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The Relationship Between FOSS and Democracy
An anonymous reader writes "Free software is about freedom. So it shouldn't be any surprise that the ideals behind the free software movement have spread to the place where freedom is most affected: government. The old definition of e-democracy is, basically, 'using computers in politics and governance.' So a politician sending out a batch e-mail is e-democracy. The new movement is about removing the power from politicians and making governance collaborative. The analogy to FOSS is remarkable: think of the current governments as the old guard computing companies, and the collaborative governance movement as the geeks with crazy notions of a different way of organizing things. FOSS looked like an impossible pipe-dream when it started. Tell that to the Apache group today."
Are we going to use Twitter and Facebook to arrange a schedule when we're going to all take turns guarding the prisoners, patching the roads, cleaning the sewers, and all that stuff that government does through that old-fashioned bureaucracy? I mean, we're "making governance collaborative," overthrowing the old-guy system of doing things, right? So from now on, we'll just send out a tweet when someone robs a bank, and handle the police work on it *collaboratively*.
Surely everyone is willing to do some actual *WORK*, right, instead of just lazily shooting your digital mouth off on a blackberry or iPad keyboard? Surely we all realize that *REAL* governance takes actual time and effort, no?
Wait, what is that? ...is that crickets I hear?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Right. The appropriate term is "cyberdemocracy".
It all started with Washington yelling "First!" at the start of his presidency.
You cannot fork government, you are not free to change to your liking; You cannot use a different government than your neighbor does, you are not free to pick.
The form of democracy used in most countries is everything but freedom. Sure, you are free to vote on some guy that might share opinions/thoughts/ideals, based on the propaganda they put out. But after that, the person you voted on has free play till the next elections. At that point, you handed over part of your freedom.
I know I had Politics turned off on my front page.
Did that get broken as well as the checking comments?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
No, the point is FOSS will help us become an anarcho-syndicalist commune. We'll take it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week But all the decision of that officer have to be ratified at a special biweekly meeting. By a simple majority in the case of purely internal affairs, but by a two-thirds majority in the case of more...
And in other ways, FOSS and democracy are opposites. The biggest aspect that pops into mind is force: nobody is forced to use FOSS against their wishes. FOSS is almost always compatible with proprietary implementations (that is, a proprietary implementation can re-implement whatever FOSS does). With democracy, there is always the tyranny of the majority: if 50% + 1 want something, everyone must go along by force. That strikes me much more like proprietary software than FOSS, where a single implementation is the only implementation (such as needing perfect MS Office compatibility).
FOSS is much more like liberty or anarchy than democracy. No one forces you to use FOSS, but you are free to do so.
Be relentless!
Democracy:
Power of the Majority (i.e. white or German) to squash and exterminate the minority (i.e. black, Japanese, or jew). Is anyone thinks this "remove power from laws" is a good idea, then they truly don't understand what they are endorsing. Tyranny of the majority destroys human rights; it does not protect them.
See Athens. See what happened to Socrates (sentenced to death simply because the majority did not like him).
Information wants to be expensive AND wants to be free. So you have Value vs. Cheap distribution fighting each other.
The "point" to me sounded like a bunch of bullshit cyberspeak about how the internet is going to turn government into a big drum circle where we all join hands and sing songs of peace and love.
I'll be the first to admit that a lot of Progressive activism does suffer from its (often impractical) idealism. That said, the assertion that the Internet, with its FOSS-style approach to standards and its preference for unmediated communication, really is a democratising force.
The problem is, the powers-that-be are becoming aware of this fact, and they don't like it. I may be getting cynical in my old age, but recently all I've been seeing is how susceptible to coercion modern networks are. I've written a series of newspaper columns and blog posts on the topic. Here's the basic take-away:
Will the revolution be twittered? If Egypt is any example, it's increasingly likely that it won't. That said, Internet protocols and FOSS philosophy still hold some important ground. They can be used to organise groups and share experience/intelligence. Not all hope is lost.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
The alternative, our status quo, is to surrender all power to the corporate and political aristocracies. If there's sufficient money to keep the powerful in place, then those wielding those funds form the laws out of whole cloth.
In what way is this better?
What I find completely amazing is this simple fact: Most well-run and successful open source projects seem to bear very little relationship to a true democracy (i.e., majority rule) in form or function.
The head of these projects is often referred to as a "benevolent dictator" - he whose word is law. The contributors cooperate (and sometimes compete, sometimes even via nasty political infighting) in what is in essence, a ruthless meritocracy-slash-technocracy, led by that 'benevolent dictator.'
1000 Joe Q Publics writing to the Linux kernel mailing list will be easily outweighed by a simple "NO" from Linus, or any single one of the other frequent kernel contributors. 1000 Joe Q Publics complaining about how some feature didn't get implemented yet will be told, "Go fuck yourself, we're not here to work for you, if you think it's that important, either write the code yourself, or wait until we decide to get to it." Last I checked, they weren't asking people to vote on which features to implement in the next version of the Linux kernel.
Openness and Democracy are often found together, and a well-run democracy requires an educated populace (which, in turn, requires information to be available to the populace so that they may be informed), but the two ideals are absolutely not identical. Opening up governance to "egalitarian collaboration" simply means that you'll see a lot more trolling, a few more Goatse bills, and god help us all if Anonymous decides to get involved in governance "for the lulz."