Group items tagged

allowing the free aggregation of individuals around shared values or common value creation

a huge sociological shift

new life forms, social practices and human institutions

emergent communities of practice are developing new social practices that are informed by the p2p paradigm

ethical revolution

openness

participation

inclusivity

cooperation

commons

the open content industry in the U.S. to reach one sixth of GDP.

political expressions

the movement has two wings

constructive

building new tools and practices

resistance to neoliberalism

we are at a stage of emergence

difficulty of implementing full p2p solutions in the current dominant system

At this stage, there is a co-dependency between peer producers creating value, and for-profit firms ‘capturing that value’, but they both need each other.

Peer producers need a business ecology to insure the social reproduction of their system and financial sustainability of its participants, and capital needs the positive externalities of social cooperation which flow from p2p collaboration.

peer producing communities should create their own ‘mission-oriented’ social businesses, so that the surplus value remains with the value creators, i.e. the commoners themselves, but this is hardly happening now.

Instead what we see is a mutual accomodation between netarchical capital on one side, and peer production communities on the other.

the horizontal meets the vertical

mostly hybrid ‘diagonal’ adaptations

For peer producers the question becomes, if we cannot create our own fully autonomous institutions, how can we adapt while maintaining maximum autonomy and sustainability as a commons and as a community.

Why p2p have failed to create successful alternatives in some areas?

In commons-oriented peer production, where people aggegrate around a common object which requires deep cooperation, they usually have their own infrastructures of cooperation and a ecology combining community, a for-benefit association managing the infrastructure, and for-profit companies operating on the market place; in the sharing economy, where individuals merely share their own expressions, third party platforms are the norm. It is clear that for-profit companies have different priorities, and want to enclose value so that it can be sold on the marketplace. This in fact the class struggle of the p2p era, the struggle between communities and corporations around various issues because of partly differential interests.

Even commercially controlled platforms are being used for a massive horizontalisation and self-aggregation of human relationships, and communities, including political and radical groups are effectively using them to mobilize. What’s important is not just to focus on the limitations and intentions of the platform owners, but to use whatever we can to strengthen the autonomy of peer communities.

requires a clever adaptation

use for our own benefit

The fact today is that capital is still capable of marshaling vast financial and material resources, so that it can create,

platforms that can easily and quickly offer services, creating network effects

without network effects, there is no ‘there’ there, just an empty potential platform.

p2p activists should work on both fronts

using mainstream platforms for spreading their ideas and culture and reach greater numbers of people, while also developing their own autonomous media ecologies, that can operate independently, and the latter is an engagement for the ‘long haul’, i.e. the slow construction of an alternative lifeworld.

The commons and p2p are really just different aspects of the same phenomena; the commons is the object that p2p dynamics are building; and p2p takes place wherever there are commons.

So both p2p and the commons, as they create abundant (digital) or sufficient (material) value for the commoners, at the same time create opportunities to create added value for the marketplace. There is no domain that is excluded from p2p, no field that can say, “we wouldn’t be stronger by opening up to participation and community dynamics”. And there is no p2p community that can say, we are in the long term fully sustainable within the present system, without extra resources coming from the market sector.

One trend is the distribution of current infrastructures and practices, i.e. introducing crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, social lending, digital currencies, in order to achieve wider participation in current practices. That is a good thing, but not sufficient. All the things that I mention above, move to a distributed infrastructure, but do not change the fundamental logic of what they are doing.

we are talking about the distribution of capitalism, not about a deeper change in the logic of our economy.

No matter how good you are, no matter how much capital you have to hire the best people, you cannot compete with the innovative potential of open global communities.

the p2p dynamics

the new networked culture

the opposite is also happening, as we outlined above, more and more commons-oriented value communities are creating their own entrepreneurial coalitions. Of course, some type of companies, because of their monopoly positions and legacy systems, may have a very difficult time undergoing that adaptation, in which case new players will appear that can do it more effectively.

the corporate form is unable to deal with ecological and sustainability issues, because its very DNA, the legal obligation to enrich the shareholders, makes its strive to lower input costs,  and ignore externalities.

we need new corporate structures, a new type of market entity, for which profit is a means, but not an end, dedicated to a ‘benefit‘, a ‘mission’, or the sustenance of a particular community and/or commons.

abundance destroys scarcity and therefore markets

open design community

will inherently design for sustainability

for inclusion

conceive more distributed forms of manufacturing

entrepreneurs attaching themselves to open design projects start working from an entirely different space, even if they still use the classic corporate form. Prevent the sharing of sustainability designs through IP monopolies is also in my view unethical and allowing such patents should be a minimalist option, not a maximalist one.

The high road scenario proposes an enlightened government that ‘enables and empowers’ social production and value creation and allows a much smoother transition to p2p models; the low road scenario is one in which no structural reforms take place, the global situation descends into various forms of chaos, and p2p becomes a survival and resilience tactic in extremely difficult social, political and economic circumstances.

accelerated end of capitalism

Making sure that we get a better alternative is actually the historical task of the p2p movement. In other words, it depends on us!

I don’t really think in terms of technological breakthroughs, because the essential one, globally networked collective intelligence enabled by the internetworks, is already behind us; that is the major change, all other technological breakthroughs will be informed by this new social reality of the horizontalisation of our civilisation. The important thing now is to defend and extend our communication and organisation rights, against a concerted attempt to turn back the clock. While the latter is really an impossibility, this does not mean that the attempts by governments and large corporations cannot create great harm and difficulties. We need p2p technology to enable the global solution finding and implementation of the systemic crises we are facing.

observation

A post-peak world will depend on detailed observation and good design rather than energy-intensive solutions.

not rely on weather forecasts but to learn to read the clouds,

“instead of researching the market, be the market”

businesses should be out there observing.

larger businesses tend to rely more on surveys and on second-hand information.

direct contact with customers.

move our idea of ‘capital’ from what we have in the bank, to the resources we have around us

not running a business on a constant high speed cash throughput with little or no capital reserves

lack of resilience in the just-in-time supply approach

a shift to storages of parts and materials, as well as the need to financially not be so dependent on debt financing

work slower with more financial reserves and take less risks, not building beyond what the company’s financial resources can support.

either to not borrow any money at all, or to borrow so much money that you can’t fail, being bigger than the people you borrow money from, so they have a vested interest in your succeeding!

energy efficient

long term

Looking to make buildings as autonomous as possible in a world entering energy descent is critical

see things that are flowing past and through the business that others don’t see as being a resource and having no monetary value as being valuable.

any intervention we make in a system, any changes we make or elements we introduce ought to be productive

This is instinctive to businesses

Obtain a Yield, in this context, is out of balance

much of business

have taken this to extremes

A well-designed system using permaculture principles should be able to self-regulate, and require the minimum of intervention and maintenance, like a woodland ecosystem, which requires no weeding, fertiliser or pest control.

moving from “we’re just obeying the law” to being proactive, acting before you get hit over the head with regulation and other vulnerabilities.

be able to put a foot on the break, not just going hell for leather on profit maximisation.

apply applied restraint, avoiding excessive, overfast growth that hasn’t been consolidated

looking for the negative feedbacks, from customers and from the environment in general

We need to increase the tightness of feedbacks.

Where nature can perform particular functions

we should utilise these attributes, rather than thinking we can replace them

Where nature can take some work off our hands we should let it.

a shift towards renewable resources

The emerging opportunities for businesses are things that are renewable. Renewable energy sources are the ones that will ensure a business’s stability in the long run. We can also broaden the concept of renewable resources to include things like goodwill and trust, things which a business can rebuild with good husbandry. Most business doesn’t just depend on law and competition, trust is at the heart of much business and it is very much a renewable resource.

The concept of waste is essentially a reflection of poor design. Every output from one system could become the input to another system. We need to think cyclically rather than in linear systems.

looking at our work from a range of perspectives

wider context

keep a clearer sense of the wider canvas on which we are painting, and the forces that affect what we are doing.

being strategic is important too

ask how is what we are doing part of a bigger picture, the move away from globalisation and towards the local, taking steps back from the everyday.

This can be done firstly by allowing space for Devil’s advocates, for black sheep, for hearing the voices of those outside of the dominant culture of the organisation and secondly by looking from a holistic perspective of how things interconnect, rather than just relying on experts who are embedded in detail. It emphasises the need to value the generalist, to give value to holistic thinkers.

allowing people to imagine different possibilities.

scenario planning

Permaculture has been described as the science of maximising beneficial relationships.

Solutions are to be found in integrated holistic solutions rather than increased specialisation and compartmentalisation

The challenge here is to move to seeing business as being part of the geographical community, as being rooted in place, rather than just part of a globalised community. At the moment for many larger businesses, the local is something one pays lip-service to as a source of good PR, something one is passing through, rather than actually being an integral part of the community.

This is a profound structural challenge for large organisations. Part of the resilience of the organisation comes from the degree of lateral integration. Resilience is in all solutions, it is the characteristic of ecological systems. If we apply these principles, resilience is one of the emergent properties

the notion that big is best needs to be challenged

new opportunities are very hard to understand and exploit from a macro level perspective, and are much better done from small scale perspective. It is here that the idea of appropriateness of scale becomes key.

more diverse systems have much more inbuilt resilience

have a diversity of small businesses, local currencies, food sources, energy sources and so on than if they are just dependent on centralised systems, globalisation’s version of monoculture.

not having all your eggs in one basket.

In the short term this kind of diversification could reduce profits, but in the longer term it will be more secure

this is about the reverse of specialisation, about having a mixed portfolio, and presents a big culture change for businesses.

it is a good strategy for business to keep a diverse portfolio of what sustains the business, keep some things that appear to be peripheral. They may not at this stage appear to be a serious part of how the business is run, but in this new world they will increasingly become so

‘edge’

the point where two ecosystems meet is often more productive than either of those systems on their own.

overlap systems where possible so as to maximise their potential.

recognising that innovation doesn’t come from the centre but from fringe thinkers.

giving status to the marginal

It is important that the business has as many fingers in as many pies as possible, as many interfaces, and recognises that every person working for the business represents it in the community.

Natural systems are constantly in flux, evolving and growing.

Remaining observant of the changes around you, and not fixing onto the idea that anything around you is fixed or permanent will help too.

be flexible, lean and adaptable

A healthy approach is to start with no complete plan, to allow the process to be emergent. This is not a time when we can work to a rigid plan as conditions will change so fast. Organisations will need to stay on their toes, without rigid management.

we are interested in the resilience that comes from building a rich ecosystem of interoperable currencies

What are the core elements of a modern cryptocurrency?

Digital

Holdings are electronic and only exist and operate by virtue of a community’s agreement about how to interpret digital bits according to rules about operation and accounting of the currency.

Trustless

don’t have to trust a 3rd party central authority

Decentralized

Specifically, access, issuance, transaction accounting, rules & policies, should be collectively visible, known, and held.

Cryptographic

This cryptographic structure is used to enable a variety of people to host the data without being able to alter it.

Identity

there must be a way to associate these bits with some kind of account, wallet, owner, or agent who can use them

Other things that many take for granted in blockchains may not be core but subject to decisions in design and implementation, so they can vary between implementations

It does not have to be stored in a synchronized global ledger

does not have to be money. It may be a reputation currency, or data used for identity, or naming, etc

Its units do not have to be cryptographic tokens or coins

It does not have to protect the anonymity of users, although it may

if you think currency is only money, and that money must be artificially scarce

Then you must tackle the problem of always tracking which coins exist, and which have been spent. That is one approach — the one blockchain takes.

You might optimize for anonymity if you think of cryptocurrency as a tool to escape governments, regulations, and taxes.

if you want to establish and manage membership in new kinds of commons, then identity and accountability for actions may turn out to be necessary ingredients instead of anonymity.

In the case of the MetaCurrency Project, we are trying to support many use cases by building tools to enable a rich ecosystem of communities and current-sees (many are non-monetary) to enhance collective intelligence at all scales.

Managing consensus about a shared reality is a central challenge at the heart of all distributed computing solutions.

If we want to democratize money by having cryptocurrencies become a significant and viable means of transacting on a daily basis, I believe we need fundamentally more scalable approaches that don’t require expensive, dedicated hardware just to participate.

We should not need system wide consensus for two people to do a transaction in a cryptocurrency

Blockchain is about managing a consensus about what was “said.” Ceptr is about distributing a consensus about how to “speak.”

how nature gets the job done in massively scalable systems which require coordination and consistency

Replicate the same processes across all nodes

Empower every node with full agency

Hold this transformed state locally and reliably

Establish protocols for interaction

Each speaker of a language carries the processes to understand sentences they hear, and generate sentences they need

we certainly don’t carry some kind of global ledger of everything that’s ever been said, or require consensus about what has been said

Language IS a communication protocol we learn by emulating the processes of usage.

Dictionaries try to catch up when the usage

there is certainly no global ledger with consensus about the state of trillions of cells. Yet, from a single zygote’s copy of DNA, our cells coordinate in a highly decentralized manner, on scales of trillions, and without the latency or bottlenecks of central control.

Imagine something along the lines of a Java Virtual Machine connected to a distributed version of Github

Every time this JVM runs a program it confirms the hash of the code it is about to execute with the hash signed into the code repository by its developers

This allows each node that intends to be honest to be sure that they’re running the same processes as everyone else. So when two parties want to do a transaction, and each can have confidence their own code, and the results that your code produces

Then you treat it as authoritative and commit it to your local cryptographically self-validating data store

Allowing each node to treat itself as a full authority to process transactions (or interactions via shared protocols) is exactly how you empower each node with full agency. Each node runs its copy of the signed program/processes on its own virtual machine, taking the transaction request combined with the transaction chains of the parties to the transaction. Each node can confirm their counterparty’s integrity by replaying their transactions to produce their current state, while confirming signatures and integrity of the chain

If both nodes are in an appropriate state which allows the current transaction, then they countersign the transaction and append to their respective chains. When you encounter a corrupted or dishonest node (as evidenced by a breach of integrity of their chain — passing through an invalid state, broken signatures, or broken links), your node can reject the transaction you were starting to process. Countersigning allows consensus at the appropriate scale of the decision (two people transacting in this case) to lock data into a tamper-proof state so it can be stored in as many parallel chains as you need.

When your node appends a mutually validated and signed transaction to its chain, it has updated its local state and is able to represent the integrity of its data locally. As long as each transaction (link in the chain) has valid linkages and countersignatures, we can know that it hasn’t been tampered with.

If you can reliably embody the state of the node in the node itself using Intrinsic Data Integrity, then all nodes can interact in parallel, independent of other interactions to maximize scalability and simultaneous processing. Either the node has the credits or it doesn’t. I don’t have to refer to a global ledger to find out, the state of the node is in the countersigned, tamper-proof chain.

Just like any meaningful communication, a protocol needs to be established to make sure that a transaction carries all the information needed for each node to run the processes and produce a new signed and chained state. This could be debits or credits to an account which modify the balance, or recoding courses and grades to a transcript which modify a Grade Point Average, or ratings and feedback contributing to a reputation score, and so on.

By distributing process at the foundation, and leveraging Intrinsic Data Integrity, our approach results in massive improvements in throughput (from parallel simultaneous independent processing), speed, latency, efficiency, and cost of hardware.

You also don’t need to incent people to hold their own record — they already want it.

Another noteworthy observation about humans, cells, and atoms, is that each has a general “container” that gets configured to a specific use.

Likewise, the Receptors we’ve built are a general purpose framework which can load code for different distributed applications. These Receptors are a lightweight processing container for the Ceptr Virtual Machine Host

Ceptr enables a developer to focus on the rules and transactions for their use case instead of building a whole framework for distributed applications.

how units in a currency are issued

Most people think that money is just money, but there are literally hundreds of decisions you can make in designing a currency to target particular needs, niches, communities or patterns of flow.

Blockchain cryptocurrencies are fiat currencies. They create tokens or coins from nothing

These coins are just “spoken into being”

the challenging task of

ensure there is no counterfeiting or double-spending

Blockchain cryptocurrencies are fiat currencies

These coins are just “spoken into being”

the challenging task of tracking all the coins that exist to ensure there is no counterfeiting or double-spending

You wouldn’t need to manage consensus about whether a cryptocoin is spent, if your system created accounts which have normal balances based on summing their transactions.

In a mutual credit system, units of currency are issued when a participant extends credit to another user in a standard spending transaction

Alice pays Bob 20 credits for a haircut. Alice’s account now has -20, and Bob’s has +20.

Alice spent credits she didn’t have! True

Managing the currency supply in a mutual credit system is about managing credit limits — how far people can spend into a negative balance

Notice the net number units in the system remains zero

One elegant approach to managing mutual credit limits is to set them based on actual demand.

concerns about manufacturing fake accounts to game credit limits (Sybil Attacks)

keep in mind there can be different classes of accounts. Easy to create, anonymous accounts may get NO credit limit

What if I alter my code to give myself an unlimited credit limit, then spend as much as I want? As soon as you pass the credit limit encoded in the shared agreements, the next person you transact with will discover you’re in an invalid state and refuse the transaction.

If two people collude to commit an illegal transaction by both hacking their code to allow a normally invalid state, the same still pattern still holds. The next person they try to transact with using untampered code will detect the problem and decline to transact.

Most modern community currency systems have been implemented as mutual credit,

Hawala is a network of merchants and businessmen, which has been operating since the middle ages, performing money transfers on an honor system and typically settling balances through merchandise instead of transferring money

Let’s look at building a minimum viable cryptocurrency with the hawala network as our use case

To minimize key management infrastructure, each hawaladar’s public key is their address or identity on the network. To join the network you get a copy of the software from another hawaladar, generate your public and private keys, and complete your personal profile (name, location, contact info, etc.). You call, fax, or email at least 10 hawaladars who know you, and give them your IP address and ask them to vouch for you.

Once 10 other hawaladars have vouched for you, you can start doing other transactions because the protocol encoded in every node will reject a transaction chain that doesn’t start with at least 10 vouches

seeding your information with those other peers so you can be found by the rest of the network.

As described in the Mutual Credit section, at the time of transaction each party audits the counterparty’s transaction chain.

Our hawala crypto-clearinghouse protocol has two categories of transactions: some used for accounting and others for routing. Accounting transactions change balances. Routing transactions maintain network integrity by recording information about hawaladar

Accounting Transactions create signed data that changes account balances and contains these fields:

The final hash of all of the above fields is used as a unique transaction ID and is what each of party signs with their private keys. Signing indicates a party has agreed to the terms of the transaction. Only transactions signed by both parties are considered valid. Nodes can verify signatures by confirming that decryption of the signature using the public key yields a result which matches the transaction ID.

Routing Transactions sign data that changes the peers list and contain these fields:

As with accounting transactions, the hash of the above fields is used as the transaction’s unique key and the basis for the cryptographic signature of both counterparties.

Remember, instead of making changes to account balances, routing transactions change a node’s local list of peers for finding each other and processing.

a distributed network of mutual trust

operates across national boundaries

everyone already keeps and trusts their own separate records

Hawaladars are not anonymous

“double-spending”

It would be possible for someone to hack the code on their node to “forget” their most recent transaction (drop the head of their chain), and go back to their previous version of the chain before that transaction. Then they could append a new transaction, drop it, and append again.

After both parties have signed the agreed upon transaction, each party submits the transaction to separate notaries. Notaries are a special class of participant who validate transactions (auditing each chain, ensuring nobody passes through an invalid state), and then they sign an outer envelope which includes the signatures of the two parties. Notaries agree to run high-availability servers which collectively manage a Distributed Hash Table (DHT) servicing requests for transaction information. As their incentive for providing this infrastructure, notaries get a small transaction fee.

This approach introduces a few more steps and delays to the transaction process, but because it operates on independent parallel chains, it is still orders of magnitude more efficient and decentralized than reaching consensus on entries in a global ledger

millions of simultaneous transactions could be getting processed by other parties and notaries with no bottlenecks.

There are other solutions to prevent nodes from dropping the head of their transaction chain, but the approach of having notaries serve out a DHT solves a number of common objections to completely distributed accounting. Having access to reliable lookups in a DHT provides a similar big picture view that you get from a global ledger. For example, you may want a way to look up transactions even when the parties to that transaction are offline, or to be able to see the net system balance at a particular moment in time, or identify patterns of activity in the larger system without having to collect data from everyone individually.

By leveraging Intrinsic Data Integrity to run numerous parallel tamper-proof chains you can enable nodes to do various P2P transactions which don’t actually require group consensus. Mutual credit is a great way to implement cryptocurrencies to run in this peered manner. Basic PKI with a DHT is enough additional infrastructure to address main vulnerabilities. You can optimize your solution architecture by reserving reserve consensus work for tasks which need to guarantee uniqueness or actually involve large scale agreement by humans or automated contracts.

It is not only possible, but far more scalable to build cryptocurrencies without a global ledger consensus approach or cryptographic tokens.

gospel of individualism, small government, and market fundamentalism

innovation is the new selfishness

mastery of public relations

making it seem as if the language of economics was, in fact, the only reasonable way to talk about the subject

memes are for losers; the real money is in epistemes.

“Open source software” was also the first major rebranding exercise overseen by Team O’Reill

It’s easy to forget this today, but there was no such idea as open source software before 1998; the concept’s seeming contemporary coherence is the result of clever manipulation and marketing.

ideological cleavage between two groups

Richard Stallman

Free Software Foundation, preoccupied with ensuring that users had rights with respect to their computer programs. Those rights weren’t many—users should be able to run the program for any purpose, to study how it works, to redistribute copies of it, and to release their improved version (if there was one) to the public

“free software.”

association with “freedom” rather than “free beer”

copyleft

profound critique of the role that patent law had come to play in stifling innovation and creativity.

Plenty of developers contributed to “free software” projects for reasons that had nothing to do with politics. Some, like Linus Torvalds, the Finnish creator of the much-celebrated Linux operating system, did so for fun; some because they wanted to build more convenient software; some because they wanted to learn new and much-demanded skills.

Stallman’s rights-talk, however, risked alienating the corporate types

he was trying to launch a radical social movement, not a complacent business association

By early 1998 several business-minded members of the free software community were ready to split from Stallman, so they masterminded a coup, formed their own advocacy outlet—the Open Source Initiative—and brought in O’Reilly to help them rebrand.

“open source”

The label “open source” may have been new, but the ideas behind it had been in the air for some time.

In those early days, the messaging around open source occasionally bordered on propaganda

This budding movement prided itself on not wanting to talk about the ends it was pursuing; except for improving efficiency and decreasing costs, those were left very much undefined.

extremely decentralized manner, using Internet platforms, with little central coordination.

In contrast to free software, then, open source had no obvious moral component.

“open source is not particularly a moral or a legal issue. It’s an engineering issue. I advocate open source, because . . . it leads to better engineering results and better economic results

While free software was meant to force developers to lose sleep over ethical dilemmas, open source software was meant to end their insomnia.

Stallman the social reformer could wait for decades until his ethical argument for free software prevailed in the public debate

O’Reilly the savvy businessman had a much shorter timeline: a quick embrace of open source software by the business community guaranteed steady demand for O’Reilly books and events

The coup succeeded. Stallman’s project was marginalized. But O’Reilly and his acolytes didn’t win with better arguments; they won with better PR.

A decade after producing a singular vision of the Internet to justify his ideas about the supremacy of the open source paradigm, O’Reilly is close to pulling a similar trick on how we talk about government reform.

much of Stallman’s efforts centered on software licenses

O’Reilly’s bet wa

the “cloud”

licenses would cease to matter

Since no code changed hands

So what did matter about open source? Not “freedom”

O’Reilly cared for only one type of freedom: the freedom of developers to distribute software on whatever terms they fancied.

the freedom of the producer

who must be left to innovate, undisturbed by laws and ethics.

The most important freedom,

is that which protects “my choice as a creator to give, or not to give, the fruits of my work to you, as a ‘user’ of that work, and for you, as a user, to accept or reject the terms I place on that gift.”

O’Reilly opposed this agenda: “I completely support the right of Richard [Stallman] or any individual author to make his or her work available under the terms of the GPL; I balk when they say that others who do not do so are doing something wrong.”

The right thing to do, according to O’Reilly, was to leave developers alone.

According to this Randian interpretation of open source, the goal of regulation and public advocacy should be to ensure that absolutely nothing—no laws or petty moral considerations—stood in the way of the open source revolution

Any move to subject the fruits of developers’ labor to public regulation

must be opposed, since it would taint the reputation of open source as technologically and economically superior to proprietary software

the advent of the Internet made Stallman’s obsession with licenses obsolete

Many developers did stop thinking about licenses, and, having stopped thinking about licenses, they also stopped thinking about broader moral issues that would have remained central to the debates had “open source” not displaced “free software” as the paradigm du jour.

Profiting from the term’s ambiguity, O’Reilly and his collaborators likened the “openness” of open source software to the “openness” of the academic enterprise, markets, and free speech.

“open to intellectual exchange”

“open to competition”

“For me, ‘open source’ in the broader sense means any system in which open access to code lowers the barriers to entry into the market”).

“Open” allowed O’Reilly to build the largest possible tent for the movement.

The language of economics was less alienating than Stallman’s language of ethics; “openness” was the kind of multipurpose term that allowed one to look political while advancing an agenda that had very little to do with politics

highlight the competitive advantages of openness.

the availability of source code for universal examination soon became the one and only benchmark of openness

What the code did was of little importance—the market knows best!—as long as anyone could check it for bugs.

The new paradigm was presented as something that went beyond ideology and could attract corporate executives without losing its appeal to the hacker crowd.

What Raymond and O’Reilly failed to grasp, or decided to overlook, is that their effort to present open source as non-ideological was underpinned by a powerful ideology of its own—an ideology that worshiped innovation and efficiency at the expense of everything else.

What they had in common was disdain for Stallman’s moralizing—barely enough to justify their revolutionary agenda, especially among the hacker crowds who were traditionally suspicious of anyone eager to suck up to the big corporations that aspired to dominate the open source scene.

linking this new movement to both the history of the Internet and its future

As long as everyone believed that “open source” implied “the Internet” and that “the Internet” implied “open source,” it would be very hard to resist the new paradigm

Telling a coherent story about open source required finding some inner logic to the history of the Internet

“If you believe me that open source is about Internet-enabled collaboration, rather than just about a particular style of software license,”

everything on the Internet was connected to everything else—via open source.

The way O’Reilly saw it, many of the key developments of Internet culture were already driven by what he called “open source behavior,” even if such behavior was not codified in licenses.

No moralizing (let alone legislation) was needed; the Internet already lived and breathed open source

apps might be displacing the browser

the openness once taken for granted is no more

Openness as a happenstance of market conditions is a very different beast from openness as a guaranteed product of laws.

One of the key consequences of linking the Internet to the world of open source was to establish the primacy of the Internet as the new, reinvented desktop

This is where the now-forgotten language of “freedom” made a comeback, since it was important to ensure that O’Reilly’s heroic Randian hacker-entrepreneurs were allowed to roam freely.

Soon this “freedom to innovate” morphed into “Internet freedom,” so that what we are trying to preserve is the innovative potential of the platform, regardless of the effects on individual users.

Lumping everything under the label of “Internet freedom” did have some advantages for those genuinely interested in promoting rights such as freedom of expression

Forced to choose between preserving the freedom of the Internet or that of its users, we were supposed to choose the former—because “the Internet” stood for progress and enlightenment.

infoware

Yahoo

their value proposition lay in the information they delivered, not in the software function they executed.

The “infoware” buzzword didn’t catch on, so O’Reilly turned to the work of Douglas Engelbart

to argue that the Internet could help humanity augment its “collective intelligence” and that, once again, open source software was crucial to this endeavor.

Now it was all about Amazon learning from its customers and Google learning from the sites in its index.

The idea of the Internet as both a repository and incubator of “collective intelligence”

in 2004, O’Reilly and his business partner Dale Dougherty hit on the idea of “Web 2.0.” What did “2.0” mean, exactly?

he primary goal was to show that the 2001 market crash did not mean the end of the web and that it was time to put the crash behind us and start learning from those who survived.

Tactically, “Web 2.0” could also be much bigger than “open source”; it was the kind of sexy umbrella term that could allow O’Reilly to branch out from boring and highly technical subjects to pulse-quickening futurology

O’Reilly couldn’t improve on a concept as sexy as “collective intelligence,” so he kept it as the defining feature of this new phenomenon.

What set Web 2.0 apart from Web 1.0, O’Reilly claimed, was the simple fact that those firms that didn’t embrace it went bust

find a way to harness collective intelligence and make it part of their business model.

By 2007, O’Reilly readily admitted that “Web 2.0 was a pretty crappy name for what’s happening.”

O’Reilly eventually stuck a 2.0 label on anything that suited his business plan, running events with titles like “Gov 2.0” and “Where 2.0.” Today, as everyone buys into the 2.0 paradigm, O’Reilly is quietly dropping it

assumption that, thanks to the coming of Web 2.0, we are living through unique historical circumstances