So open source is a development and production model that provides for free distribution of resources, creations, and design blueprints, which promotes cooperation, easy modification and reproduction, and ultimately, greater ease of innovation. It allows human beings to be social, as opposed to being atomized workers, managers, and executives, or homo economicus in the abstract.
Open source isn't perfect. Like any open form of human production, it has its share of talented contributors and less-talented ones. It has its share of good will and it has its share of opportunists - plenty of open source projects have sold out. But as an organizing principle, and a general principle of production, it produces quality goods.
The best goods rise to the top and become "stable" over time, and conventions develop around quality and stability, passing by word of mouth and popular usage. The development atmosphere itself tends to be much more loose and open, a joy. Many of the programmers I know complete "contracts" or work in offices to make money, and then put their passions and ideas into the open source world.
But open source does have a couple of drawbacks. First, as a mode of production it enjoys the command of very little resources, at least, in comparison to commercial tech. This is the type of activity that everyone does on their free time, on top of paid work. Another problem is that this activity requires rigorous technical knowledge, and has a very high barrier to entry.
In the previous post, we were talking about the state of affairs in which a
monopolist gains control of a large sector of production, so that much
of the economic activity within a given mode of production must bend in the
direction of the monopoly, encapsulating resources and knowledge in
turn. As a monopoly grows, it commands greater resources, until it no longer seems as if there is an alternative to working within the monopoly. One is afforded freedom of choice of many different iterations of the same thing.
The modern corporation brandishes copyright and proprietary technology and technique as the spearhead of innovation. This assumes creative types and engineers are motivated by money, which is completely the opposite of what is usually the case. Creators, engineers, inventors, what have you, are more often motivated by passion, curiosity, and regard for their fellow humans, or by less savory motivations such as self-aggrandizement, a motivation which can also be decoupled from money. But of course business executives, given nearly absolute power, can speak for the creators, and innovation to them means finding more ingenious ways of directing the fruits of production to their own selves.
I say modern corporation because the way that today's corporation is structured enables explicitly imperialistic, monopolistic, and extractionary behavior from its controllers. When corporations were first conceived, they began as limited economic organizations with arrangements set into place for a specific project, the completion of which caused the corporation to be disbanded, as opposed to today's perpetual empire-building mechanisms.
This is an economic pattern which crops up
frequently in our society, because of a meta-pattern with which the
society operates, whose logic ultimately generates reproductions of the
pattern across economic sectors. I've hit on this theme repeatedly and in various ways, and
so I'd like to attempt to tie in the previous discussion of open source
with this phenomenon.
In short, an economic milieu in which there is an impulse to encapsulate and exploit resources (for individual gain) introduces intense competitive pressures that can only reproduce more of their kind. If individuals can control key resources for personal gain, then other individuals have to erect countervailing economic structures that encapsulate and exploit whatever resources, manufactured goods, or services haven't already been monopolized, so as to introduce opposing forces of economic power, to avoid becoming subsumed and subjugated. The old leftist ideology saw efforts to introduce a stabilizing central government, which would inject currency and works into the population, and introduce tighter controls on key public resources, a project that worked for some time, but then failed as dormant economic actors regained power, and a laissez-faire ideology returned, and with it, predatory economic actors which penetrated government structures themselves and inserted themselves into the social spending process, wherever they didn't destroy it anyways.
The money system itself, originally constructed to facilitate this game, becomes captured in this process, where today it exists as the primary exploitative pressure, as the resources themselves have been abstracted away under financial constructs (though this fiction is unsustainable of course). So we have the high-tech field of computer production -and programming itself - embedded within this system, wherein individuals erect their own structures of encapsulation and exploitation amidst the fields of social, creative human activity. There are plenty of convenient blueprints for doing this: the modern corporation's design and legal construction is available to anyone with the gumption, resources, and the deadened soul to embark on such an undertaking. Now that's open source for you.
You can see this process progress almost as the hardening of a volcanic flow (with due apologies to volcanoes): the open source field bubbles with ideas, or otherwise you have brand new start-ups that are born with ideas, and the core individuals within these fields are bought, along with the operations themselves, and all of that flowing knowledge and those technical blueprints (patents) are frozen and locked up within ever-growing imperial corporate structures.
Ah so we finally have a clear-cut solution in sight! Give the creators and engineers more resources and artistic/technical control and let's unleash that stunted innovation. Break apart the monopolies! Well, no, it gets much more complicated of course. Those monopolies need to be crushed with state power, a monopoly. Who shall control the state? Yet another resource to encapsulate, and what is to keep it from being exploited? We must also take stock of natural resources and energy that go into this activity. Finally, there are those pesky technical barriers to entry mentioned above as well, which sounds innocuous enough, but within them are the glimmers of difficult and complex problems to account for. In the next series of posts, I will try to get to these issues, and any corollary solutions.
