An Introduction to Generative Justice
Ron Eglash
Reviewer A:
Please, comment on the most relevant aspects (positive points and areas to improve) of the reviewed article.
This introduction to the Generative Justice special issue is a very exciting and important contribution to our thinking about social change, especially through digital technologies.
Would you suggest any changes or make any recommendations to improve the quality of the article?
There is more of a genealogy to the idea of Generative Justice than the author engages, although some of the recent work in this area (by David Graeber, for example) is addressed.
he centrality of the idea of extropy to many digital workers, activists, and philosophers is elided by the focus on negative entropy. Negative Entropy has always seemed for of an expression of the Deistic anxieties of theoretical physicists than a good framing of a very little understood, yet fundamental, dynamic of reality. One that is is quite relevant at an epistemological level, to some of the key concepts of Generative Justice, even if it has been sort-of hijacked by the Transhumanist Movement.
Recommendation: Accept.
Reviewer B:
Please, comment on the most relevant aspects (positive points and areas to improve) of the reviewed article.
The article offers an excellent introduction to the cutting edge topic of generative justice. However, as mentioned above, we found it sometimes too dense and too specialised for the average reader who might come across this topic for the first time. The length of the article (circa 12.000) is beyond the word limit of the journal length for karpeta articles (7000). I wonder if some of the footnotes could be omitted. Most of them are quite illustrative but too specialised. For the purpose of an ibtroductory text on the topic and for the purpose of this special issue, most of them could be omitted. Moreover, the author might consider to bring to an earlier moment in the text the comment on p. 9 about the differences between this article and that other publlished in an earlier issue of TK. There are some other formal aspects to be taken into account. The Spanish translationnn of the abstract needs further revisio, so the format of the quotations in the mai text.
Would you suggest any changes or make any recommendations to improve the quality of the article?
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Recommendation: Revisions required
Reviewer C:
Please, comment on the most relevant aspects (positive points and areas to improve) of the reviewed article.
The article is a very interesting introduction to GJ.
However, is should be trimmed by 1.000-2.000 words at least.
The second half of the article losses a little bit the track of the central ideal by going to deep into secondary details and considerations. I think it would be a much stronger text if these drifts could be reduced, building a more straight forward argument. For example in the Arduino section, there are too many details, and in the Nonhuman section the text goes into complex reflections that could be simplified and made easier to understand.
Would you suggest any changes or make any recommendations to improve the quality of the article?
I made also comments on the text.
Finally, the references are not always made according to APA standards.
Recommendation: Revisions required.
Reviewer D:
Please, comment on the most relevant aspects (positive points and areas to improve) of the reviewed article.
The argument and questions the author is raising are important and useful. Using Marx’s concept of alienation is useful and allows the author to bring Marx into a contemporary labor example and see where it works, or doesn’t, to help us understand shifts in contemporary economies, societies and power. The paper also raises and addresses important and interesting questions for critical social researchers in terms of open source technology. The author helps us question whether corporate developments in terms of the social demands for ecological and fair labor and trade practices are just new forms of ‘incorporation’ into flexible neoliberal economies and relations or have radical potentials in terms of social change. The author attempts to argue that open source technologies now being used in some corporations are full of progressive potentials in terms of open access to information, sharing of knowledge and the resulting development of ecologically sound corporate products. Towards this effort the article presents some interesting examples of corporations that are using open source technologies. The author demonstrates how open source technology in these cases decreases labor alienation, creates opportunities for horizontal power sharing and creative opportunities for innovation.
Would you suggest any changes or make any recommendations to improve the quality of the article?
The paper can be improved in terms of theory, methodology and structure. Critical analysis of any social phenomena must include a theorization and analysis of the micro and macro geographies of the object being studied an its impact. This means we must thing about and make explicit a theorization of the global economy to then accurately locate the impacts, for example, of particular new technologies. The article must address the central question of how critical social researchers can accurately differentiate between what are progressive uses of new technologies and what aspects are recuperated and become part of the general expansion of neoliberalism itself. The question is raised, but the article does not explicitly answer the question in terms of theory, methodology or empirical evidence.
Open source technologies maybe potentially transformative, but the criteria we are going to evaluate whether this is occurring or not occurring has to be grounded in real economic analysis and social terms. The article needs to make a broader systemic analysis to ask about the transformative impact of a corporation like Arduino. Who benefits by the profits the company makes and how does the corporation participate in the development of power relations of new neoliberal technological economies? For example, Arduino in 2015 announced it is now partnering with the Micro Soft Corporation, so the author must consider and come to some sense of how these developments are taking place and to what effect. This level of critique is critical if the author wants to make a convincing argument that ‘open source technology’ isn’t just another creative neoliberal advancement. It is great that young tech educated university graduates have Google-like jobs and can create and share software in a more open way. Yet we have to consider, who benefits from these new advancements and what really changes in terms of economic and social realities?
The article attempts to answer this criticism, but the authors rationalization is weak and unconvincing. We need to ask: If terms of neoliberal expansion what are the real impacts of the use of open source technology in macro-systemic terms. The problem isn’t whether these shifts are merely good or bad in terms of a narrow microanalysis; the real issue is in terms of the expansion of the ‘cage’ of neoliberalism itself. The article fails to convince the reader that the corporate use of open source technology really benefits the ‘common good’ in terms of micro or macro social relations. Obviously the introduction of technologies like the Internet, social media and cheap international communications systems such as Skype do change social relations and one could argue that they have radical potentials and have even proven that in the case of social movements in the Middle East uprisings and elsewhere. Yet the argument that the use of open source software by private corporations such as Arduino is progressive in terms of social relations has to be proven in relation to the actual economic geographies of the neoliberal economy it competes and is embedded in. There can be, as the article states, progressive elements (open sharing of knowledge) but that has to be problematized and put in context in terms of the actual social and economic geographies it reproduces.
Recommendation: Resubmit for review.
The text included important modifications before publication
