I left off talking about open source programming and the problems that are posed to it because of concentrated economic power, and then hinted at various solutions and further problems that were related to those solutions. Let's briefly touch on these.
We look upon this relentless production of exploitative economic structures built on top of each other, every which way, checking each other or consuming each other and we let out a vast sigh of exhaustion. What to do!
We thought we could use the state's monopoly on violence to flatten out these oscillating exploitative pressures by cutting off their wavelengths at the extremes. Progressive income taxes, redistribution of some wealth, state employment, social welfare, etc. But then these mechanisms were further compromised as economic concentration found yet again its expression in alternative channels, such as in think tank propaganda, the slow infiltration of anti-government ideology, control of media organs, gradual control of courts, and the re-taking of political power through bought politicians and institutions.
Capitalist disruption and innovation may very well change the flow of this endless vacillating game of leapfrog, and transfer power from one politico-economic bloc to another, but it only temporarily halts the concentration of power, and the dangerous mimetic effects that come with the concentration of power: monkey see the other monkey perched high atop the jungle gym, and monkey want what other monkey has, so to speak.
We produce these marvelous technologies partially out of the internal impulse to personal freedom: to create and command resources for those creations, which provides temporary relief from our structural tendencies to crush each other, and this project extends further out into conceptual abstraction and technical sophistication, perhaps solving some of the problems we've created trying to do this in the first place, or if we are lucky, solving more fundamental problems.
Technology serves to democratize computing power, ideological power (through printing and distribution), mechanical power, and mass communication.
However we've come to realize that this endless procession of incremental technological, cultural, political, and economic adjustment does not ultimately produce more stable socio-economic structures; it merely reproduces previous exploitative people-relations while delaying the explosive effects of power concentration that has both catastrophic internal and external consequences for itself. The technological innovations which are meant to give power to ordinary people are themselves infiltrated by concentrated economic and political power, and we are left with existing forms of exploitation that merely grow more complex.
What's more, further extension of technological innovations requires a growing base of economic growth and energy usage. All of these computers and Internet servers for example require working supply chains and energy sources: mines for extraction of rare elements and metals, transportation networks, construction, maintenance, the production of electricity, the administration of systems of knowledge and production that make these technologies possible, and so on. To keep from cooking ourselves with bombs, we must cook ourselves with energetic waste, or the dumping of carbon into the atmosphere.
Oh, dreary old fundamental problems of maintaining a civilized society and such. Back to open source in the next post.
