Software and Social Justice
When I was browsing my feeds earlier today, I came across a Slashdot story on a talk called “Software and Community in the Early 21st Century” by some guy called Eben Moglen. I’ve just finished the hour long video and I highly recommend watching it. Moglen is a law prof at Columbia University and works with the Free Software Foundation. He talks about the role software will play in the very near future in equality and social justice across the world.
The twenty-first century economy is not under-girded by steel. The 21st century economy is under-girded by software. Which is as crucial as the underlying element in economic development in the 21st century as the production of steel ingots was in the twentieth.
The talk has definitely reminded me of what I’d hoped to do with my fancy-schmancy Software Engineering degree. It led me to recall why I was so adamant about free software and what I believed freedom of information meant for the world. It brought back what I’d learned at CC at the Social Justice workshop and how to tie my passion for Christ, for computers, and for social equality together. If anything, the talk reminded me of my importance because of the importance of software and why it will be and is important.
There are a lot of good quotes from the talk, and I’ll post them here.
On owning software:
Imagine if you will for a moment a society in which mathematics has become property, and it’s owned by people. Now every time you want to do anything useful – build a house, make a boat, start a bridge, devise a market, move objects weighing certain numbers of kilos from one place to another – your first stop is at the mathematics store to buy enough math to complete the task which lies before you.
On the importance of software:
It is that software provides alternate modes of infrastructure and transportation. That’s crucial in economic history terms, because the driving force in economic development is always improvement in transportation. When things move more easily and more flexibly and with less friction from place to place, economic growth results, welfare improvements occur.
On software and political upheaval:
The gate that has held the movements for equalization of human beings strictly in a dilemma between ineffectiveness and violence has now been opened. The reason is that we have shifted to a zero marginal cost world. As steel is replaced by software, more and more of the value in society becomes non-rivalrous: it can be held by many without costing anybody more than if it is held by a few.
On the One Laptop Per Child project:
We can also change the infrastructure of social life. That OLPC has every textbook on earth. That OLPC is a free MIT education. That OLPC is a hand-powered thick-net router. When you close the lid as a kid and put it in the shelf at night, the main CPU shuts down – but the 802.11 gear stays running all night long on the last few pulls of the string. And it routes packets all night long and it keeps the mesh. The village is a mesh when the kids have green or purple or orange boxes. And all you need’s a downspout somewhere, and the village is on the Net. And when the village is on the Net, everybody in the village is a producer of something: services, knowledge, culture, art, YouTube TV.
On citizen journalism:
Now what is journalism like when every village has a video camera and is on the Net? What is diplomacy like? What does it mean if the next time somebody starts some nasty little genocide in some little corner of the Earth the United States Government would prefer to ignore, that there’s video all over the place all the time in every living room. What’s it mean when children around the world are networking with one other over the issues that concern them directly without intermediation, everybody to everybody, saying, “Do you have what we need? How come you have what we need? How come we can’t do what we can do? Because your father’s rich? Because we’re dark? Because we live down here?”
To the developers:
If we know that what we are trying to accomplish is the spread of justice and social equality through the universalization of access to knowledge; if what we know we are trying to do is to build an economy of sharing which will rival the economies of ownership at every point where they directly compete; if we know that we are doing this as an alternative to coercive redistribution, that we have a third way in our hands for dealing with long and deep and painful problems of human injustice; if we are conscious of what we have and know what we are trying to accomplish, this is the moment when, for the first time in lifetimes we can get it done.
Tags: Computers, Free, open_source, Politics, social_justice