Coding Our Way to Liberation

Over the last few months I've been getting more and more blown away about what is happening on the internet. I can trace this back to my recent visit with Mark Pesce and John Gilmore at Mind States 6.  For those who don't know John Gilmore, he was employee number 5 at Sun Microsystems, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.  Spending time with two internet pioneers, I thought I should take this opportunity to ask them a question that many people worry about in the internet age -  "Will the internet be locked down, now or at some point in the future?". They both chuckled.  Mark said, "The genie is out of the bottle, and there is no way to put it back in!". "What about hardware?," John said, "It's just another machine running on code. Therefore it's software too, and software can be hacked!". Ah ha! I finally got it, silly me.

So I had an epiphany today, finally, about what this all meant on a practical and technical level. Well, right now we have a ton of highly successful p2p networks, programs and clients readily and freely available to download whenever you want. They are almost, if not impossible to censor or stop. The joke is on them, and all of this mea culpa from developers and companies is just lip service. They are playing the game to stay in business. They know their business model, like everyone else's is threatened by all of this, they're just not telling you, because they still need your money.

So basically, this means that the moment a company announces a new hardware or DRM implementation or system, even global wide restandardization or downright government and/or UN mandate backed by billions of dollars to censor the internet, WILL FAIL. They will fail because the moment they try to implement such a system, all it takes is a few hours from some clever 16yr old to code around it. Immediately the code is available on the internet, and within hours thousands if not millions of copies will have been distributed. Before the control system could ever be in place, there will already be two steps ahead of them in releasing a work-around. Then the moment they try to block that code escape, more software is released on the then most robust p2p system, and around and around we go, except the hole to freedom keeps getting wider, because the pace of developing a 10 line program is a million times faster than the thousands of lines and thousands of hours to convert the internet over. So any attempts to shut down, block and censor the internet will become all the more pathetic and wasting. The sooner all of these companies, systems and governments of the world accept the reality the better off we'll all be. Whining about it will prove useless. It's kind of like people whining because cars and telephones came around, but they came anyway, because having one gave you such an advantage over not having one.

The same is true today for the internet. Having a free and open internet is much more powerful and liberating that not having one. What does this mean for capital? Well it will become liberated too. Not in some weird right-wing Ayn Randian Extropian hell, but liberated from control. There will be no control of capital, which means the richest man in the world will have no more real power than anyone else. Because this capital freed by the network itself will be totally frictionless, fast and unstoppable, therefore making everyone rich. No more corporate control and wage slavery. Say hello to the leisure society. Of course the rich folk are all freaked out about this, because they are still addicted to being at the top. If everyone was as rich as they were, then what would make them special? Those poor unfortunate bastards who made money their goal and tied it around their self-esteem, as is happens in modern American capitalism, are in for the biggest ego deflation of all. If they are special because of their money, and since they spent ALL OF THEIR TIME earning that money, they have nothing else to show for it.

Oh well. It's not a matter of liking or disliking this scenario. It's inevitable. I realized it a few years ago, and so I now devote all my time to spreading as much joy and happiness in the world as possible.