OpenSourceSociety

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been the lucky recipient of a good deal of encouraging news without even realizing it.    Since I was laid off in February, when not looking for work I’ve had a great deal of time to read up on socioeconomic movements that are gathering steam.  The cumulative effect caught up with me today and slapped me in the face with a big dose of enthusiasm.

I’ve heard many different opinions and theories on “revolution” over the years, and everyone has their own ideas on what is or isn’t a revolution, and how we ought to go about having one.  When I was thirteen, I fantasized about millions of workers hitting the streets with their rifles and pitchforks in a popular uprising; exactly how I envisioned the Russian Revolution of 1917.  I couldn’t see any other way to change things than loading up my AK and taking out the bosses in cold blood.  Looking back, I chalk a lot of that up to raging teenage hormones and unresolved anger issues.  As most beliefs do, mine evolved over time and lost their bloody zeal in exchange for a more practical approach.

A couple years back, I started reading up on American history to try and gain an understanding of how and why we got as screwed up as we are.  Through all the accounts I read of our own revolution, there was a recurring theme staring me right in the face: the Colonists were able to slough off British rule because they became self-sufficient.  The American Revolution was won before a single shot was ever fired.  The miltary campaigns which are unfortunately quite often mistaken for the actual revolution, were in reality an attempt by the British to retake what had already been lost.  This is contrary to our popular myth of the Minuteman fighting to claim what is rightfully his from the British, rather than defending what he had already taken without violence.  The difference is subtle but significant, both in terms of understanding the process of revolution, and understanding the impact our myths have had on our collective conscience.

The American Revolution occurred the moment the Colonists decided to create their own organizations of production and government.  They set up their own congresses, and imbued them with the authority of popular consent, rather than divine right.  They began to manufacture their own goods, and do without any goods they couldn’t make themselves.  They utilized their own natural resources at home, rather than selling them off to England where they were turned into finished goods and then sold back to the Colonies at inflated prices.  Each of these actions were undertaken independently, without any overall detailed plan involved, but they added up over time to create a strong community that didn’t need an outside government to rule it.  The British Government quite simply became obsolete and superfluous.

That, my friends, is how successful revolutions are won.  By creating our own community congresses with authority born of popular consent, rather than falsified histories, we gain greater control and influence of our living conditions and environment.  By rejecting globalized manufacture, and using sustainable, community-based manufacture, we insulate ourselves from global economic fluctuations, and empower ourselves to lead more fulfilling and happy lives.  We don’t need to march in the streets with bombs and guns and flags; doing this will only result in starting a vicious cycle of violence and fear.  We simply need to make our existing system of politics and economics obsolete with good old-fashioned home-grown American industry and ingenuity.  These are the very things that from the hour of our nation’s birth made it such a great country to live in.

Now that you understand where I’m coming from, it will be clear to you why I’m overjoyed to see a growing number of small, grassroots movements pushing sustainability and community-based economics.  I’m not referring to the recent trend of big businesses adopting the term “green” to make everything they do seem warm and eco-friendly (*cough* BULLSHIT *cough*).  I mean the large number of small, non-profit organizations who make it their goal to discover and teach ways to live in harmony with nature and each other.  The momentum is building greatly, and these groups are popping up all over the world.

So what?  Well think about the implications of these movements, in light of what we know about the first American Revolution, and you’ll see that we’re already well on the path to making the current system of human interaction irrelevant.  It’s a soft, fuzzy, cuddly-looking backlash, but it’s a backlash nonetheless, and whether its participants will admit it or not the movement represents a complete rejection of “business as usual” in favor of a humanist approach to life, work, and community.  So my friends, the second American Revolution, and indeed a global revolution, has already begun.  This revolution will resemble a dance of joy, rather than a war, and will be fought with shovels, picks, and axes, not guns, bombs, or cannons.  And in the end, I think we can’t help but end up with a better society that values happiness and wealth of spirit above all else.

During the Great Depression, unscrupulous individuals roamed the land far and wide hawking everything from snake-oil cures, to Bibles, to vitamin pill pyramid schemes.  They took advantage of poor and ignorant people who were searching for any ray of hope in the midst of the darkest times they had even known.  With the war and the New Deal came an end to the Depression, and a decline in the number of scam artists.  They never fully left us, however, and over the past 60 years he (I say “he” because in human mythology even the Devil is a male, and ever since we attribute being male to being evil.  This does not mean women aren’t just as guilty of being hucksters, liars, and cheats) has been lurking in the shadows, selling diet pills and magic towels and various food preparation gadgets that would make Rube Golberg himself blush.

The age of the Internet ushered in a whole new class of rip-off masters.  Spam email, black-hat crackers, spyware vendors, phishing sites, and of course the same old pyramid schemes and snake-oil in digital form.  Some attempts at regulation have been made, but on the whole our attitude has remained the same: caveat emptor; the consumer has no rights.  Some of this scurrilous activity, such as data mining and “payday” lending, is even specifically sanctioned by law.  It is far easier to make a profit from manipulating and tricking ignorant people, than to actually do work that is productive for society.  The normal forces of the market do nothing to prevent this, and in fact the great rewards for ripping folks off serve to encourage this behavior.  This is one of the biggest flaws in a market-based mode of production.

As if these problems weren’t enough to plague the average American, a new type of scam has surfaced recently.  This technique targets would-be job seekers using sites like Craigslist.  There are plenty of pitfalls and false pots of gold out there to trip up an unwary job hunter, but this new tactic is particularly odious.  The scammers make a post like this one (link removed), offering a very appealing position, with a very appealing salary, and requiring modest qualifications.  It all looks fine and aboveboard, certainly no work-at-home scheme or sales nonsense, there doesn’t appear to be a catch at all.  So you respond to the ad with your resume and contact information, perhaps you do as I did and spend almost an hour writing a masterpiece cover letter.  Immediately after sending your magnum opus application, you receive an email thanking you for your interest and inviting you to follow a link which contains an application you must fill out to be considered for employment.  If you follow the link, you are presented with a page which requests a number of highly personal information items, and tries to sell you something or sign you up for an online degree search site.

With the economy as bad as it is, it seems cruel to play this kind of trick on people trying to find honest work.  It already seems criminal that we let so many “legitimate” companies continue to operate against the interests of the public and the economy, but this takes it to a whole new level.  I must constantly be on my guard now when reviewing ANY job posting, and at any minute I risk handing over my personal information to someone who could use it to steal my identity or drain my bank account.  This means effectively my job search capability has been reduced dramatically, due to a significant loss in efficiency.  I’ll never get that hour of my life back, and that’s one more hour that I wasn’t doing something productive for my community and earning money to feed my family.  Shame!

I’ve added four new links I think you might find interesting.  These are projects I think embody the concept of an open source society in that they promote sharing of information, self-reliance as well as community spirit, and a quest for alternatives to unrestrained globalization.  I strongly believe these projects represent the trends of the future, and if they do, I think the future is very bright indeed.

The first site is called Instructables, and it is basically an enormous collection of howtos on everything from wind turbines, to water filters, and even a cracker chucker.  Why go out and spend your hard-earned money on products with planned obsolescence, when you can easily make so many things with your own two hands that will last far longer, cost much less, and give you a sense of pride?  I hope this site will help you get out of Wal-Mart and get into the garage.

The next site is Low-Tech Magazine.  They describe themselves thus:

“Low-tech Magazine refuses to assume that every problem has a high-tech solution. A simple, sensible, but nevertheless controversial message: high-tech has become the idol of our society.”

I think that says it all very well.  The site is similar to Instructables, but it has a low-tech twist.  It is chock full of ideas on how to solve everyday modern problems without resorting to an over-complicated, needlessly expensive, high-tech solution.

Next we have PeaceLoveHuman, a project started to encourage collaboration, kindness, and sharing among human beings.  The creators of “Smile Church”, PeaceLoveHuman is rapidly growing into a large movement.  There are some great ideas on the site for ways you can get involved in your community to infect it with happiness and cooperation.

Last but certainly not least, we have the Open Source Ecology project.  This is an active experiment in Missouri that aims to create a completely off-grid, self-sufficient, open source community called a “Global Village”.  They are creating a suite of technologies called the Global Village Construction Set, which will allow anyone to create a similar self-sufficient community just about anywhere.  This is a truly amazing project that I am very interested in following,  and I am hoping to get an interview with some of the core members of the experiment soon.

I hope these projects help to inspire you to make an impact in your own community.  I am certainly fired up now to go out and make a positive impression on my neighborhood.  If you have any comments or questions, feel free to contact the individual projects, or send your questions to me and I will do my best to forward them to the proper people and get you a response.  If you know of other great projects like these, or have one of your own, by all means send me an email and let me know!