Open source: Opening up the network democracy
One model for the open-ended and participatory process through which
legislation might occur in a networked democracy can be found in the
'open source' software movement. Faced with the restrictive practices
of the highly competitive software developers, and the pitifully
complex and inefficient operating systems such as Microsoft Windows
that this process produces, a global community of programmers decided
to find a better development philosophy for themselves. They founded
one based in the original values of the shareware software development
community, concluding that proprietary software is crippled by the
many efforts to keep its underlying code a secret and locked down.
Many users don't even know that a series of arbitrary decisions have
been made about the software they use. They don't know it can be
changed. They simply adjust.
By publishing software along with its source code, open source
developers encourage one another to correct each other's mistakes, and
improve upon each other's work. Rather than competing they
collaborate, and don't hide the way their programs work. As a result,
everyone is invited to change the underlying code and the software can
evolve with the benefit of a multiplicity of points of view.
Of course this depends on a lot of preconditions. Participants in an
open source collaboration must be educated in the field they are
developing. People cannot expect to be able to understand and edit the
code underlying any system until they have taken the time and spent
the necessary energy to penetrate it. Very often, as in the case of
computer software, this also depends on open standards so that the
code is accessible to all. But it is also true of many other systems.
If those who hope to engage in the revision of our societal models are
not educated by those who developed what is already in place, they
will spend most of their time inefficiently reverse-engineering
existing structures in an effort to understand them. Progress can only
be made if new minds are educated in the current languages, exposed to
the rationale for all decisions that have been made and invited to
test new methods and structures.
Those who are invited to re-evaluate our social and political
structures in such a way will stand the best chance of gaining the
perspective necessary to see the emergent properties of such systems,
as well as avenues for active participation in them. If no one is
invited then the first harbingers of emergent paradigms will be those
who have been motivated to train themselves in spite of the obstacles
set in front of them by those who hope to maintain exclusive control
over the code. The new models they come up with may, as a result, end
up looking much more like old-style revolutions than true
renaissances.
The implementation of an open source democracy will require us to dig
deep into the very code of our legislative processes, and then rebirth
it in the new context of our networked reality. It will require us to
assume, at least temporarily, that nothing at all is too sacred to be
questioned, re-interpreted and modified. But in doing so, we will be
enabled to bring democracy through its current crisis and into its
next stage of development.
But, like literacy, the open source ethos and process are hard if not
impossible to control once they are unleashed. Once people are invited
to participate in, say, the coding of a software program, they begin
to question just how much of the rest of our world is open for
discussion. They used to see software as an established and inviolable
thing - something married to the computer. A given circumstance. With
an open source awareness, they are free to discover that the codes of
the software have been arranged by people, sometimes with agendas that
hadn't formerly been apparent. One of the most widespread realizations
accompanying the current renaissance is that a lot of what has been
taken for granted as 'hardware' is, in fact, 'software' capable of
being reprogrammed. They tend to begin to view everything that was
formerly set in stone - from medical practices to the Bible - as
social constructions and subject to revision. Likewise as public
awareness of emergence theory increases, people are beginning to
observe their world differently, seeing its principles in evidence,
everywhere. Formerly esoteric subjects such as urban design or
monetary policy become much more central as the public comes to
recognize the power of these planning specialties to establish the
rules through which society actually comes into existence.
This marks a profound shift in our relationship to law and governance.
We move from simply following the law, to understanding the law, to
actually feeling capable of writing the law: adhering to the map, to
understanding the map, to drawing our own. At the very least, we are
aware that the choices made on our behalf have the ability to shape
our future reality and that these choices are not ordained but
implemented by people just like us.
Unlike the 1960s, when people questioned their authorities in the hope
of replacing them (revolution), today's activists are forcing us to
re-evaluate the premise underlying top-down authority as an organising
principle (renaissance). Bottom-up organisational models, from slime
mould to WTO protests, seem better able to address today's
participatory sensibility. Indeed, the age of irony may be over, not
just because the American dream has been interrupted by terrorism and
economic shocks but because media-savvy Westerners are no longer
satisfied with understanding current events through the second-hand
cynical musings of magazine journalists. They want to engage more
directly and they see almost every set of rules as up for
reinterpretation and re-engineering.
Applying the theory
So what happens when the open source development model is applied to,
say, the economy? In the United States, it would mean coming to
appreciate the rules of the economic game for what they are: rules.
Operating in a closed source fashion, the right to actually produce
currency is held exclusively by the Federal Reserve. Quietly removed
from any relationship to real money such as gold or silver by Richard
Nixon in the early 1970s, US currency now finds its value in pure
social construction. Whether or not we know it, we all participate in
the creation of its value by competing for dollars against one
another. For example, when a people or businesses borrows money from
the bank (an agent, in a sense, of the Federal Reserve) in the form of
a mortgage they must eventually pay the bank back two or three times
the original borrowed amount. These additional funds are not printed
into existence, but must be won from others in the closed source
system. Likewise, every time a student wants to buy one of my books,
he must go out into the economy and earn or win some of these
arbitrarily concocted tokens, US currency, in order to do it. Our
transaction is brokered by the Federal Reserve, who has a monopoly on
this closed source currency.
Meanwhile, the actual value of this currency, and the effort required
to obtain it, is decided much more by market speculators than its
actual users. Speculation accounts for over 90 percent of US currency
transactions in any given day. By this measure, real spending and the
real economy are a tiny and secondary function of money: the dog is
being wagged by its tail.
What if currency were to become open source? In some communities it
already is. They are not printing counterfeit bills but catalysing
regional economies through the use of local currencies, locally
created 'scrip' that can be exchanged throughout a particular region
in lieu of Federal Reserve notes or real cash. The use of these
currencies, as promoted by organisations such as the E.F. Schumacher
Society, has been shown to accelerate the exchange of goods and
services in a region by increasing the purchasing power of its
members. There is no Federal Reserve surcharge on the creation and
maintenance of cash, and no danger of government currency depreciation
due to matters that have nothing to do with actual production and
consumption.
Like any other bottom-up system, the creation of local currency
develops transactional models appropriate to the scale of the actual
transactions and the communities in which they occur. While Federal
notes, or Euros for that matter, might be appropriate for a merchant
to use across state or national boundaries, local currencies make for
greater fluidity and accountability between members of the same
community.
Thanks to the dynamic relationships permitted in a networked society,
we need not choose between local and closed currencies. A
post-renaissance perspective on economic issues has room for both to
exist, simultaneously functioning on different orders of magnitude.
In a society modelled on open source ideals, 'think globally, act
locally' becomes more than just a catch phrase. The relationship of an
individual or local community's action to the whole system can be
experienced quite readily. For example, an open source software
developer who writes just a few useful lines of code, say the protocol
for enabling infrared communications to work on the Linux operating
system, will see his or her contribution interpolated into the kernel
of the operating system and then spread to everyone who uses it. He
has done more than distributed a line of computer code. He has also
enabled thousands of people using Linux to connect cell phones, PDA's
and other devices to their computers for the first time. And he did it
from his home, in his spare time.
Likewise, a developer who leaves a security hole open in a piece of
software quite dramatically sees the results of his action when a
software 'worm', written by a computer criminal, penetrates the mail
files of thousands of users, sending replicates of itself throughout
the internet, sometimes for years to come.
Members of an open source community are able to experience how their
actions affect the whole. As a result, they become more conscious of
how their moment-to-moment decisions can be better aligned with the
larger issues with which they are concerned. A programmer concerned
with energy consumption and the environment might take time to
consider how a particular screen-saver routine impacts the total
energy consumption pattern of a particular monitor. The programmer
already understands that if the code is used on millions of machines,
each effort to reduce energy consumption by a minuscule amount can
amplify into tremendous energy savings. (Indeed, it has been
calculated that the energy required to power all the televisions and
computers in America that are currently in sleep mode equals the
output of an entire average-size power plant.)
The experience of open source development, or even just the acceptance
of its value as a model for others, provides real-life practice for
the deeper change in perspective required of us if we are to move into
a more networked and emergent understanding of our world. The local
community must be experienced as a place to implement policies,
incrementally, that will eventually have an effect on the whole. For
example, the environmental advocate who worries about the Brazilian
rainforest will quit smoking himself before racing off to the next
rally held to save the lungs of the planet. The woman organising
against genetic engineering in agriculture will refuse to let her
children eat at McDonalds, even if it requires them to bring their own
lunch to a friend's birthday party. A consistency between belief and
behaviour becomes the only way to make our designs on reality real.
Closed source: no justice, no power
An open source model for participatory, bottom-up and emergent policy
will force us, or allow us, to confront the issues of our time more
directly. Using the logic of a computer programmer, when we find we
can't solve a problem by attacking one level of societal software, we
proceed to the next level down. If necessary we dig all the way down
to the machine language.
For instance, today's misunderstood energy crisis provides a glaring
example of the liability of closed source policymaking. The Western
World is unnecessarily addicted to fossil fuels and other energy
commodities not because alternative energy sources are unavailable,
but because alternative business models for energy production cannot
be fully considered without disrupting the world's most powerful
corporations and economies. It really is as simple as that.
Solar, geothermal and other renewable energy sources are quite ready
for deployment in a wide variety of applications. They are not
encouraged, not through tax policies nor through venture capital,
because they don't make sense to an industry and economy that has
based its business model on the exploitation of fixed and precious
resources: A closed source model. As a result, we are suffering
through a potentially irreversible environmental crisis, as well as a
geopolitical conflict that is already spinning wildly out of control.
The maintenance of such imbalances is dependent on closed source
processes. The power of puppet dictators in the oil-producing Middle
East is perpetuated not just by US warplanes, but by their own
economies which derive all their wealth through the exploitation of
resources. Were these nations required to compete in the global
marketplace through the production of goods or services, then a
passive, uneducated population would no longer bring their monarchs
the wealth to which they are accustomed. As it is the peasants need
only be educated enough to dig. And the closed source mentality
travels all the way around the distribution cycle. Nowhere is the
closed source imperative of an oil-based economy more evident than in
the appointment, by America's judicial branch (though not its
population), of a President to represent the oil industry.
Conclusion
The new transparency offered by the interactive mediaspace allows even
the casually interested reader to learn how the West's foreign and
domestic policies have been twisted to a perverse caricature of
themselves. I do not wish here to beat the drum for a partisan
revolution. Instead, I am to demonstrate how a growing willingness to
engage with the underlying code of the democratic process could
eventually manifest in a widespread call for revisions to our legal,
economic and political structures on an unprecedented scale, except in
the cases of full-fledged revolution. Transparency in media makes
information available to those who never had access to it before.
Access to media technology empowers those same people to discuss how
they might want to change the status quo. Finally, networking
technologies allow for online collaboration in the implementation of
new models, and the very real-world organisation of social activism
and relief efforts. The good news, for those within the power
structure today, is that we are not about to enter a phase of
revolution, but one of renaissance. We are heading not toward a
toppling of the democratic, parliamentary or legislative processes,
but toward their reinvention in a new, participatory context. In a
sense, the people are becoming a new breed of wonk, capable of
engaging with government and power structures in an entirely new
fashion. The current regime, in the broadest sense, will have ended up
being the true and lasting one, if it can get its head and policies
around these renaissance modalities of increased dimensionality,
emergence, scalability and participation.
My advice? Don't beat them. Let them join you. Choose to believe that
the renaissance I am describing has already taken place. Instead of
looking forward to a day when justice will be won, declare that we are
living in a just world right now. Declare that we are simply fighting
for more justice.
Movements, as such, are obsolete. They are incompatible with a
renaissance sensibility because of the narrative style of their
intended unfolding. They yearn forward towards salvation in the manner
of utopians or fundamentalists: an increasing number of people are
becoming aware of how movements of all stripes justify tremendous
injustice in the name of that deferred future moment. People are
actually taken out of their immediate experience and their connection
to the political process as they put their heads down and do battle.
It becomes not worth believing in anything.
This is why we have to advocate living in the now in order to effect
any real change. The should be no postponement of joy. Once we start
down this path, there's can be no stopping. We begin to see the
unreality of money. We begin to see how 'salvation' has been traded in
for 'retirement' as the new ultimate goal for which Westerners suspend
their lives and their ethics. (People work for companies they hate,
and then invest in corporations whose ethics they detest, in order to
guarantee a good retirement). We see the artificial obstacles to
appropriate energy policy, international relations, urban planning and
affordable healthcare as what they are: artificial. Meanwhile, what we
can accomplish presents itself on a much more realistic scale when we
engage with it in the moment and on a local level.
Yes, political structures do need to be changed. But we may have to
let their replacements emerge from the myriad of new relationships
that begin to spawn once people are acting and communicating in the
present, and on a realistic scale, instead of talking about a
fictional future.
The underlying premise is still dependent on the notion of progress.
Indeed, things must get better or there's no point to any of it. But
our understanding of progress must be disengaged from the false goal
of growth, or the even more dangerous ideal of salvation. Our
understanding must be reconnected with the very basic measure of
social justice: how many people are able to participate?
Our marketing experts tell us that they are failing in their efforts
to advertise to internet users and cultural progressives because this
new and resistant psychographic simply wants to engage, authentically,
in social experiences. This should sound like good news to anyone who
authentically wants to extend our collective autonomy. This population
is made up not of customers to whom you must sell, or even
constituents to whom you must pander, but partners on whom you can
rely and with whom you can act.
Treat them as such, and you might be surprised by how much you get
done together.
1 Karen Armstrong, A History of God, (London: Vintage, 1999)
2 First Monday, The High-Tech Gift Economy, Richard Barbrook., 1998,
(http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue3_12/barbrook/)
3 Douglas Rushkoff, Cyeria: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace,
(Flamingo, 1994)
4 Wired Magazine, Jul 1997 (see
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.07/longboom_pr.html)
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