Physicist Alan Sokal decided to try an experiment that could expose the pretentiousness of academic journals. His hypothesis was that it was possible to get an article “liberally salted with nonsense” published if “(a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions.” But what field to turn to? Ah, yes. Literary Theory. He scribbled up a big pile of rubbish called “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” filled it with obtuse prattling about how quantum gravity has progressive political implications, and submitted it to Social Text, a journal put out by Duke University. The same day that the article appeared in Lingua Franca announcing that the article was a joke, written deliberately to show that if you made something sound fancy-schmancy and gave it a pretentious title, nobody in academia would notice that the emperor wasn’t wearing any clothes. Red-faced Postmodernists everywhere responded by clenching their buttocks even tighter so the stick inside wouldn’t fall out and saying, “Yeah, well, you just don’t get what critical theory is about, do you?” Which just made them look even sillier.

In short, it’s the most radtacular thing ever written. This document was to the pretentious ivory tower academic establishment what A Modest Proposal was to eighteenth-century British politics. It proved that academia in general and English professors in particular are full of two things: hot air and themselves.

One of the best aspects of this prank was that anybody who jumped to the defense of postmodern intellectualism just looked like an even more out-of-touch snob than ever before. Mathematician Gabriel Stolzenberg took the bait most thoroughly, writing essay after essay attempting to refute the criticisms of Sokal and his veritable army of people Fed Up With Pretentious Bullshitting. The argument went like this:

Sokal: Your philosophy is designed to make you sound fancy and smart but is actually just full of crap.

Stolzenberg: You just didn’t understand what you were reading.

Sokal: With all your education, you should have been able to clearly explain yourself. Or maybe you just write in an obtuse manner so that people who don’t understand you will be intimidated into going along with whatever you say.

Stolzenberg: That’s just the petulant whining of someone who lacks the academic understanding and intellectual capacity to truly understand modern critical theory.

Sokal: Pretentious wanker.

Stolzenberg: You just don’t understand philosophy, so your criticism is meaningless. Just like everything else in the universe.

Sokal: QED. Wanker.

Sokal would go on in 1998 to publish Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science, and I hope someday to read the sequel Super-Fabulous Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Intellect.

This weekend I was asked how someone like me could possibly take a professional interest in open source software, when nothing in my training has prepared me for the issues involved. Nothing could be more untrue. In fact, it would probably be helpful for members of the open source community to brush up on their history and see how they are making old ideas new again. Collaborative authorship, a key aspect of open source software, is not a modern concept. Slapping one name on a work and making that the exclusive, official version is the relatively new idea. It’s only been done for about four hundred years, and has only really become enforced since the Industrial Revolution when it became profitable. We’ve become obsessed with labeling literature and music. Publishing house. Author. Date of Publication. Record Label. It’s very satisfying to see all the blanks filled in, with a secure and complete identity assigned to a work. This idea that authorship and ownership need to be clearly defined are rooted in the idea that art is a commodity, rather than a public asset. If there’s no owner, no money can change hands. Nobody can be sued for using it without permission. The folk tradition doesn’t see how exclusionary procedures aid in the creation of music. They only see how adding other voices can make it stronger, which is why all folk songs are in perpetual open beta.

Those who don’t understand folk music or open source software would say that it was an “Anonymous” creation, a term that goes along with the misnomer “Dark Ages.” But “Anonymous” is an unhelpful term that presupposes exclusive authorship as the natural order of things. As a folk musician and open source community member, I know the proper term is “Traditional,” a term that means we’re talking about an active public resource — a living thing, not a closed off artifact on a museum shelf.

If you look at the titles of papers given at medieval conferences, they don’t look that different from papers written on open source. Terms like “Distributive Authorship” and “Collaborative Tradition” are littered everywhere. This is because in the premodern era, individual credit wasn’t that important. You couldn’t get any richer from it, and without publishing and mass distribution it was hard enough to just get the ideas out there. Hang trying to insist on credit for them. Like open source software, texts tended to originate from a specific area, but then the stories would be mashed up and localized. The legend of King Arthur probably originated in Cornwall. They were popularized by Geoffrey of Monmouth, and then the open source legend spread. It went over to France, where poets like Chrétien de Troyes added to the legend. Some of the stories were exported back home to England, taking their most famous form in Le Morte D’Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory. The corpus of Arthurian Literature is enormous, highly localized, extremely diverse, and fortunately largely well preserved. Lucky us! Nowadays we’re a little more closed minded. Where in the past an author could take a world and run with it, now work like this is discredited as “fan fiction” and rarely receives critical consideration. I wonder how well off the Web would be if that were how we treated a really amazing and creative hacker.

The only people who worked to keep art open source in the modern era were musicians — specifically Jazz and Folk musicians. I always laugh when friends complain about the difficulties that go with trying to label Golden Age Jazz in iTunes or RealPlayer. “Who is the author of this one? I think Tommy Dorsey wrote it but it’s being performed by Ella Fitzgerald with the Duke Ellington Orchestra. Who should I put as the artist?” Such a question shows how well trained we are to look for the official seal of approval on anything. The best music I’ve ever heard comes from collaboration, not exclusionary, proprietary sources.

For this reason artists like Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan have been hard to classify. Cash isn’t quite country and Dylan isn’t quite rock. That’s because they are both really folk artists, covering other work and being covered by other artists. The stuff they were doing back in the sixties is the same as what we’re doing now in the Mozilla community. Folk music is in perpetual open beta. You can mix it up, mash it up, redo the harmonies, add or subtract voices or instruments, and the value of the music is never diluted. It only increases. It’s the same with code. As you can hear in the many different takes on “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” creations made through collaboration are always greater than the sum of their parts.

Open Source isn’t new or modern. It’s traditional. It’s how we did things for millenia. Nobody needs to take credit for a public resource. That locks it in with one author and sucks all the fun out of taking the source material and doing something with it on your own and makes it about the self and making money. That’s boring and uninspiring. Whether it’s musical notes or code, encouraging collaborative creativity is at the heart of art.

The scientists who unearthed the “shaman” initially thought that pungent green stuff in the bowls buried with him was coriander. They had to use genetic testing to identify the cannabis, proving yet again that scientists are big fat nerds who never got asked to hang with the cool kids in college. Discovery news mused, “The scientists are unsure if the marijuana was grown for more spiritual or medical purposes, but it’s evident that the blue-eyed man was buried with a lot of it.” They also insisted that nobody could feel the effects today due to 2,700 years of decomposition. I bet they didn’t even try to find out. Only a raging nerd would find a guy with enough Mary Jane to fuel a Grateful Dead concert and think “well, of course, this must have been for religious purposes.” So I guess the difference between being a stoner and a spiritual leader is just being dead for a few millenia.

These archaeologists need a smack upside the head. I just borrowed our time machine for a quick blast to the past to find this guy and prove to myself that I was right. The specs were easy. 45 year old Caucasian male, blue eyes, member of the Gushi tribe, speaks Tocharian . . . bam. There he was. Here’s the image capture:

Holy crap! As it turns out, this guy wasn’t even from the Gobi Desert. Turns out the first Woodstock wasn’t in New York. Guess what nerds? SCIENCE FAIL. You didn’t find a shaman. You found an Iron Age Jimmy Buffet Fan.

Yes, you could argue that the Plymoth Plantation Thanksgiving of 1621 (mistakenly referred to as The First Thanksgiving, which it wasn’t since Thanksgiving was celebrated by many Europeans) was a religious occasion. There’s records that people prayed and gave thanks to God. You can also argue that it is seen today by many as adding insult to injury regarding the millions of Native Americans whose lives and lands were lost due to European immigration.

As someone who has an ancestor that sailed on the Mayflower and Native American blood, I’m just gonna throw it out there that this is a debate usually had by upper middle class white people with Steven Segal ponytails, square spectacles, and a case of The Smug that absolutely overlooks the diversity and complexity of Native American cultures. It was never White versus Red. If it had been Europeans never would have established themselves here at all because Indian tribes would have been too politically unified. They didn’t see themselves as being part of the same nation any more than Germans, Italians, Spaniards, and English did simply because they were all Caucasian.

The Pilgrims initially skirmished with the Massasoit Indians, but they established a treaty and became very close allies, eventually fighting side-by-side against other Indian tribes in King Philip’s War. On the day of Thanksgiving, European and Indian people were living together in the same territory as legally established neighbors. European settlement of the Americas was probably inevitable. But instead of putting blanket condemnation on Ol’ Whitey, maybe we should look back and see that there were many immigrants who came to this country and did things the right way. Communication was the key to understanding and coexistence, and we can thank Samoset and Squanto for that.

The origin of Thanksgiving was never explicitly religious, as harvest festivals celebrating bounty are a part of every culture on Earth. Religious language permeated how the Pilgrims expressed themselves (duh) but that doesn’t make the festival a religious event. If you read the writings of William Bradford and Edward Winslow, this was about expressing thankfulness that they’d made it through the vicious winter of 1620/21 and showing hope for a brighter future. If they want to credit God for that, rad. This is America. You can do what you want. Optimism is a critical part of what makes America what it is, and I’m happy to see optimism expressed in any way, religious or secular. Grouchy pessimism is for the Old World. I want to live in the New.

Thanksgiving is a kickass holiday. There will always be grumpy haters who will look at a rose just to find signs of it wilting and trolls who provoke a needless debate by cherry-picking facts. In the meantime, I’m going to be over here being thankful for my pumpkin pie and football.