Open Source Democracy - Douglas Rushkoff (leveled readers .txt) 📗

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