Building the World Again

Linux and the Open Source Software movement evoke an intensifying struggle between corporatism and individualism. The Web seems to be the battleground for what is shaping up as a whopper of a confrontration for control of the Digital Age

In "On Revolution," philosopher Hannah Arendt described the two prerequisites for generating revolutions: the sudden experience of being free and the sense of creating something new.

Both are familiar to anyone who has spent much time on the Internet or World Wide Web, or has participated in sites like this one.

The institutions of the outside world - journalism, politics, education, commerce - were threatened by the cyberworld from the start. Perhaps justly fearing displacement, for years now they've presented the digital culture in terms of its worst potential dangers - perversion, addiction, isolation, theft. They're only lately beginning to grasp what is, for them, the true menace.

Cyberspace has never been about technology or machinery. It is also an intensely political realm, an entity all its own. The early hackers were the first guerrillas of the Digital Age, battling (sometimes unconsciously) to spread ideas freely; they would have been stunned to learn how much in common they had with their forebears, the information guerrillas who sparked the American Revolution.

The battle cries from 200 years ago are eerily relevant to ours. Thomas Paine, the forgotten father of the American press, dreamed of a vast, diverse, passionate, global means of transmitting ideas and opening minds. "We have it in our power to begin the world anew," he wrote. Through media, he believed, "we see with other eyes; we hear with other ears; and think with other thoughts, than those we formerly used."

Paine, the radical, and Thomas Jefferson, the idealist, bombarded one another with letters in which both dreamed of a new information culture - one so much like the Internet it sends a shiver down the spine.

In a letter to Paine just after the revolution, Jefferson wrote of this desire: "That ideas should spread freely from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible all over space, without lessening their density at any point."

The writings of these two brilliant men leave little doubt where they would be pamphleteering, sounding off, and philosophizing today: not on the dreary, suffocating newspaper op-ed pages or high-decibel, low-content TV talk shows, but clacking away furiously right here on Slashdot, ICQ chat, Hotlines, tbtf.com and other sites on the Web.

Neither Jefferson nor Paine could have imagined that giant conglomerates - Microsoft, Time Warner Turner, Disney, News America - would take over the media they helped create.

They wouldn't have liked the idea much.

But in the symbolic, sometimes metaphorical standoff between greedy and powerful companies like Microsoft and a growing army of increasingly politicized geeks, they would right away have grasped the implications of the epic battle shaping up for control of the Digital Age.

Our civilization, wrote novelist & essayist John Ralston Saul in "The Unconscious Civilization," (Free Press, $22), is at this moment tightly in the embrace of a dominant ideology: corporatism.

"The acceptance of corporatism causes us to deny and undermine the legitimacy of the individual as citizen in a democracy. The result of such a denial is a growing imbalance which leads to our adoration of self-interest and our denial of the public good."

Reading Saul, then browsing through Slashdot and other open source sites, bells went off for me, especially after the release of Microsoft's now - legendary Halloween Document, in which a company engineer sounded an alarm about the threat from the free and shared software movements and speculated about ways to change and control the protocols that provide open access to the Internet.

This paradigm transcends money or software. There is a great deal at stake politically, culturally, economically. The visions of Paine and Jefferson and the specter involved by Saul are very much on the line; a free and open culture, versus a closed and commercial one. Corporatization versus individualism.

We get so much dumb rhetoric from our two exhausted American political and media ideologies, liberalism and conservatism, that we've grown allergic to pious moralizing. We're almost afraid to take ourselves seriously, in case we end up sounding them them.

We can't absorb any more partisan combat, dogma and knee-jerk thinking, and since the emergence of the Net and Web, we don't really have to. I get e-mail all the time from some of our culture's brightest people -- scientists, academics, physicists, engineers - who abandoned conventional media years ago and are busy shaping their own informational spheres, sending ideas whizzing to one another across space.

But this notion of individuals versus corporatism, along with the growing sense that the Web is the natural battleground for that conflict, is a big idea. Here, individuals can find and communicate with one another. Here, like ants, they work feverishly to tear down wall and fences and keep ideas moving.

Corporatism is now ubiquitous, a threat almost everywhere to individualism, security and free expression. Giant companies have taken over media, publishing, retailing, entertainment and much of American commerce. Music and movies are routinely censored by mindless ratings systems that tip off retail chain buyers. Blocking software censors the information available to millions of children and library patrons. Controversial films - Todd Solondz's "Happiness" was only the most recently example - face difficulty even getting distributed. The hacker's battle cry of "Information Wants To Be Free" seems increasingly hollow as giant companies swarm onto the Internet to control information and make it - and the programs that distribute it - as expensive as they can get away with making it.

Corporatism - from the acquisition of journalism by theme park operators and light-bulb manufacturers to the control by one corporation of more than 90 per cent of the software that runs the world's computers -- has touched us and almost everyone we know.

How many of us like and trust our employers? Or admire their values? How many feel secure and creative in our jobs? How many think giant corporations like Microsoft - sometimes obsessively demonized on the Net and Web - will enhance the freedom of individual expression, and will work to "spread ideas freely from one to another over the globe?"

This is an issue of particular -- and highly ironic -- sensitivity to the geek culture. Geeks design and run the systems that corporations depend on. Fiercely idiosyncratic individualists are woven into the fabric of corporations - the geeks and the suits. Geeks and corporations are coming to understand one another only too well.

There's a danger in taking Microsoft's Halloween document too seriously or exaggerating its menace. There is no rational way one company can control the protocols that run the Internet, nor any evidence Microsoft was even seriously planning to try. But the symbolism - corporatism versus the individual - was overpowering.

On websites like this one, and in movements like OSS, the battle lines seem clearly and powerfully drawn between the corporatism embodied by Bill Gates and his company and the response by countless individuals determined to write a different history for this culture.

Slashdot member Rob Bos e-mailed me that the OSS isn't about "hacking, software, technology, corporations...We are not building an OSS, we are embracing a tradition of openness and the free exchange of ideas to an extent only dreamed of by early scientists and writers; an entire culture based on it, and not merely for the elite - freedom of exchange for the masses."

Jefferson would have wept for joy - knowingly or not, Bos captured the central ethos of the American Revolution and the people who founded the American press, now a morally bankrupt institution utterly disconnected from these roots.

Jeremy Lee e-mailed me this quote from Plato: "We take nothing into the other world but our education and our culture." Paine, says Lee, would have supported that remark.

"Doesn't it feel strange to be at the forefront of the revolution?" he asked.

Yes, it does. Though it's important to remember that this one, however enthralling, is far less dangerous than previous ones. So far, at least, Linux and Apache geeks aren't at risk of being shot or jailed for their rebelliousness.

But that doesn't mean they don't make dramatic choices or that they don't take risks.

More than a few hackers have gone to jail, and as the financial and political stakes surrounding the Internet continue to grow, how can the battle between corporatism and individualism here become anything but more intense?

Jeff, a former ordained minister, was a NT Net-Administrator for a large multinational corporation, helping to manage a domain that spread from Los Angeles to Amsterdam. He quit, he says, "because of the cognitive dissonance. The suits - the people who could open Word on a good day - were being wined and dined by MS flunkies. Consequently, life had a decidedly Orwellian flavor around them - "NT never crashes,' as I'm cleaning up after the latest BSOD...[system crash]"

Part of his motivation for going "independent and open-source" was practical, says Licquia. But when he's being honest with himself, he realizes that the deeper motivation was moral. "To many of us, the real issue with 'open source' is still freedom. Sure, there are lots of economic benefits. Sure, it's practical, for this or that reason. Sure you can do business with it. But, most importantly," he writes, "you're free." After time in the dungeons of Microsoft systems management, he writes, the feeling is intoxicating.

Saul argues that we have unconsciously accepted a civilization in which the kind of corporatization Licquia instinctively abandoned overwhelms our lives and our culture. Layoffs, down-sizings, acquisitions, the stifling of individual initiative and creativity, rampant marketing have disrupted tens of millions of lives, thrown people out of work and torpedoed long-held work notions of responsibility, loyalty and security.

In the media culture, the spread of corporatism has turned the press into just another valueless, greedy and self-destructive mass-marketed product, an awful turn on display all year in the form of the Monica Lewinsky "scandal." Self-censorship is almost routine, controversial commentary and reporting increasingly abandoned in favor of screaming matches between warring partisans. The individual citizen has vanished from journalism. In the year of Monica Lewinsky, can you remember having seen one on a single Washington talk show?

The irony is that on the Web, we are mostly unaware just how patriotic we are, how closely connected to the ferociously determined individuals who midwifed the idea that citizens be free to express their opinions.

The idea that ordinary ctizens with no special resources, expertise or political power - like Paine himself - could sound off, reach new audiences, even spark revolutions, was brand-new to the world. In its wake, writes Gordon Wood in "The Radicalization of the American Revolution, "every conceivable form of printed matter - books, pamphlets, handbills, posters, broadsides, and especially newspapers - multiplied and were now written and read by many more people than ever before in history."

Sadly, this idea has nearly perished offline. Ordinary citizens with no special resources, expertise or political power can merely write letters or sent faxes to newspaper editors or, sent e-mails to remote, non-interactive websites or, if they're lucky, make it through to Larry King's switchboard.

Corporatized modern media has scant interest in providing forums for individual expression. In this arena, as in so many others, the individual has lost out to the corporation.

This idea of indvidual freedom now lives on the Web, which is precisely what makes the Internet so stirring a place, and and the open source and free software such radical political movements. Embodied within them, potentially at least, the ability of millions of ordinary citizens to get their hands on machinery that enables them to sound off once again.

The echoes of these powerful ideas resound from that time to this. Once more, there is the compelling, even thrilling sense that we can build the world anew. Jon Katz is the media critic for the First Amendment Center of the The Freedom Forum [http://www.freedomforum.org/] ***