final product.” [4]

Footnotes

[1] We should ask EO Wilson or Steven Johnson (Emergence. New York: Scribner, 2001.) what the ant is looking for.

[2] Geof Bowker and Susan Leigh Star. Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequence. (Cambridge: Mitpress, 1999).

[3] The tree structure is routinely used by projects like CAIDA (Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis) and representation of computer file hierarchies.

[4] Jack Stillinger. Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).

[5] Herbert Schiller. The Mind Managers. (Beacon Press, 1973), 8-11.