Open Source Democracy | Page 5

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 discussions about thousands of different topics. They themselves spawned communities of scientists, activists, doctors, and patients, among so many others, dedicated to tackling problems in collaboration across formerly prohibitive geographical and cultural divides.
The Backlash
These new communities are perhaps why the effects of the remote, joystick and mouse represented such a tremendous threat to business as usual. Studies in the