The iron fist, the invisible hand, and the battle for the soul of open source.
Summer in Vienna. Virtual intelligentsia from across the continent and beyond gather for Open Cultures, a convocation of the open source movement's self-proclaimed cultural wing. Dreadlocked Italian geeks ponder P2P video with clean-cut German bloggers. Slovenian net.art curators bend the elbow with Georgian patent lawyers. They're all here to celebrate the specter haunting cybercapitalism: free information.
Free as in beer, free as in freedom, free as in the slowly collapsing pretense that 1s and 0s are worth any money, to anybody, anywhere. The culture-centric take: The Internet, built by professors and soldiers, went bust in the private sector's fumbling hands. Come 2003, ecommerce is all spam, fraud, and piracy, with the shadow of copyleft eclipsing revenue. Open Cultures aims to finish the job. They'd like to see free software evolve from a nifty way to program computers into a broad wave of social reform. It's Solidarnosc for the technosphere.
Logically - indeed, free-software geeks are the most logical hippies in the whole wide world - the revolution is at hand. Why should anybody pay for software? What do you get for your money besides shrink-wrap licenses, potential lawsuits, DRM cuffs around both wrists, and a cloud of viruses? "Property relations" are blocking social and technical progress. Secure computing and digital rights management are coercive regimes that would make George Orwell blush. The free market is a tissue of political fiction as brittle as an Eastern European regime. With open source code on tap, the software trade will collapse under its own weight.
In the swelter of downtown Vienna's Kunsthalle, Eben Moglen, Columbia Law School's free-software guru, delivers a three-point master plan for world domination. Step one: Embrace and extend the legacy of free code. Step two: Block the forces of commerce from installing their barbed wire in computers and phones. Step three: Take back the people's bandwidth from malign spectrum hogs like "Mr. Berlusconi Eisner Murdoch Gates." The future: superabundant bits and open hardware in a hand-to-hand, peer-to-peer megacloud of global Wi-Fi solidarity. Not one damn businessman in sight! Human dignity restored!
From Redmond or Cupertino, it may seem decadent that an elitist scrum of hairy cyber-Euristas would style itself a cultural avant-garde. But consider the track record. In 1989, European civil society tore the guts out of Communism. When the Europeans won the Cold War, they got a bonus the US never did: zillions of eager former Commies. For these New Europe types, open source is a great, glittering step up from the vile product they're used to: broken-open source software, as in pirated CDs sold off blankets at flea markets.
So Europe's open source revolutionaries have a great model for fighting the power. But they rarely consider the aftermath. As the former Soviet Union sadly demonstrates, if you depose the system and don't replace it with anything, you unleash not only altruism but a host of dark traits no less human yet far more destructive. When that happens, you may well get things like well, like this remarkable souvenir I bought for about $1 in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
It's a pirated audiotape of "turbofolk" music by Ceca (pronounced "Tsetsa"), the busty pop-star widow of notorious Balkan war criminal Zeljko "Arkan" Raznatovic. Ceca is in prison at the moment, mostly because her latest boyfriend allegedly helped assassinate the prime minister of Serbia to protect the illicit revenue of Belgrade's Zemun gang. When outraged avengers raided Ceca's crib, they found the place crammed with automatic weapons. That's like discovering Avril Lavigne has her own cruise missiles.
Thanks to this disaster for the people of the Balkans, I've got some nifty music to play in my walkman, and the information was practically free. Ceca won't get my money. Nor will her publisher, her backup musicians, her kids by the dead warlord, or her fellow mobsters. The Bosnians would never give Ceca her cut, because (a) they're amazingly crooked and (b) she's a Serb and they hate her guts. So, in an orgy of contempt for cops, lawyers, and WIPO, they steal her music, repackage it with lousy graphics and worse sound quality, and sell it for peanuts to passing Americans.
The denizens of Open Cultures want their connected collectivism to liberate the world from regulations, markets, and intellectual property. But what if victory only clears the way for corruption of their beloved culture? When I listen to Ceca, I have to wonder what dark passions and ancient evils have been held in check by the grim totalitarianism of the profit motive. We may yet find out.
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