[ExI] The Flight of the Lawn Chair Man, Part II

Emlyn emlynoregan at gmail.com
Thu Jul 10 06:59:48 UTC 2008


2008/7/7 Bryan Bishop <kanzure at gmail.com>:
> On Sunday 06 July 2008, Gary Miller wrote:
>> Come on, there's no such thing as free. And I suppose you think we
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charity
>
> Free is baseline, it's physics; anything nonfree is usually socially
> constrained. There's a difference.

That's a beautiful statement, Bryan. A keeper.

In the context of what Gary was saying, of course, things do actually
cost money (because you're talking about equipment produced inside a
capitalist, scarcity driven society). Having the government mandate
collision detection equipment, rather than provide it, makes more
sense *under that system*.

Now I'm with you, actually, that the whole
monkeys-trading-peanuts-for-bananas thing is daft. Particularly, our
instinct for private property conflicts dreadfully with the benefit to
the whole of knowledge/information being free.

I think there's something extremely interesting going on at the moment
in this regard, globably. Actually, I should probably say in the
wealthy western world. We've got this default culture that's all about
money and ownership, increasing our wealth, status, more peanuts!
Then, there's this interesting counterculture bursting out of the
tech/science communities, saying that you can't subject information to
the same rules as physical property, that our common intellectual
wealth is based on the ability to share and build on information
discovered by others, that the concept of IP just breaks things and
makes us all poorer. And you have these really quite astounding
realizations of these values, most prominent being the FOSS movement,
which seems like the most positive product of collective frustration
one could imagine.

The two cultures really are quite incompatible, when you think about
it, because they differ utterly in basic values. The mainstream
culture bases in a capitalist, ownership oriented value set, while
Free culture could easily have the slogan "From each according to his
ability, to each according to his need". I think the capitalist
culture tolerates the free culture so far mostly because it provides
free stuff, therefore in the short term people in the capitalist
culture can feel like they're benefiting, under their value system,
from free riding on the output of the Free culture.

But there are rumblings, of course, as others in the capitalist world
begin to feel threatened. eg: Steve Balmer: "There's no company called
Linux, there's barely a Linux road map. Yet Linux sort of springs
organically from the earth. And it had, you know, the characteristics
of communism that people love so very, very much about it."
(http://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/07/31/ms_ballmer_linux_is_communism/)

The free culture movement is growing, imo, into a serious contender.
It's been doing it slowly, but inexorably, and I think we will see a
quite magnificent cultural clash play out over the next decade or two.
It a slow grind, like tectonic plates grinding together, or maybe more
like a tree growing through a slab of concrete.

As extropians, we potentially are in a bind. There's a libertarian
aspect to extropianism which tends to be very supportive of
capitalism, of private ownership. But on the other hand, we can see
the benefits of post-scarcity economy, which is exactly what the Free
culture movement in its various form is all about. It's about
information now, but we want the material world to take on the same
characteristics, to behave as information (mnt!) eventually. So our
realistic vision for what is property must shrink over time. You just
can't get there from capitalism imo, not without the discontinuity we
see in the free movement.

Also, I said I was talking about the West, above. I've been noticing
that the developing world (particularly India and China) don't seem
quite as tied to the concept of IP as we are. So there's a double
whammy for the IP culture; rebellion from within and without.

So who do we root for? What do we support? I know I personally want to
see it all go free.

-- 
Emlyn

http://emlynoregan.com



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