Nerdy, Solid, Stable: The Invisible Backbone of Our Newsletter (HEN Editorial 356)

Why our news­let­ter runs on digi­tal com­mons, NixOS, and friendship—and how this infra­struc­ture empowers us.

In a cer­tain sense this will be the most nerdy edi­to­rial that has ever had the honor to intro­duce an issue of the Hete­ro­dox Eco­no­mics News­let­ter 🤖. So let’s get this one going!

As you might have gues­sed pro­du­cing the News­let­ter is a tedious endea­vor and we could never do it with stan­dard tools, like html-edi­tors, tex-files or Goo­g­le­Doc. We need our own dedi­ca­ted and secure data­base. And an algo­rith­mic rou­tine that trans­forms our data­base into a nicely for­mat­ted out­put. Tog­e­ther they form a Newsletter-‚backend’ that boosts our labor pro­duc­ti­vity and ther­eby makes the whole pro­ject tenable, alt­hough it still remains a tough job ;-).

Hence, as so many endea­vors under­ta­ken for prac­ti­cal pur­po­ses the News­let­ter requi­res a solid and relia­ble foun­da­tio­nal infra­struc­ture and for the News­let­ter this has really worked out well. Back in 2013 we mana­ged to create a ‚backend‘-system that ran sta­bly for thir­teen years and has just recently seen its first major update since its inception.

This foun­da­tio­nal infra­struc­ture of the News­let­ter is built on recipro­city as a main pro­vi­sio­ning logic in various ways. For one, I have been gui­ded by Her­wig Hoch­leit­ner, a fri­end of mine and an IT-genius, who reco­gni­zed the merits of hete­ro­dox eco­no­mics early on and, hence, deci­ded to com­mit to pro­vide con­ti­nuous sup­port to the News­let­ter on a mainly vol­un­t­ary basis. For ano­ther, Her­wig and I share some fetish for crea­ting sta­ble ser­vices for self-hos­ting to faci­li­tate digi­tal empower­ment, which mate­ria­li­zed in this pro­ject that tries to create appro­priate light­weight ser­vices for self-hos­ting and makes them available for free .

On top of that, all our digi­tal infra­struc­ture is based on not­hing less than NixOS. What sounds like an obscure Linux dis­tri­bu­tion at first glance, turns out to be exactly that on clo­ser inspec­tion 😂. But it is a beau­tiful and empowe­ring form of obscu­rity: not only is NixOS a com­mons in its best sense – free to use & repli­cate, com­mu­nity-dri­ven and decen­tra­li­zed –, but it also puts the user back into the driver’s seat.

On stan­dard OS, like Win­dows or MacOS, many core sys­tem set­tings are hid­den from the user or can only be modi­fied in sel­ec­tive ways via pre­com­po­sed menus. In NixOS, in con­trast, you will write one sin­gle code-file, which exactly spe­ci­fies the whole setup of your machine and gives you truly full con­trol of what you are doing. While this is some­ti­mes com­pli­ca­ted and tri­cky (but don’t worry, NixOS is pre­pared to catch your errors before reboot­ing ;-)), it gives an immensely empowe­ring fee­ling and, for me per­so­nally, it reminds me of my 12-year old self, who tried to hack the AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS of MS-DOS 6.22 machine to finally get some com­pu­ter game to run…

As you see the News­let­ter is not only a com­mons-based pro­vi­sio­ning sys­tem in its­elf, it also builds on other such com­mu­nity-based pro­vi­sio­ning sys­tem as a foun­da­tio­nal infra­struc­ture. Both examp­les illus­trate that digi­tal space is just ano­ther spa­tial dimen­sion, where dif­fe­rent logics of pro­vi­sio­ning com­pete: the logic of mar­ket exch­ange in the form of large digi­tal tech mono­po­lies alre­ady colo­ni­zed large parts of this space, whe­reas com­mu­nity-based, open ser­vices buil­ding on the logic of recipro­city stay ready to re-craft digi­tal space as some­thing empowe­ring, open and accessible.

Such digi­tal com­mons, like NixOs or the Hete­ro­dox Eco­no­mics News­let­ter, are dri­ven by belief, trust, fri­end­ship, coope­ra­tion and a pas­sion for get­ting the job done ins­tead of a com­mo­di­fy­ing pro­fit motive. Often it is our choice as users, which way to go. The News­let­ter-Team opts for com­mu­nity-based solu­tion and eman­ci­pa­tory self-hos­ting and is ready to accept the occa­sio­nal cala­mi­ties that might come with such an approach ;-).

Many aca­de­mic envi­ron­ments rely on pro­prie­tary ser­vices ins­tead that often fall behind open and com­mu­nity-based solu­tion in terms of qua­lity – not to speak of cost-effec­ti­ve­ness. We all could put more effort into chan­ging that – and build and use solu­ti­ons that more truly live up to the com­mons-based logic that under­pins all sci­en­ti­fic effort.

All the best 🖥️💾