| Sumario: | Part of a special issue on time, society, and the course of new technologies. Connecting two threads of work, on “virtual ethnography” and on the role of shared objects in maintaining social reality, the writer discusses how contradictory aspects of post/modernity are addressed by a collective of individuals working together to create and maintain the Linux software development project. He asserts that inhabitants of such translocal spaces as the Linux developers can manage some of the contradictions of local and global, compression and expansion, through a relationship to Linux that allows them to maintain a productive tension between global affiliation and local situatedness and to establish a sensitivity, both emotional and empathetic, to their shared creation. He discusses the project mascot, Tux the penguin, as a key element of the developers' attachment to Linux.
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