new disserter 2010. . . but why?

This is the new version of my old research blog, all shiny and new and running on drupal.  Why drupal?  (Drupal is a f/oss content management system that can be used for really complicated stuff like mtv.co.uk or this simple site) Why not one of the many, very nice, easy to use hosted softwares out there like blogger or wordpress or something?  Why did I waste all sorts of time trying to learn drupal, failing to understand .css, and coming up with bad color schemes?  I didn't realize until I was done and ready to write my first post that this is kinda part of what I'm trying to research and figure out.

So really, why did I waste all my time?  This question appears to be about motivation, but I think its really about something else.  By many measures, learning a bit about drupal and doing this myself was a total waste of time, it was slower and I ended up creating something that is probably less functional than a wordpress blog.  And the usual justifications for the choice of doing it myself--that I learned all about how the software works, some of the behind the scenes stuff, have a deeper understanding of the web or something, picked up valuable skillz, etc.--are only about half right.  I don't understand how drupal works and barely touched any code--I did learn some things, but its mostly still an opaque world out there for me.  I got frustrated, yelled at lines of .css and I can't really even say it was fun.  (Which is interesting, since I'm researching fun in free software like drupal.)

Far more important is that defending wasting time because I learned some skillz and might better understand how things work falls into the same vien of economic logic that allows for statements like "learning drupal was an unproductive waste of time."  These arguments end up feeding into making a case for my choice to learn drupal as being a good, rational economic choice.  But it wasn't, at all.  It did have its moments of fun and play, and some economists argue that fun and play should be part of making sense of rational economic decision making.  But this was something else, one of those many labors that really make no sense in any sort of rational choice, gain-seeking models ... but I could make it fit very easily if I wanted to and it could end up fitting even if I didn't try.

The hacker, maker, crafter, artist or whatnot in all of us that makes us labor on strange and seemingly pointless things should make us question basic assumptions about productivity, ownership, what a "good" economy means and how we go about laboring; but often it doesn't.  For instance, I love make maganize, and alot of their rants are dead on, especially about "maker ethics."  But all to often, arguments for making, hacking, etc. end up rolling back into ways we have readily at hand to imagine economic choices.  That making and crafting are entrepreneurial, have important roles to play in capitalist growth or are about rationally filling niche markets.   I could use these arguments to write a very convincing story about the value of learning drupal instead of using an existing web-based blogging application.  I might even believe it and I've made these arguments before.  But it would miss so much because learning drupal was not a "good" choice and the worth of doing so that I care about does not readily make sense in the sort of normative, shared economic imaginations I have available.  And I think about ways of imagining economies way too much.

How we imagine the things we call economic or "economic choices" plays a huge role in how we organize our lives and relationships and I'm really curious about the different imaginations that come out of making free software.  It seems like there is a constant struggle for the shared imagination to describe, explain and understand the vast parts of our lives of working (in the very base sense of exerting human capacities to transform some material) and exchanging what we made that really make no sense in normative imaginations of capitalist economics that we share (even as we might hate them and struggle for another way).  I "made" this silly blog and would like to share it with some people (maybe).  But thinking about why I did so and what I made and transformed by utilizing the labor of all involved in making and supporting drupal, the labor, raw materials and electicity used in building and shipping my laptop and my webhost's servers and the material, physical-ness of the data of this post stored by voltage indicators on a metal platter somewhere and then its movement across various mediums and wavelengths all makes my head hurt.  All of this is why I'm compelled to study F/OSS; because people involved in making new sorts of economies out of this way of laboring and thinking about this stuff too, in probably more interesting and insightful ways.   And maybe even having more fun than I did failing to learn drupal.