I wanted to write mostly on the Open Source World Conference, OSWC, which takes place this year n Málaga, Spain. But I present later on today, Tuesday, and thought I'd go over some points I want to raise in my presentation. These also riff on a discussion that I had with Simon Phipps last night after the panel on sustainability. He argued, quite powerfully ad lucidly, for the fundamental importance of freedom in the architecture of social and technological communities.
About the conference: At least 8,000 people, with huge numbers of students, government officials, and business people. Software Libre, FOSS, is a serious thing here, and is not just a Libertarian act of independence or, far worse, a marketing afterthought predicated on the expectation of its own failure.
The theme this year is sustainability. As it happens, it's a theme I've been harping on for the last year or so, and have been trying to tie to green movements related to energy, food, manufacture. Green is totally the wrong term, of course, as it aligns the movement (not an ideology per se) to US ecological movements, and those are fatally flawed. They have their origins in 18th and 19th century aesthetic movements, and not in more politically defensible economics. I prefer the term "sustainable economics" as it implies several things:
* Do today what can be done tomorrow and the day after, or planning for the future in every act. This means that it's indefensible to pollute your local environment (or even your neighbour's) because that kills the future, yours and his.
* Do things with the consciousness of others: This means that you have to engage others in what you do. The future is like another country, and it could be near or far. We wont' last forever, Kurzweill or not; and what we do, if we want to engage others, and I think we do, as the age of gross egotism is dead, I hope, must be done in ways that enable others to sit at the same table as you. Call this the commensal principle, and it is the hope of the commons.
(Forget about forgetting the past or declaring history bunk; capitalism's short memory is our long life. Razing the past to build the future never works because the past remembers us even as we try to forget it in the fiction of the present and future.)
* Do what you can now, and don't wait for some sign, revolution, spectacle of catastrophe. We have the tools to act, we have the sense, and we all know what has to be done. But I at least don't want local communities of fascists acting on th espur of their own distorted beliefs. I want communities of freedom, based on the principles of individual freedom and responsibility and acting in conjunction with others.
Freedom and responsibility, communities of freedom: Freedom without responsibility is a version of what the Victorians would derisively call the American "Do as you like" ideology. Freedom without responsibility is the death of community, and we can see some fine examples of it today, in the blood money flooding Wall Street and now Main Street. (What me worry? ideology, is another way of putting it, if flippant.)
The inverse, responsibility without freedom doesn't work, I tend to believe, and seems a lot like the Victorian Era. Consider it community without possibility, an impossible community. The goal is rather liberty and community, community and liberty, not one or the other, and one not privileged over the other. (If the American revolution brought liberty without the claim of community--the US got federation, instead--the French revolution introduced the necessity of community as a crucial element of freedom. But as history has shown, it's a balance, a negotiation, a narrative. And elements of the triad gt lost. This is why I believe we need to renew that social contract, revive the egalité, fraternité, liberté as goals and practices.)
So, I argue--or I guess, assert--the need for developing communities of liberty for establishing sustainable systems of production. This is true whether we speak of energy, food, or Foss, and in practice, each instance will have its own archive of examples, contexts, but one logical effect would be to respect local markets, wisdom and to connect disparate communities, for as the Málaga conference shows, the world is connected.
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