People's Informative

The following is a piece by blogger and friend of the collective, Josh Benson. As always, share and enjoy

The world right now is in upheaval. The ridiculous and dangerous extent to which unrestrained greed permeates the upper reaches of power in the industrialized world has been laid bare for all the world to see. What is even more unusual is that our leaders seem to have no answers for how to solve the crisis. The resolutions being proffered by the world’s financial and political elite have left many people with a bad taste in their mouths. There is a growing sentiment that surely we can do better than this?

This puts us at one of those rare junctions in history when a significant portion of the population is casting about for new answers to the same problems they have been struggling with for years. It has never been more apparent to more people that capitalism is no longer a tenable system of resource distribution, if indeed it ever was. People are receptive now to ideas they would have rejected out of hand just a few months ago. The time is now for social activists to stand up and be heard. But as the old saying goes, we should look before we leap, and not risk squandering a golden opportunity to effect real change on our world.

We possess a significant advantage in that we have a perfect, real-world example of change in action to draw from: the open-source movement. On the surface, the free and open-source community has all the traits of a Utopian society with little or no authority structures whatsoever. Yet, it flourishes in a hostile environment in direct competition with very well-funded proprietary systems based on profit, strict authority, and secrecy. These proprietary systems survive not based on their fair and open competition with other software alternatives, but purely by the nature of their anti-competitive collaboration with hardware manufacturers to create a sense among end-users that this is just the way things are, and there are no better alternatives. Outside of the public view, they disseminate lies and misdirections to discourage support for the open-source community, and people’s desire to participate in it. Nevertheless, open-source has survived, and even thrived under these conditions, and is now set to take center stage and wrest control of the personal computer away from the traditional profit-based solutions.

It’s worth it to us as social activists to take some time to seriously examine this community closely and learn everything we can from their successes, and their failures. Open-source embodies in bits and bytes and methods of human interaction the very characteristics we want to impart to the way humans communicate and work with each other in all aspects of life. Through no real conscious effort or grand design, the free and open-source software movement has created a dynamic society that is both a collection of smaller communities dedicated to specific goals and causes, and a large group of individuals with their own personal aims and ambitions. It has dissolved boundaries of culture, language, and arbitrary divisions of territory, to bring people from all over the world together in pursuit of thousands of projects of every stripe.

Open-source software has been skyrocketing in popularity over the past few years, for many specific reasons. As more open-source applications that satisfy common computing needs are made available, more and more users are switching to them and sharing them with their friends and family. This has had a cumulative effect that is world-changing. For example: 5 years ago, hardly anyone knew what “Firefox” was or what it did, but once it reached a certain critical mass, it exploded onto the scene and now represents a significant threat to IE. There has also been a change in attitudes within the community. Proponents of open-source software have learned to be more people-friendly when engaging potential users. The open-source movement has learned the hard way that intellectual snobbery is detrimental to the cause. Finally, there has been a noticeable shift in priorities. For a long time the main focus of the FOSS movement was on simply making software that worked and did useful things. Now that those initial hurdles have been overcome, the community has been able to focus on making these applications more accessible, aesthetically appealing, and user-friendly. Finally, the open-source community has found ways to get involved in the mainstream dialogue of the industry. By working within the existing system created by proprietary software vendors, the FOSS community has forced the existing vendors to acknowledge its presence.

What we can take away from these changes in the FOSS community and the resulting surge in popularity is that we need to change our approach as well. For instance, although the anti-authoritarian community is made up of many sub-movements with many different ideas on how the world should operate, the fundamental principles we believe in have been around for a long time. The challenge now is to package those fundamentals and present them to the “end-user” with the proper attitude. We need to shift our priorities towards discovering ways to connect with people in a way that will be interactive, informative, and productive, and will encourage the people we interact with to share those ideas with their friends and family. What this means is instead of just offering solutions and recoiling in bewilderment when our attempts to educate people are rebuffed, we need to engage people in a real dialogue. The buzzword “dialogue” has been tossed around a lot by progressive movements lately, but let’s remember what it really means: the bi-directional exchange of information and the collaborative effort of finding solutions to problems.

We can engage people in this discussion by working within the system as well as outside of it. By participating in the more widely disseminated discussions and bringing an anti-authoritarian perspective, without overtly labeling ourselves as such and resorting to tired rhetoric, we begin to stop appearing as “radicals” and portray ourselves instead as regular people with different ideas about how to approach the challenges we face today. It’s this very method that has allowed such radicals as Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, etc., to successfully present themselves as mainstream contributors.

The lessons FOSS can teach us don’t stop there. The very nature of the open-source economy fosters and encourages the exact sort of individuals who can make it stronger. The lack of a significant profit motive, without precluding the possibility of financial reward for one’s work, ensures that people whose sole interest is satisfying personal greed are few and far between, and the people who stick around are the ones who are truly passionate and dedicated to a project or cause. They are personally driven to work towards a goal, and to share their hard work with others. In addition to this, the low or nonexistent cost of entry means that the maximum possible number of people are given an opportunity to participate in whatever way and to whatever extent they feel compelled, and no more. If we can structure the anti-authoritarian movement in a similar way, and indeed strive for a society that embodies these same traits, it will be a huge step towards engaging new people into a discussion they themselves might not have thought possible or practical.

What we seek to create is a dynamic society that is both a collection of smaller communities dedicated to specific goals and causes, and a large group of individuals with their own personal goals and aspirations. We want to dissolve barriers of culture, language, and arbitrary divisions of territory, and bring people from all over the world together in pursuit of the common goal of survival, while allowing every person the freedom to pursue their own hopes and dreams. We aim to minimize or eliminate the cost of participation in our communities so that any willing person is encouraged to get involved in any way, to any extent they feel compelled, and no more. By marginalizing profit motives, while still allowing people to be rewarded financially for their work, we will discourage the pursuit of personal greed, and encourage passionate and dedicated members of our communities. These words I humbly to submit to you my friends, in hopes I can in some way do my very small part.