I keep hinting at the technical knowledge that open source software requires, as well as the fact that this requirement reveals much about the unfolding of a technological society of our nature, and then I keep delaying the discussion with some detour here or there. Well, here we go.
We are left with another challenge: open source production and utilization, with its direct command of raw computing power, takes sophisticated technical knowledge to navigate. This is because of the nature of a computer's construction and administration: it must be talked to with a specific language that commands it to do specific things, all abstracted into towering interconnected structures of protocol and process. You can't simply tell a computer to "do this."
It is possible to democratize this command of computer resources with the development of user-friendly interfaces: buttons, screens, mouses, visual interfaces, all of which made it easier for less technically-sophisticated users to work with these systems. But this democratization requires an entire industry of specialists: programmers willing to build these interfaces, graphic designers willing to develop visual interfaces and user-friendly design, technical support representatives, hardware designers, you name it.
But the broader reach a given sphere of human activity entails, and the more time and resources a given sphere requires, the more likely the sphere is in danger of commercial expropriation. Capital seeks out concentrated pockets of human activity like an oil company seeks out concentrated oil reserves. Whatever grows in social regard tends to be desired to a greater degree; this is the primary resource that capital seeks. One gets one's grubby claws around an object of desire and becomes the gatekeeper, charging a premium for access.
So pockets of non-commercial activity tend to run on lower resource inputs, and they tend to be populated with a limited subculture which is somewhat insulated from the mainstream.
Open source has become a general concept that spans many fields, and the fields do overlap. I won't deny there is a vibrant underground, or shadow economy that grows as the formal economy loses legitimacy. However open source programming itself tends to be populated predominantly with programmers, due to the technical requirements. There are many types of programmers, many of whom are willing to set up easier-to-use interfaces for lay people and interface with the general public. But on the whole, the subculture remains insulated.
Part of this insulation stems from technological complexity itself. As a culture increases in complexity, a greater amount of divisions are required in numerous specializations, due to human cognitive limits. In an ideal society, more basic living functions would be shared among the populace, and individual specialists would share their knowledge and technical know-how with each other and cooperate through a trust that each specialization does its part.
What we seem to have instead time and time again through the history of human civilizations is a relegation of basic functions - which have become uninteresting to a society delighted with its technological progress - to vulnerable and disliked portions of the population, or to entire societies outside of the imperial core. Let immigrants and the poor in the imperial core handle agriculture, landscaping, service, and maintenance, and let the post-colonials handle resources such as agricultural goods, raw manufacturing materials, energetic resources, and whatever else is uninteresting to the shiny modern sensibility; they're all brutes anyways!
Now you can witness the sheer hubris of our global empire by gazing over the vast landscape of outsourced manufacturing, energy, resources, and now even tech work, as all of it bleeds into the periphery through financial engineering, economic bullying, and what is now waning military power.
If you have slaves and indentured servants handling all of the grunt work, you can ignore all of it and concentrate on the finer things in life, such as your insanely limited and reductionistic specialized disciplines. This impetus serves in part to characterize an ambitious and complex society, and contributes major pressures to the formation of a social hierarchy.
If you're happy with living in one of the many economic dictatorships (corporations) that span the modern world, great. However for open source programmers, who have an egalitarian sensibility and a penchant for sharing, this is a fatal weakness. If capital can intersperse itself in all sectors of the economy, and those sectors are all played against each other through exploitative pressures, and each sector of resources is fenced off for private gain, then one has to rely on the market for most of one's basic needs, even as one participates in a radical, egalitarian community. To do open source programming one has to have one's nutritional needs, medical needs, shelter, energetic requirements, social needs, and whatever else, all of which must be procured from the market if one is not fulfilling those needs oneself, or getting those needs fulfilled from the local community.
The only way to preserve this state of affairs and revolutionize one's own social activity would be to take control of the state itself and force a change on the rest of society, as the old socialists and communists understood all too well. Which, I'm not sure is possible any longer, for reasons I could get into another time.
And so, in the abstract, radical creativity, or creativity that takes place outside of a dominant economic or social system, takes a granular knowledge of all of the elements and tools of creation. It also takes time and energy, both of which are required to subsist in the old society as one makes preparations for a transition.
It also requires the ability to handle one's own basic needs, or to have those needs relegated to a sympathetic community that one can trust and reciprocate with.
In the abstract, pure open source programming lacks these needs, but as I write, open source communities everywhere have beaten me to the punch. Increasingly resilient and self-sufficient communities are forming everywhere, and individuals are adopting increasingly multi-disciplinary approaches, and are becoming once again interested in those disciplines that were once relegated to less powerful groups. Increasingly a greater human mass is becoming further disenfranchised, with previous ethnic and subcultural divisions in its midst melting away, where they aren't strengthening and sharpening anyways.
I'll take a look at the implications of these developments in the final post.
