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Tim O'Reilly Steps In To Debate Open Government and Linux
PatrickRIot writes "Aeon Magazine ran a longform critique of Open Source politics last week titled 'Open Sesame: "Openness" is the new magic word in politics – but should governments really be run like Wikipedia?' It referenced Tim O'Reilly and the man himself has stepped in at the bottom of the page for a detailed and lengthy rejoinder. 'I'm a bit surprised to learn that my ideas of "government as a platform" are descended from Eric Raymond's ideas about Linux, since: a) Eric is a noted libertarian with disdain for government b) Eric's focus on Linux was on its software development methodology. From the start, I was the open source activist focused on the power of platforms, arguing the role for the architecture of Unix and the Internet in powering the open source movement. ... One thing that distresses me about this discussion is the notion that somehow, if open government doesn't solve every problem, or creates new problems as it solves others, it is a failed movement. The world doesn't go forward in a straight line! The "open" democracy experiment of 1776 is still ongoing; we're trying to figure out how to use technology to adapt it to the 21st century and a country with a hundredfold greater population.'"
Way too easily used to justify doing nothing, or even just to oppose doing anything different than what's already done.
It's probably one of the more pernicious attitudes to be found, but ultimately it's an empty cause.
From what I learned here it has failed.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
When our Korporate Overlords have secured a firm grip on the reins of this rocket ship that is plunging directly into hell?
Linux is not even a bump in the road. And Government will never be open.
Rick B.
We simply recognize that government by necessity must be limited. Think of government like a fire. I use fire to heat my house. By carefully controlling the fire and keeping it in a furnace, I reap the benefits (warmth) without suffering the ill effects (being burned or having property destroyed). If I didn't control that fire, my house would be destroyed. That doesn't mean I have disdain for fire or I hate fire, I just recognize that it must be controlled to be useful.
Government is exactly the same.
Do you have ESP?
That's the brilliance of the Founders in finding a way to overcome the problems endemic to the Roman Republic to ensure that a republic can (and will) survive the predations of corruption.
I'm kind of confused as to what brilliance that is, exactly. It's only been a little over two centuries and we've already got:
Of course, we don't have the sanguine entertainment of the sands, but the US is batshit about sports, and the Romans didn't have the options of Hollywood and Call of Duty to provide a virtual equivalent to bloodshed.
We really haven't solved any of the problems the Roman Republican had, except for keeping people fed. It'd be harder for a Caesar to rise up and drive a whole stinking mass of politicians out of D.C., but I'd argue the Founding Fathers pointedly did not solve that issue - they were absolutely against the idea of a standing army directly loyal to the Republic.
At any rate, it's still a damned better system than direct democracy, absolutely. Democracy sound great, and probably is great - until you find your behavior isn't liked by a simple majority.
Nonsense. Read up on what a republic is, what a democracy is, the Federalist Papers (and read all of them, not just the 2 lines your favorite site fed you) and something about the context of when the constitution was written.
The US is a constitutional republic. Congratulations, so is France, Germany, China, Russia, the ex-USSR, Egypt, and a whole host of others. There is nothing more common than a constitutional republic in the world of national governments. What is also true is that the US is a representative democracy, a smaller subset of the super set of republics. This can be distinguished from direct democracies (which are also republics, and can be constitutional), or binding representation, (which are also republics).
Again, there is absolutely NOTHING special about the US being a republic.
The Founders explicitly shied away from establishing a democracy for the simple reason that democracies do not scale beyond a small collection of city states.
And if you'd read the Federalist Papers instead of just parroting someone else, they are EXPRESSLY referring to a direct democracy not scaling. After the initial definition, they just refer to democracies, while implying "direct democracies".
Open government? Democracy? That's a recipe for totalitarianism -- because only the strongest consensus builder can assert control to get anything done and few, if any, checks and balances can be imposed or enforced.
Congratulations. You discovered the principal flaw of democracy. You're only about 300 years late to the party. Voltaire has a nice discussion around what makes a ruler legitimate. You might want to look into it. Once you do, you'll also realize that the US was subject to the same risk from the day it became a nation, because it operates on exactly the principles you decry: openness in operation, democratic election of legislators and executives, and a requirement for consensus-building to operate.
Yes, it's just semantics. But it bothers me because the trend seems to be define things in such a way until only a very small and very vocal minority is allowed to participate in government. Of course, they do it because they are the only ones who truly understand how the founding fathers wanted to run things, and they are the only ones who can save the nation. Now where have I heard that before....
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
...But this is about a some high-profile person (activist if you like) being wrongly pigeon-holed by a space-filler for the purposes of winding up the libertarians, open-sourcers etc. etc.
Basically T O'R has confronted a troll. [Well done that man. Always stand up for what you believe in.]
Government, by definition, is involuntary and functions outside of Natural Law. If you have voluntary institutions of governance, with force limited only to the protection of negative Rights, then they are no longer called "government".
Our current addiction to government needs to be phased out, with gradualist caution and intelligence, but that doesn't make government a good thing. Disdain is exactly what it deserves.
--libman
"The "open" democracy experiment of 1776 is still ongoing"
No, it isn't.
Democracy was not newly invented in 1776 - the rebellion in the American provinces came about because people, somewhat mistakenly, thought their democracy was being taken away, and they fought to preserve it.
And now that it's the 21st century we're pretty sure it works.
The government is an irrational belief that exists in the minds of the overwhelming (but slowly shrinking) majority of people. This belief is that some class of priests, through some ritualistic exceptionalism, has a special right to get away with violence.
No, your reasoning is inverted. A better approach to understand this stuff is through motivations.
A sizable chunk of humanity has as its driving goal "having power". They will struggle to obtain power by any means available, that isn't something they chose to be, it's just what they are. And if you don't provide them the mechanisms to do this in a least damaging way, which is what a stable government with concrete prospects of power shifts by non-violent means is, you'll quickly find them doing it on their own in very damaging ways.
People with different driving goals are usually unable to understand how strong this one is, and as is typical for human beings try to reinterpret it in terms of their own different goals, thus reaching confusing and invalid conclusions. Libertarianism is a prime example. It is mostly composed of people with the goals of intellectual achievement and entrepreneurship and who are unable to understand either power thirst or, for that matter, stability seeking, which is what "workers" want above anything else. No surprise then they get to develop a well crafted utopic dream which can work provided those two cases aren't around, the only minor problem with it being that reality gets in the way by continuing to producing those two cases every single generation, no end in sight.
What Libertarianism lacks is balance. They have an excellent theory on how to create material wealth and should be commended for this. What they don't understand, and this is what clouds their mind, is that for the majority out there "material wealth" is of secondary importance, if not something they see as the "necessary evil" they must keep enduring despite their own best interests.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
Actually the connection between republic and democracy is even looser than you seem to suggest: it's not just that a republic is not necessarily a democracy (or not) but a democracy is not necessarily a republic. Case in point, half of the EU is some kind of monarchy (Portugal, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, the UK, Sweden, etc) yet they are representative democracies.
Real life is overrated.
- Some form of slavery; to our credit, we did get rid of outright slavery, but migrant workers are far more politically correct, hey?
Even better: the real slaves and/or low income jobs now don't even live in our Western countries anymore. Much cheaper to ship products in bulk or in containers to us, and leave the people in far away countries where different rules apply. Whatever way you twist that, the reality is still that there are different sets of rules for different groups of people. And the poorest work for the richest. If it is not exactly the same as slavery, then at least it's pretty damned close to it.
...I have to say that it made points that approached, well, cognitive dissonance. Then I saw the author's position: asst. prof at the "Centre for Interdisciplinary Methologies"... which sounds like deconstructionist pudding.
I've known Eric personally for, um, better than 30 years (and have spent a fair bit of that time arguing or heckling him over politics amd guns), and to try to put his view in there with Tim O'Reilly, and anything resembling a working, representative government is saying that, oh, the Beatles, amelodic modern jazz, and Wayne Newton fit together becuase it's all music.
It's also like the neoConfederate tea partiers and the fascist current crop of non-tea party Republicans trying to argue that since Hitler called his movement "national socialism", that it was left wing....
mark
You seem to be making the classic mistake in political arguments of assuming that everyone has the same goals/values that you do and judging their policies on how well they achieve those goals.
In my previous post I've stated what I believe motivates some people: political power, "free lunch", axiomatic liberty-worship, religion, Luddism, etc. What motivates me is the pursuit of objective truth, including a rational basis of ethics and law. Over the years this pursuit has led me many places I didn't intend to go, and would have been much happier avoiding... But it is what it is.
Sorry if I am misrepresenting you, but you seem to consider maximizing Economic Freedom as one of the primary goals, if not the only goal, of the US government.
The "Economic Freedom Index" is a crude measurement that tries to flatten many qualitative dimensions into a single linear scale. That said, it is fairly effective at capturing the fundamentals of how a country should be judged: individual Rights, freedom of contract, reliable rule of law, and not having more institutionalized violence than is necessary.
There are indexes that explore other dimensions of freedom, but they are secondary. A clean-slate voluntary corporation-state like Singapore can limit guns, drugs, and even speech without being tyrannical - those are the rules that people agree to when they choose to come there.
Needless to say, this belief is not universal. Many people believe that civil rights or social welfare, for example, are higher priority. A stronger economy may lead to some of those goals in the long-term, but that is not the same as addressing them directly sooner. Worse, the goals of any political party are likely a compromise representing none of their members exactly.
Economic laws are as universal as the laws of physics. No matter what you* "believe" or how many votes you have or what deliberative rituals you perform, you simply cannot legislate that Pi == 3.0 or that murder is a-OK - those facts of reality exist outside of human influence. (*Note that rhetorical "you" is being used throughout my rant.)
You can either recognize them or fail to recognize them, and failing to recognize them has consequences, akin to trying to build something with an inaccurate understanding of mathematics. A society that fails to recognize Natural Laws will find itself dysfunctional and at a competitive disadvantage compared to a society that comes closer to recognizing those Laws.
Evolution, whether biological or economic, doesn't care for your wishful thinking.
"Nature, to be commanded, needs to be obeyed."
Of course, a particular group's policies may not be the best way to achieve their goals but it is disingenuous to claim a group's policies are "wrong" because they do not achieve your goals.
People should be free to work toward whatever goals they wish, but conflicts between people's desires can only be solved objectively. "You are entitled to your opinions, but not to your own facts." I cannot have a "right to have sex with a pretty girl" if she has a right to say no. You cannot have a "right to a free pony" if people who are to pay for it have a right to property. Full recognition of all Rights has never been possible before in human history, but there is a positive progression toward a rational ideal.
You can set up a voluntary commune on private land and Heil Marx till your heads grow together - as long as everyone (or at least all adults) are there by choice. The Right of the people outside your commune not to be taxed by it, the Right of the children to be emancipated upon reaching adulthood and have the option of leaving, etc are not matters of arbitrary opinion - they are the rational answers to these fundamental questions, as can be shown through rational philosophy, and any other answer is wrong.
"in a society of people who are rational enough to foo" / "under bar every tiny gap of power is tightly filled"
Your factual analysis is sound except for these two bits and their surrounding reasoning. These aren't part of a rational analysis of how thing really are and how to deal with reality as it is, rather they're the small dream bits from which one constructs an Utopia: a fiction describing how reality would be if this or that were so and so. Socialists have theirs too you know? "If only people were compassionate enough...", "If only people were willing to work hard enough...", "If only people were concerned enough with...", "If only people could see that..."
Sorry, but the world isn't like that. To develop any good proposal you must start with how things are, now how they "should" be, then plan according starting with the assumption of the worst possible outcome coming to pass, being the most pessimistic possible the squaring or cubing it, and working up and down from there. What if nudging thing in this direction has this all but absurd side effect? What if a charismatic leader arises and convinces all those people who don't WANT to know 'x' that they should do 'y' instead? What if...? What if...? What if...?
Utopists don't like to do that. Thinking all the ways their pet social engineering projects could go wrong and working with the whole set of potential effects isn't fun. It's like work, because it actually is work. Scientific work at that: developing hypotheses, testing them, fixing, going back, restarting. All of which while dealing with the fact they might be unintentionally wreaking havoc with the lives of millions or billions of people.
So, here's the actual scenario:
a) Society will never be composed entirely of people who are rational enough to foo;
b) Under bar only a percentage of the potential gaps of power will ever be filled, and of those percentage, only a subpercentage will be tightly filled;
c) Both conditions will fluctuate randomly around a median, developing always approximately into a bell curve, and from time to time moving even faster in either direction.
Now, plan.
Ugly, but as real as it will ever get.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.