Open Source Democracy Part 3

These models for interactivity and coordinated behavior may have been launched in the laboratory, but they were first embraced by countercultures. Psychedelics enthusiasts (people who either ingested substances such as LSD or found themselves inspired by the art, writing and expression of the culture a.s.sociated with these drugs) found themselves drawn to technologies that were capable of reproducing both the visual effects of their hallucinations as well as the sense of newfound connection with others.

Similarly, the computer and Internet galvanized certain strains of both the pagan and the gra.s.sroots 'do-it-yourself' countercultures as the 'cyberpunk' movement, which was dedicated to altering reality through technology, together. Only now are the social effects of these technologies being considered by political scientists for what they may teach us about public opinion and civic engagement.

The underlying order of apparently chaotic systems in mathematics and in nature suggest that systems can behave in a fashion mutually beneficial to all members, even without a command hierarchy. The term scientists use to describe the natural self-organisation of a community is 'emergence'.

As we have seen, until rather recently, most observers thought of a colony of beings, say ants, as receiving their commands from the top: the queen. It turns out that this is not the way individuals in the complex insect society know what to do. It is not a hierarchical system, they don't receive orders the way soldiers do in an army. The amazing organisation of an anthill 'emerges' from the bottom up, in a collective demonstration of each ant's evolved instincts. In a sense, it is not organised at all since there is no central bureaucracy. The collective behaviour of the colony is an emergent phenomenon.

Likewise, the slime mould growing in damp fields and forests all around us can exhibit remarkably coordinated behaviour. Most of the time, the sludge-like collection of microorganisms go about their business quite independently of one another, each one foraging for food and moving about on its own. But when conditions worsen, food becomes scarce or the forest floor becomes dry, the formerly distinct creatures coalesce into a single being. The large ma.s.s of slime moves about, ama.s.sing the moisture of the collective, until it finds a more hospitable region of forest, and then breaks up again into individual creatures. The collective behaviour is an emergent trait, learned through millennia of evolution. But it is only activated when the group is under threat. The processes allowing for these alternative strategies are still being scrutinised by scientists, who are only beginning to come to grips with the implications of these findings in understanding other emergent systems from cities to civilisations.

At first glance, the proposition that human civilisation imitates the behaviour of slime mould is preposterous, an evolutionary leap backwards. An individual human consciousness is infinitely more advanced than that of a single slime mould micro-organism. But coordinated human metaorganism is not to be confused with the highly structured visions of a 'super organism' imagined in the philosophical precursors to fascism in the 19th and 20th centuries. Rather, thanks to the feedback and iteration offered by our new interactive networks, we aspire instead towards a highly articulated and dynamic body politic: a genuinely networked democracy, capable of accepting and maintaining a multiplicity of points of view, instead of seeking premature resolution and the oversimplification that comes with it.

This is why it appeared that the decision to grant the public open access to the internet in the early 1990s would herald a new era of teledemocracy, political activism and a reinstatement of the collective will into public affairs. The emergence of a networked culture, accompanied by an ethic of media literacy, open discussion and direct action held the promise of a more responsive political system wherever it spread.

But most efforts at such teledemocracy so far, such as former Clinton pollster d.i.c.k Morris's web site www.vote.com, or even the somewhat effective political action site www.moveon.org, are simply new versions of the public opinion poll. Billing themselves as the next phase in a truly populist and articulated body politic, the sites amount to little more than an opportunity for politicians to glean the gist of a few more uninformed, knee-jerk reactions to the issue of the day. Vote.com, as the name suggests, reduces representative democracy to just another marketing survey. Even if it is just the framework for a much more substantial future version, it is based on a fundamentally flawed vision of push-b.u.t.ton politics. That's the vision shared by most teledemocracy champions today.

So what went wrong? Why didn't networked politics lead to a genuinely networked engagement in public affairs?

Interference in the emergence

First, by casting itself in the role of cultural and inst.i.tutional watchdog, governments, particularly in the United States, became internet society's enemy. Though built with mostly US government dollars, the internet's growth into a public medium seemed to be impeded by the government's own systemic aversion to the kinds of information, images and ideas that the network spread. The government's fear of hackers was compounded by a fear of p.o.r.nography and the fear of terrorism. The result was a tirade of ill-conceived legislation that made internet enthusiasts' blood boil. New decency laws aimed at curbing p.o.r.nography (which were ultimately struck down) elicited cries of curtailment on free speech. Unsubstantiated and bungled raids on young hackers and their families turned law enforcement into the Keystone Cops of cybers.p.a.ce and the US Justice Department into a sworn enemy of the shareware community's most valuable members. Misguided (and unsuccessful) efforts at preventing the dissemination of cryptography protocols across national boundaries turned corporate developers into government-haters as well. (This tradition of government interference in the rise of a community-driven internet is contrasted by the early partic.i.p.ation of the UK's Labour government in the funding of internet opportunities there, such as community centres and public timeshare terminals, which were initially exploited mainly by arts collectives, union organisers, and activists.

Of course all this didn't play very well with the nascent UK internet industry, which saw its slow start compared with the US and other developed nations as a direct result of government over-management and anti-compet.i.tive funding policies.)

So, the US government became known as the antagonist of cyberculture.

Every effort was made to diminish state control over the global telecommunications infrastructure. The internet itself, a government project, soon fell into private hands (Internic, and eventually industry consortiums). For just as a bacteria tends to grow unabated without the presence of fungus, so too does corporate power grow without the restrictive influence of government.

This in itself may not have been so terrible. E-commerce certainly has its strengths and the economic development a.s.sociated with a profit-driven internet creates new reasons for new countries to get their populations online. But an interactive marketplace is not fertile soil for networked democracy or public partic.i.p.ation. As we have seen, the objective of marketers online is to reduce interactivity, shorten consideration and induce impulsive purchases.

That's why the software and interfaces developed for the commercial webs.p.a.ce tended to take user's hands off the keyboard and onto the mouse. The most successful programs, for them, lead people to the 'buy' b.u.t.ton and let them use the keyboard only to enter their credit card numbers and nothing else. The internet that grew from these development priorities, dominated by the World Wide Web instead of discussion groups, treats individuals more as consumers than as citizens. True, consumers can vote with their dollars, and that in a way feels something like direct communication with the ent.i.ty in charge - the corporation. But this is not a good model for government.

Sadly, though, it's the model being used to implement these first efforts at teledemocracy. And it's why these efforts suffer from the worst symptoms of consumer culture: they focus on short-term ideals, they encourage impulsive, image-driven decision-making and they aim to convince people that their mouse-clicking is some kind of direct action. Anyone arguing against such schemes must be an enemy of the public will, an elitist. Teledemocracy is a populist revival, after all, isn't it?

Perhaps. But the system of representation on which most democracies were built was intended to buffer the effects of such populist revivals. Although they may not always (or even frequently) live up to it, our representatives' role is to think beyond short-term interests of the majority. They are elected to protect the rights of minority interests, the sorts of people and groups who are now increasingly cast as 'special interest groups'.

Achieving the promise of network democracy

The true promise of a network-enhanced democracy lies not in some form of web-driven political marketing survey, but in restoring and encouraging broader partic.i.p.ation in some of the internet's more interactive forums. Activists of all stripes now have the freedom and facility to network and organise across vast geographical, national, racial and even ideological differences. And they've begun to do so.

The best evidence we have that something truly new is going on is our mainstream media's inability to understand it. Major American news outlets are still incapable of acknowledging the tremendous breadth of the WTO protest movement because of the multiplicity of cooperating factions within it. Unable to draw out a single, simplified rationale that encompa.s.ses the logic of each and every protestor, traditional media storytellers conclude that there is no logic at all. (Just as I am writing this section, a newscaster on CNBC, reporting from a WTO demonstration, is condescendingly laughing at the word 'neo-liberal'

on a placard, believing that the teen protestor holding it has invented the term!) In actuality, the multi-faceted rationale underlying the WTO protests confirm both their broad based support, as well as the quite evolved capacity of its members to coalesce across previously unimaginable ideological chasms. Indeed, these obsolete ideologies are themselves falling away as a new dynamic emerges from nascent political organism.

For politicians who mean to lead more effectively in such an environment, the interactive solution may well be a new emphasis on education, where elected leaders use the internet to engage with const.i.tuents and justify the decisions they have made on our behalf, rather than simply soliciting our moment-to-moment opinions.

Politicians cannot hope to reduce the collective will of their entire const.i.tuencies into a series of yes or no votes on the issues put before them. They can, however, engage the public in an ongoing exploration and dialogue on issues and their impacts, and attempt to provide a rationale for their roles in the chamber in which they partic.i.p.ate. They must accept that their const.i.tuents are capable of comprehending legislative bodies as functioning organisms. In doing so, politicians will relieve themselves of the responsibility for hyping or spinning their decisions and instead use their time with the public to engage them in the evolution of the legislative process.

Like teachers and religious leaders, whose roles as authority figures have been diminished by their students' and congregants' direct access to formerly secret data, politicians too must learn to function more like partners than parents.

In doing so, they will leave the certainty of 20th century political ideologies behind, and admit to the open-ended and uncertain process of societal co-authorship. Whatever model they choose must shun static ideologies, and instead acknowledge the evolutionary process through which anything resembling progress is made.

Chapter 5

Open source: Opening up the network democracy

One model for the open-ended and partic.i.p.atory 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 compet.i.tive 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. Partic.i.p.ants 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 partic.i.p.ation 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 a.s.sume, 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 partic.i.p.ate 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 circ.u.mstance. 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 partic.i.p.atory 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 partic.i.p.ate 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 partic.i.p.atory, 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.