Frankly, this is funny, but also disturbing. Boingboing.net continues to post articles like this one about how they oppose censorship of dissent in foreign countries like China:

Boing Boing: Chinese govt. rejects blue-headed Mao in Colors magazine

But, Boingboing.net refused to post a submitted story about the freEtech 2007 (un)conference because it was too critical of O'Reilly publishing. Since Cory Doctorow is on the board of the ETech conference, you can expect any criticism of O'Reilly to be omitted from Boingboing so that he can protect his status with O'Reilly. Despite claiming to be a supporter of democracy, for example by being on the board of the Democracy net tv player, Cory is apparently against dissent when it comes to endangering his own fame.

Click read more to read Cory's reply and my reply to him...

technorati tags:linux, gnulinux, freesoftware, opensource, boingboing, slashdot, feminism, postcolonialism, sandiego, etech, hacking, hacklab, race, gender, racism, classism

Boingboings claim that they support, for example, free music sharing based on the premise tht the more people that hear the music the more useful it is. Still, they apparently don't support the idea of making the Etech conference free. I proposed that it could be free just for San Diego residents, since most attendees are flown in from out of town by their employers, but I got no reply.

Here's my original link suggestion for a BoingBoing.net story:

Hola, I'm working with some folks in San Diego who are proposing to set up a free (un)conference space the day before etech begins in san diego. If there's interest and people sign-up, we'll get the space the net connection and the power. It wouldn't be much fun by ourselves, so please help us get the word out! Here's the announcement about the event:
http://publish.sandiego.indymedia.org/wiki/sdshacklab/show/FreeTechUnconference
also posted here:
http://deletetheborder.org/lotu5

Here's Cory's reply:

Cory Doctorow wrote:
I was interested in posting this until I saw that it was a total slam
against O'Reilly, and not an effort to provide an adjunct activity. Your
critique seems to consist of, "O'Reilly is a business making money." I
just don't think that's a valid critique -- will all profit-motivated
activities be excluded from your un-conference?

O'Reilly does lots of things at lots of price-points, including free.
For example, they funded the creation of both Movable Type and Blogger,
released tons of material under CC licenses and PD licenses and FLOSS
licenses, podcast the lectures and seminars at their conferences,
offered scholarships to students and hackers, mounted free invitational
"foo camps" and promoted the alternative bar camps that they inspired.

In past years, un-conferences have been thrown before/after O'Reilly
cons with the happy support of O'Reilly -- events where speakers and
attendees who'd come to ETECH based on its drawing power could
recapitulate their own presentations -- for example, ConCon in San
Francisco and Emerging Man in San Jose.

The price-point of Etech reflects what it costs to run that kind of
conference in that kind of space. Unconferences are great too, and they
reflect the cost of mounting their kind of conference. ISTM that you're
saying that no one should be allowed to mount the kind of conference
that O'Reilly puts on, just the kind of conference you're putting on --
that the former is immoral ("All of the values of the Free Software
movement are totally violated by O’Reilly publishing’s conferences.")

Are you running a pro-Free-Software conference, or an anti-capitalism
conference?

Cory

Here's my reply, which he hasn't replied to:

Hi Cory,

Thanks for replying. Its great to hear from someone involved with the
process of planning Etech in response to our little effort.

First off I would say, what about the democratic value of dissent? You
seem to value democracy, being one of the main people behind the
Democracy net tv project. Don't you think that dissenting opinions are
an important part of the process of creating feedback loops that result
in change, and that allowing space for dissent is a critical part of
democracy? If you do think so, I'd think that you should post our
conference on BoingBoing.net to help us create a broader dialog about
the cost of tech conferences and the issues of inclusion and
representation in tech culture.

Also, I would say that you have a good question. Are we trying to say
that what you are doing is inherently immoral? I'm not. I'm trying to
say that a $1500 conference is contrary to the values of openness,
community, free software and respecting your users that O'Reilly uses to
promote the conference. So, that seems hypocritical, and hyopcracy can
be interpreted as immoral. Do you see a contradiction there?

As for your last question, "are you running a pro-Free-Software
conference, or an anti-capitalism conference?", I would say that we're
running a pro-free-software conference. One of the main values of the
Free Software movement is the freedom to reuse and tinker. Well, I feel
that freedom is inhibited by the lack of technological education of
women, queers and people of color which is created by sometimes subtle
processes of exclusion. When I was a debian developer, I remember the
strong resistance put up against the Debian Women group. From their
website "We seek to balance and diversify the Debian Project by actively
engaging with interested women and encouraging them to become more
involved with Debian." You can see our project in that vein. Since there
is no visible Debian Queers project or Debian People of Color of
project, I can't refer to them. For more info on that topic, see "Is
DEBIAN a MALE Chauvinist Pig? ;)" http://www.mepis.org/node/1932 , but
there are lots of other women, queers and people of color writing about
the pracitces of exclusion in techno culture. The book Domain Errors has
a great essay by Michelle M. Wright entitled "Racism, Technology, and
The Limits of Western Knowledge"
(http://www.autonomedia.org/domainerrors/). That book was edited by the
subRosa collective which has done amazing work in the field of
cyberfeminism (http://www.cyberfeminism.net/).

It is a frequently made conjecture that open source values are
anti-capitalist. While I think that is often true, in my interview with
Richard Stallman, he points out that he is not anti-capitalist, but
anti-fascist. He points out Moussolini's statement that fascism is the
unity of corporations and government. Still, he said that the practice
of free software development is not tied to any ideology, other than the
values of Free Software, as is evidenced by the many military developers
of Free Software and the common corporate and military usage of Free
Software.

You can find that interview linked from here:
http://puggy.symonds.net/pipermail/fsug-kochi-discuss/2005-January/001176.html

But since is it hard to find financial support for independent media
projects that are perceived as "anti-capitalist", the host that the ogg
files is on, radio.indymedia.org is currently down.

You obviously have the privilege of writing off our critiques of techno
culture, ignoring them, not reading this email and not posting about it
on your blog. You can perceive me as a disgruntled programmer or the
techno-tranny-slut that I am and use that as a justification to put our
critiques aside in your brain as outside of your concerns or outside the
concerns of "most people", whoever that may be. But the reality is that
I worked in the software industry for years, have been using and
developing (less developing than using) free software for years and I
went to Etech last year.

The most disturbing thing to me at the conference was the repeated use
of the term "everybody", conflating everyone on the net with everyone in
the world. Dyson talked about google as the Mind of God. The speaker
from Technorati said that their dynamic viewer for tags "lets you see
what everyone is talking about today". It is clear to me that the
ethnocentricity of techno culture of alive and well and deeply embedded
in practices and language. I personally believe that it is important to
examine how we reproduce racism, sexism, homophobia and a long list of
other oppressions in our daily lives, and having a $1500 conference is
one way of doing that, in the United States, where economic status is
closely tied to social acceptance along lines of race and gender.

Thinking about the ideas behind Free Software and Creative Commons, how
much would oreilly lose if the conference was cheaper, or free? How many
more people would go if it was free? What if, in a bureaucratic gesture
to deflect criticism, it was free to university students, or to people
who live in San Diego? What would O'Reilly lose in that case? As someone
who cares about democracy and technology and who lives in San Diego, I'm
getting together with some of my friends to try to make our own free
tech conference in the hopes that some of the Etech attendees will want
to share their knowledge in a free space, free as in beer and free as in
freedom. Maybe no one will come. Maybe no one will hear about it. Maybe
no one from San Diego will come. But in the spirit of "release early,
release often", we're putting this idea out to the world in the hope of
creating a different kind of culture around technology, one not
dominated by profit, but dominated by the real desire to create and
foster community.

Sorry for the long winded email. This is obviously something I care
about. Hope you had the time to read at least part of it, in this
information economy where particular people's attention is so highly
valued.

thanks again...

//

Here's the announcement for the conference that got Cory all riled up:

freEtech 2007, an (un)Conference, san diego, march 25th

To sign up to attend or give a workshop, click edit at the bottom of the page or click here to edit this page
and add yourself to the list of people coming! Also, if there’s a
workshop/skillshare or discussion you’d like to have, add it below! If
wiki’s freak you out, call us at 619-528-8060.

why freEtech 2007?

Community.
Free Software. Openness. All of the values of the Free Software
movement are totally violated by O’Reilly publishing’s conferences.
These same values are what has made internet culture exciting and
vibrant and an important social force, and they are also the words that
O’Reilly uses to market its $1500 per seat ETech conference.

If
you care about creating and sustaining a technological culture that is
accessible to everyone, instead of being accessible to those who have
$1500 to blow on a 4 day conference, then help us create freEtech, a
free and open unconference in San Diego on March 25th, the day before
eTech begins. There’s a reason why the list of presenters is
overwhelmingly white men, we’ll talk about why.

If you are
interested in presenting at or coming to freEtech 2007, sign up here
with a blurb about what you would like to talk about. This unconference
won’t happen without you. If you do sign up, well if some people do
sign up to participate in an open space not controlled by the same
corporate interests we’ve seen in previous years (with massive
presentations by Microsoft and IBM at Etech
2006), if people do sign up, its a chance to engage with the community
of San Diego directly. As people who live in San Diego and care about
making technology accessible and who care about supporting DIY
culture, our group and the collectives we work with will provide the
space. We already have access to a space downtown near Etech and a
space at UCSD, we just have to work out the details once we have an idea of the interest level.

We
feel that emerging technology comes from rich cultural exchange,
community and passion, not from corporations. If you agree, then come
hang out with us and lets share ideas and eat some pizza.

sign-up to come to freEtech 2007

dj lotu5 – borderlands hacklab
don kilo – vAPPOr Oaxaca

add your name here!

sign-up to present at freEtech 2007

dj lotu5 – Hacking Neo(colonialism)
– Is the internet really freely available to anyone? Is “everyone”
really “on the net”? How are women, queers and indigenous people using
the internet? What is keeping them from doing so? Do you feel like
technology is available and appealing to you? Why or why not? We’ll
have a discussion about various technologial strategies of resistance
against oppression based race, class, heteronormativity and gender
including cyberfeminism, electronic civil disobedience, sci-fi,
distributed social cinema and network performance and have a hands-on
hacking (colonialism) session!

//

Funny thing is that I also submitted the freEtech conference to slashdot.org, but they didn't publish it either. But, slashdot.org is owned by O'Reilly publishing. For a bunch of people that claim to be against hegemony, they all seem not to mind an information hegemony created by O'Reilly.

Or maybe, they're not interested in critiques of their little techno-utopian party, or are fearful of "bubble bursting 2.0", or just want to keep the white, male dominated culture the way it is.