I'm not in awe of Tim O'Reilly. That's because after six years of hearing him spoken about in reverent tones in and around Second Life, reading his blog, seeing his blogger's code of conduct and so on, I was never impressed. Yeah, I got how the business model worked. Everything is free, software *has* to be free, there *must* be open standards, but the manual for that will cost you $39.99, m'am. Everything must be voluntary and everything must be networked, but the conference for *really* plugging in will cost you $1375, sir. And then there's the speaking fees.
"Your information wants to be free; mine is available for a consulting fee, however."
I definitely favour people getting paid for the work, and if somebody wants to make a business publishing books online and charging people to hear gurus for two days the price of a laptop, that's fine, but there's a hitch. The fuel, the work tools, the substrate for all this high-powered business is free-ness. Everybody else having to work for free, and having to produce a base product for free. Geeks who have the backing either of Mom, Big IT or the Government go along happily with this business model.
I don't.
I'm less than sanguine about its usefulness for social movements related to civil society and the non-profit world. As I've explained, there's a really unattractive culture and set of assumptions that comes with open source and forcing the software production culture itself on to more complex and organic human endeavours.
And I have a memory stretching back to the sit-ins of the 1960s; the conceptual art happenings of the 1970s; the Freeze movement of the 1980s; and even in a period of less activism and more hedonic self-obsession in the 1990s, still, the demonstrations in front of embassies of oppressive countries and then the anti-war marches that began after 2001 but then receded...to be replaced only by Save Darfur marches -- but still, all events, sustained by organizations, that didn't force people to work for free, even if they had volunteers, and didn't conceive of conferences, un or not, as having to cost a fortune. It was understood in the 1980s that if you worked for something like NYPIRG or SANE you got a low salary, but it was still a salary; if you went to a conference on the Freeze, it was $20 or $50, not $1500.
The philanthropy model as an engine of support for civil society is dying out, Madoffed, or chasing extremist fads or newly cautious, and naturally other forms will have to take its place, but I'm going to remain skeptical of devices like Kickstarter that involve creating wealth for a tiny handful of coders who skim off everybody else using the platform; of upstarters launching projects and shaking everybody else and offering them only a t-shirt or an autographed CD, not granting equity, and forcing the lucky recipients of all this crowd-sourced joy usually to have to start the whole process all over again for the next thing.
The culture of open sourcing has its negatives -- but the process of programming itself as a culture, open or closed, is reductive and destructive as well.
Let's take the concept of the "civic stack". When geeks talk about a stack -- which they often do with a combination of scientific earnestness and religious ecstasy -- they mean not just a stack of pancakes, but a stack of pancakes where only certain pancakes can stack, and only stack in a certain way: "abstract data type and data structure based on the principle of Last In First Out (LIFO)".
What goes on the top is "pushed"; what comes off the top is then "popped". Great system for pushing and popping numbers and symbols; not great for pushing and popping people and their owned data.
Obviously, there's the question of who gets to make the stack and push and pop stuff of it. And the answer is: the handful of coders who decided "out of the cloud" that cities "needed" to turn over "all their addresses" and that "all the cities need to be aggregated".
But...People might not have wanted to do this -- if the issue was put to them in layman's terms. And no HERRRR it's not about my fear of privacy erosion or not realizing I'm on the exposed Internet DERRRRR.
What it's about is the question of whether cities should make available civic data to handfuls of unaccountable geeks who want to make aps and who may or may not be profiting from their widgets for i-phones. That's a valid question, but you would never know it from this sort of discussion.
What gets to be in the stack and gets glued and what fits and what works -- that isn't a democratic ground-up process in the ecstatic way in which O'Reilly put it, but in fact very top-down from the superstructure of his cadres in search of a base. Of course, more "enlightened" and "localocracy" types will have "walkings" and "conversations" where they ostensibly get "inputs". Often that's just a gaggle of more local geeks than the national geeks, but perhaps that is as good as it gets. I don't want to be told if I ask questions about the formation of the civic-stack sausage that I must not want people to use their i-phones to find public toilets in New York City. I want to know what checks and balances are put *on these coders* when they grab every address of every building, public and private in a city like San Francisco and how people who don't like that can opt *in* rather than opting *out*, the usual geek solution.
I never see any discussion of the fact that Four-Square, whose original geeks just think of it as a public building check-in, realize how much users have forcibly changed it to a mixed public and private device. A teenager in my building has turned her apartment into a place to check-in, and now we can see all her boyfriends. Maybe she doesn't care. But maybe her mom does. Oh, wait, maybe her mom might start caring when she sees that 40 people checked in obviously for a party when she was out...
Back to O'Reilly.
All this means is that he wants the geeks this is intended for, to patch together various functioning bits into a cobbled-together whole rather than expending on big systems. This is a job for Ajax!
So, San Francisco "has" to open their data base of addresses, he said, as in Code for America which is making "civic software" for cities in a "Civic Commons".
"Government entities at all levels face substantial and similiar IT challenges, but today, each must take them on independently. Why can’t they share their technology, eliminating redundancy, fostering innovation, and cutting costs? We think they can. Civic Commons helps government agencies work together. "
That means homogenizing the job and putting it into a few hands again. The platform's job here is to "identify, document, and relicense technology currently in use. Projects that have been prepared for sharing are then listed in the Civic Commons directory of applications so that other government entities can find applications they need, as well as contribute their own. Civic Commons is also intended as an information resource for government technology professionals and citizen activists alike who want to support the use of open technologies, open standards and open data."
See how it works? Sounds good and wholesome, but it forces the open source option on you once again, or you can't be in it. Alllll of these things now are put into the hands basically of one man, with a maniacal obsession with making everything "free and open". And a good way to create jobs for your friends, too.
Why do I object to this? The same plan that destroyed the music, news, and other related businesses in "Web 2.0" and "disrupted" commerce and "added value" only to a few big social media oligarchs has been descending on government, and is now going to be sprung on civil society, too. Please don't tell me destroying the news business is somehow inevitable or a "good thing ultimately when...thousands of journalists lose their jobs; hundreds of publications close; Jay Rosen and Clay Shirky keep *their* jobs; Craig Newmark pockets his riches from porn and smirks at the state attorneys general; and Biz Stone, Mark Zuckerberg and company have made untold millions on dubious business models while we go on working for free...
Central Committee...And It Will Cost You
Objecting to "disruptive technology" isn't about backwardness, technophobia, or FUD -- it's actually the highest kind of social progressiveness to ask where the jobs are for people when the economics equation we are left with is even far more skewed when there were a few big media moguls that donated to hospitals and the newspaper was a dime.
So, what's the plan? There should be "a single place that people can go to" (right) and software that runs federal could be useful to city.
Then "the same model applied to the civic stack you apply to the disaster stack, here's all the pieces, here's how you download them," says O'Reilly.
He admits that what was extraordinary about Haiti "was also its weakness" -- by that I'm going to assume that he means the obvious: too many unsuitable volunteers for a complex situation that didn't lend itself to some neat technical solution. Nobody invented the ap for finding clean water and preventing the cholera outbreak, right? That's because if you lived in the kind of country that was in the kind of situation where you could stop and tag and upload clean water sources, you'd already -- and here's the Zen of humanitarian work -- be in the kind of place that would already have clean water or know where the clean water was, and likely without fancy tech.
O'Reilly regrets there isn't a "comparable effort" for Indonesia. I don't know whether to be relieved -- the thought of having to graft bar camp culture on to Indonesia is even more disconcerting. Haiti, with all its problems, had a proximity to the U.S. that explained the hundreds of people in the Montana Hotel on the day of the earthquake, who perished, many of them helpers connected to resources. Indonesia doesn't have a Montana Hotel in the areas affected.
But wait, O'Reilly is off and running. "And now we turn this into a product that has support and training." Right! $39.99 for the manual sounds about the right price. And $675 for the early-bird special for the training sounds good, too. Free, open standards!
O'Reilly imagines that this software, and these training manuals, will have *one way* of how you run government, or how you manage transportation. That's because there *is* only one way once it is digitalized, um...right?
"We'll have a civic stack o f software just as useful in Nairobi as in Chicago". Useful? Or a trojan horse for more globalization serving only certain individuals and companies?
"Open standards, any city can publish in this format all kinds of tools can use it...old unix standard in, standard out concept."
Did anybody talk to the people in Nairobi to see if this Chicago method of software-running of trains...oh, and *the government itself* (?) was appropriate? Useful? Needed?
Oh! But O'Reilly has thought of that. Use case! Turns out the argument he made to Health and Human Services was "first do homework before opening up data, find out who wants your data, who needs it, come up with cool examples, examples of people who don't rely on you evangelizing
it should add value for them."
Well, sounds good, except...wouldn't it be better to ask people not what *data* they need, but what they need...period?
I'll never forget the story of the women in Zimbabwe, the absolute least developed country in the world now on the Human Development Index, which got that way not because of "weather" or "poverty" or "racism" but because of a tyrannical leader's meglomaniacal destruction of the farm system. These were women who rode 30 miles on a cart to a hospital, or lived with HIV/AIDs. And you know what they asked for, when asked what they needed? They didn't say "water" or "medicine" but..."good governance". *They said good governance.* That means they needed to get rid of the tyranny in the worst sort of socio-economic rights way -- it wasn't a civil-political add-on.
My question is whether we substitute the same sort of first-world tyranny into a situation like this with the rigid "civic stack" concept.
But O'Reilly is warbling on. "It's the innovation layer, create more value than you capture." I guess that's supposed to mean that when you scrape everybody's data (something they couldn't opt-out of or opt-in to), then by giving them an ap, you've taken care of their concerns by distracting them with a bauble.
Say, I always wanted to know where the borders were of the country next door, in case I needed to...launch an invasion or something...oops.
Basically, civic stack is a tool for homogenization and globalization that differs little from the hated 19th century white missionary and his Bible, replaced by networking on platforms and the operating systems as the Bible.
Small pieces, loosely joined? Or big IT, tightly welded?
But let's not stop there. "Get people to put it on Wikipedia," says O'Reilly.
"People put way more effort into putting data on to their website than into Wikipedia, putting more efforts into touchpoints."
Is Wikipedia really the best place, and the best form of editing? There is so much uneven quality, so much vandalism and mischief, so many arcane and heavily-guarded editing practices and unfairness.
"You can't put it together, it *is* together"
Now, O'Reilly comes to talking about what he literally meant by "small pieces, loosely joined together." Likely half the people in the room at tech@state took this to mean some new homespun guru maxim that they should retweet and embroider into a sampler on their wall.
But actually he meant that some tools being adopted weren't designed to work to help enforce open source culture and globalization, and need to be forced to work better.
"SMS wasn't designed to automatically talk to Amazon mechanical turk" -- as if...that's a good idea, and as if Amazon mechanical turk isn't a controversial problem itself.
"Ushahidi was a perfect tool for getting reports but then oh, we need maps...then we had open steret map but the messages are in Creole...then we need translation and a mechanical turk."
Has he ever *been* on Amazon mechanical turk and looked at the jobs?! It's filled with SEO crap and underpaid marketing monkey work. I've spent some time studying it seeing if it could in fact be worked enough to make anything approximating a compensation for translation work and time.
With this Haiti project, rather than finding the funds and hiring Creole and French speakers and paying them a living wage in Haiti or in the diaspora in the U.S., the geeks want to crowdsource, make an ap, and try to globalize the cost down to a fraction of the cost of getting it done with a human being earning a living wage.
And isn't this always the way with these people. They live in million-dollar homes in Silicon Valley and pull down enormous IT salaries, but they need the software to be free, and your labour to be free or nearly unpaid.
"Some of the gateways involved human beings," O'Reilly concedes, when he began patching SMS to other stuff lol.
The moral of the story: don't solve problems with big, complex solutions. Especially any proprietary software, and certainly not with walled gardens like Facebook!
"Small pieces that solve part of the problem and then take those pieces and put with others."
"Can we pull them together to make them more useful? It's like Linux distributions like Red Hat like sourceforge."
I'll bet! Free, too. And...you get to decide what the small pieces are. Now I get it.
"Take these 3,000 programs that we think are really good and we'll package them and put them out."
"Think small, how to reuse existing tools, glue them together, adhocracy" (Cory Doctorow's term). What if you disagree with Cory's adhocracy?
And...here it comes (paging cube3! cube3, emergency, emergency!)
The money graph from the O'Reilly talk that exposes what it's all about.
PROTOCOLS AND INTERFACES ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN PROGRAMS
This at first sounds deceptively useful and even contrite (a revision of past obsession with object programming, viewing everything as a program). But it is merely a bid to homogenize and globalize *more*.
And to help this homogenizing process is "generativity". This like Kevin Kelly's "generatives" (how to generate cash out of nothing: hint, be famous and on the lecture circuit)
Generativity is "unanticipated change from unfiltered contributions from broad varied sources".
O'Reilly acknowledges here that when geekse" build a top-down system," and NGOs work a problem, we "don't get bottom-up dynamics that "make for healthy marketplaces".
"How do you get generativity"
There was this critique in 2006:
O’Reilly has already announced that Web 2.0 is really about business opportunities and new markets rather the emerging collective intelligence of humanity he preached from the barricades last year, so perhaps he will have the sense to move his followers away from Ajax towards something grounded in decent engineering.
Don't forget that the terms "open source" and "web 2.0" emerged from O'Reilly conferences, although the very elite conferencing process itself became contested by even his fellow elite influential affluent geeks.
Digitalizing -- no, Mechanizing Civil Society Relations
That's why I write long posts like this when I see O'Reilly invading "the civil society space".
Civil society is something I do know about, having studied it and lived it for 30 years. And open source and web 2.0 is something I know about, having studied it and lived it for the last 6 years. And I see something very destructive and corrosive that could occur by the arrogant imposition of the open source mystique and "business model" on to the more fragile and complex organic human systems of civil society that aren't mechanical like machines and the Internet.
It means monetarizing things for a few consultans -- like one man and his team that maybe shouldn't be monetarized (and don't pretend that the non-profit work of the O'Reilly empire is somehow unrelated to the expensive workbooks and conferences and the high human cost of open source in general).
It means low or no wages as a way of life and aspiration and necessity to keep work tools free for people that have high sources of compensation elsewhere.
But worse than all that, making everything into a stack and an ap means less freedom and less participation in decision-making, not more, *because the very decision about mechanization in the first place was ripped out of people's hands before they could think about it*.
When I first had to start using my Android (it wasn't my choice, it happened to be the cheap "2 for 1" phone in our neighborhood store that my son happened to buy for himself and give me), I held the vibrating black square in my hand and I felt very dismayed. It instantly picked out my home address on Google maps to show me where I was, and I was "supposed to be grateful" that it also opened up a pipe to shovel every single thing I did on that phone, every ap used, every text typed, every page viewed, every search term plugged in, and funnel it into the Google cloud maw. What was going to happen to that was out of my control. I couldn't "turn it off". I couldn't say "just show me the location on a map but don't suck in all my data."
Someone will be along to tell me that Google Android doesn't key-log. Oh? Today it doesn't. You're going to tell me it has no capacity to deploy and use key-loggers whatsoever lol?
Text and voice chat may not be shovelling *now*, but the choices of aps and other data *are* for sure. Did I get to chose? Did anyone get to think about it?
A rare critic of O'Reilly put it better than I could in 3,000 words: "too much meta and too much pseudo-theory-of-everything". Total theories often lead to...totalitarianism.
Government isn't a Platform, Civil Society isn't, Either
Very few people showed up to criticize O'Reilly's "government as a platform" notion that had all the worrisome authoritarianisms of opensource that I've identified, although there was one you can find that makes a critique in the geek's own language on more superficial points -- that government has to assume liability for mash-ups and won't; that government is more regulated because of *laws*; etc.
Perhaps someone will be along to make this more moderate critique of O'Reilly on the "civil society" concept where the "platformness" is not as obvious because it isn't monolithic (although he wants it to become so, and under the control of his ideas). Unfortunately, that form of milder critique would still leave unchallenged quite a few disturbing aspects of the "gov 2.0 government as platform" as well like the "forced open source imposition" and forced data-sharing (if you don't think its coerced, try objecting in one of these meetings and find out how "voluntary" this revolution really is.)
O'Reilly got a certain amount of pushback to his effort to platformize and "open source" government. But the basic totalitarian vision wasn't shed, as articulated in the web.2 expo:
"It's about building the global computing network and harnessing all the collective intelligence of all the people who are connected….We are talking about persistent computing in which we are becoming part of a great machine."
I don't want to be part of a great machine, even if, like zdnet does in the reference above, it's turned into a gamified interface. And let's not forget where most of the open source stuff ends up.
P.S. The answer to the question in the headline isn't, "everybody," because there is no such thing. It's always somebody...
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