On 22 May 2012, nearly 8 years ago, Eben Moglen (Professor of Law, Columbia Law School, Founder @sflc & President of the Board of @FreedomBoxFndn) gave a long talk about ‘Innovation under Austerity’. He spoke among friends.
Eben Moglen had little explaining to to do. He knew his audience would recognise his “little thug in a hooded sweatshirt” as the founder of Facebook. He knew that many of them knew about or were active in the Free Software movement that began in 1983 but remains little known.
That can make it hard for some to follow his talk or believe that it matters to them. It’s a sad fact that so few know about this immense & successful collaborative effort in which thousands of people across the whole world have jointly created some of the best software we have.
But it’s worth hanging in there & reading or hearing what Eben Moglen was saying. That now has even more value for us. The internet was & is reshaping our world. He goes from the critical fact of the change that it brings to the changes we need for that to bring gain & not loss.
The space Eben Moglen’s talk covers is vast. It’s about that austerity context, the way the net has developed & where it’s gone wrong. He explains how the US tried to stop him & his friends from publishing the software for Public Key Encryption that now enables internet commerce.
t’s about disintermediation. It’s about the freedoms & anonymity we need to be able to think for ourselves, to learn & invent: “the city is where you escape the surveillance of the village, and the social control of the farm.” It’s about the kind of work a new economy needs.
“We need Free Software, we need Free Hardware we can hack on, we need Free Spectrum we can use to communicate with one another...We need to be able to educate & provide access to educational material to everyone on earth without regard to the ability to pay.”
“We need to provide a pathway to an independent economic & intellectual life, for every young person. The technology we need, we have...” We could populate the net with robots that respect privacy, “instead of those we now have in our pockets”, the ones that disrespect privacy.
Eben Moglen sees these internet years as transforming & changing our world. It could give us space to develop & grow or could lock us up in ways of thinking & living that others control. Here’s a transcript (softwarefreedom.org/events/2012/fr…) & this is his talk:
Also in 2012, shortly before Eben Moglen gave his talk about ‘Innovation under Austerity’, @hilarypepper published her piece ‘An excess of democracy’ in @openDemocracy. She covers much the same time-frame. She speaks of upheavals that relate to that same technological change.
For @hilarypepper “Occupy and the multiplicity of movements that share in new ways the same hopeful characteristics” seemed “like a mountain stream with its springs in the 1960s & 1970s.” It had disappeared & was now again bubbling up: opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocra…
Was @hilarypepper then (or is she now) aware of the changes & movements that Eben Moglen describes? Perhaps: she refers to the Women’s Movement as a having developed the form of a non-technological ‘network’ . She sees the value of the internet’s new & ‘non-proprietorial forms’
“This networked form was distinctive...integral to its origin, character & sustainability were values of solidarity & equality & democracy. Today, the capacity of networks is radically enhanced through...information & communications technology in its non-proprietorial forms.”
It’s likely the ‘proprietorial’ forms @hilarypepper referred to were the proprietary walled gardens of the pre-internet online service providers such as Compuserve & AOL. Their protective protocols became prison walls. The internet protocol was open to all & enabled new worlds.
New worlds! What do feudal barons do when they discover new spaces? Peter Kropotkin described it in his ‘Conquest of Bread’. “A feudal baron seizes on a fertile valley. But as long as the fertile valley is empty of folk our baron is not rich. His land brings him in nothing...”
Get people & give them the space, the tools & the seed. Let them work your new land until your land is their life. And then find ways to extract your living from them & ways to stop others from taking ‘your’ land or siphoning off some part of the wealth you’ve taken as yours.
The resilient decentralised networks of internet space were designed by a state that feared nuclear war. It used the brains it could find, wherever it found them. Those brains couldn’t do what was needed unless they shared the means & ideas that they had, another new world.
Two letters ‘IP’ stand for two separate spaces: a space defined by the Internet Protocols & a space in which people hope to stake their claims of ‘Intellectual Property’, common land now ripe for enclosure by patent & copyright fencing based on thought about things not ideas.
The struggle for & against enclosure of the unclaimed space of ideas is intrinsically complex. Each means of advance in one part of that space may open new space that no one had ever imagined. Not all the creatures who live in these spaces themselves understand them.
The monetary value of reproducible goods relates to the marginal cost of creating new copies. For digital goods that marginal cost tends towards zero unless it’s protected by the imposition of an artificial scarcity.
The Free Software movement’s four freedoms (to use, understand, change, & transmit) seem heretical to many organisations & people. For Eben Moglen & the Free Software movement, the value the internet offers is the value those freedoms provide, not rent from enclosure.
So the internet as a world of effective ideas is an arena for primordial political conflicts between the few & the many, between the seekers & payers of rent, between workers, creators & owners. Its useful services flow from a battlefield.
However, for many (maybe most) thinkers & writers the technical world they rely on remains just a technical world of which they need to know just enough to be able to use it. Very wise, in some ways. The sun shines warm & they picnic – above hidden booby-trap trenches.
It seemed to @hilarypepper in 2012 that loosely connected networks which consisted simply of people had now gained strength by becoming more virtual & therefore more agile. But as they did that they created terrain that others would want to control. The truth became the terrain.
That’s the terrain that @Jonathan_K_Cook describes as ‘the Great Disillusionment’: it’s full of strange beasts & has ‘staging posts’ at various points in the last 20 years: 9/11, Iraq, the 2008 crash, climate-change blindness, failure to prepare for COVID19 (to name just a few).
“Anyone who still takes what our governments say at face value … well, I have several bridges to sell you.” (@Jonathan_K_Cook) But it’s not just governments neither. The experts & the journalists have been too cosy with sources of power & wealth.
All of that, & now with COVID19 & lockdown time to find the facts (& fictions) that abound on the internet has led to torrents of doubt. What are the centres of power to do? @Jonathan_K_Cook suggests they may drown us in so many facts we can’t cope, or try to take total control.
“We will need a new model of independent, pluralistic, responsive, questioning media that is accountable to the public, not to billionaires and corporations. Precisely the kind of media we do not have now.” @Jonathan_K_Cook, we'll also need our own net: jonathan-cook.net/blog/2020-04-2…
