As I have learned from geeks, structures of communication are not inevitable, given, or neutral; for any public to become a sovereign entity in contemporary technical societies, it must be recursive.

Although the social imaginary of a recursive public might sound suspiciously vicious and irrelevantly technical to some, it has, in fact, forked into other realms and other matters of concern. In the last six years alone, especially in the wake of the explosion of free and open-source software, recursive publics have found new constituencies—musicians, scientists, educators, filmmakers, collectors, activists, and architects. All of these groups have adopted not just the rhetoric of openness but also a particular attitude toward the conditions of possibility of openness—and the modes of manipulating them technically and legally—on and off the Internet.