Open Source Democracy | Page 5

camcorder, we were empowered to move the pixels ourselves.
The TV was no longer magical. Its functioning had become transparent.
Just as the remote control allowed viewers to deconstruct the content of
storytelling, the joystick allowed the audience to demystify the
technology through which these stories were being told.
Finally, the computer mouse and keyboard transformed a receive-only
monitor into a portal. Packaged programming was no longer any more
valuable, or valid, than the words we could type ourselves. The
addition of a modem turned the computer into a broadcast facility. We
were no longer dependent on the content of Rupert Murdoch or
corporate TV stations, but could create and disseminate our own
content. The internet revolution was a do-it-yourself revolution. We
had deconstructed the content of media's stories, demystified its modes
of transmission and learned to do it all for ourselves.
These three stages of development: deconstruction of content,
demystification of technology and finally do-it-yourself or participatory
authorship are the three steps through which a programmed populace
returns to autonomous thinking, action and collective
self-determination.


Chapter 2

The birth of the electronic community... and the backlash
New forms of community were emerging that stressed the actual
contributions of the participants, rather than whatever prepackaged
content they had in common. In many cases, these contributions took
the form not of ideas or text but technology itself.
The early interactive mediaspace was a gift economy (see Barbrook2).
People developed and shared new technologies with no expectation of
financial return. It was gratifying enough to see one's own email
program or bulletin board software spread to thousands of other users.
The technologies in use on the internet today, from browsers and POP
email programs to streaming video, were all developed by this
shareware community of software engineers. The University of Illinois
at Champagne Urbana, where Mozilla, the precursor to Netscape, was
first developed was a hotbed of new software development. So was
Cornell and MIT, as well as hundreds of more loosely organised hacker
groups around the world.
Invariably, the software applications developed by this community
stressed communication over mere data retrieval. They were egalitarian
in design. IRC chats and USENET groups, for example, present every
contributor's postings in the same universal ASCII text. The internet
was a text-only medium and its user was as likely to be typing into the
keyboard as reading what was on screen. It is as if the internet's early
developers released that this was not a medium for broadcasting by a
few but for the expression of the many.
People became the content, a shift that had implications not just for the
online community but for society as a whole. The notion of a group of
people working together for a shared goal rather than financial
self-interest was quite startling to Westerners whose lives had been
organised around the single purpose of making money and achieving
personal security. The internet was considered sexy simply because
young people took an interest in it. People who developed internet
applications in this way were called cyberpunks or hackers, and their
antics were often equated with those of Wild West outlaws, hippies,
Situationists and even communists.

But their organisation model was much more complex and potentially
far-reaching than those of their countercultural predecessors. Many of
these early technology and media pioneers would not have considered
themselves to be part of a counterculture at all. Indeed, many new
models for networked behaviour and collaborative engagement were
developed at research facilities dedicated to the advancement of
military technology. A US government policy requiring all firms
working under Defense Department contracts to test their employees'
blood and urine for illegal drug use led to a certain disconnection
between most Silicon Valley firms and the majority of the fledgling
computer counterculture. (In fact, of all the Silicon Valley firms, only
Sun computing quite conspicuously refused to do drug testing on its
employees.)
Whatever the applications envisioned for the communication
technology being developed, the operating principles of the finished
networking solutions, as well as the style of collaboration required to
create them, offered up a new cultural narrative based in collective
self-determination.
Online communities sprung up seemingly from nowhere. On the West
Coast in the late 1980s one of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, Stewart
Brand (now co-founder of the prestigious Global Business Network),
conceived and implemented an online bulletin board called The Well
(Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link). Within two years thousands of users
had joined the dial-in computer conferencing system and were sharing
their deepest hopes and fears with one another. Famous scientists,
authors, philosophers and scores of journalists flocked to the site in
order to develop their ideas collaboratively rather than alone.
Meanwhile as the internet continued to develop, online discussions in a
distributed system called USENET began to proliferate. These were
absolutely self-organising