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The Open-Source Everything Manifesto: Transparency, Truth, and Trust

2016; Penn State University Press; Volume: 27; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/utopianstudies.27.1.0121

2154-9648

Martin Paul Eve,

What is there not to like about “openness”? The premise seems to have virtue, particularly in the space of critique of government. From totalitarianism through to oligarchies, it can be argued that it is opacity and secrecy that have contributed to abuses of power for many centuries. In other spaces, the notion has caught hold. In several scientific fields, it appears that a lack of openness can lead to misconduct and in some cases a slowness that may cost lives. In the humanities, we might say that its absence fosters insularity. In computer software production, open-source paradigms have led to remarkable developments such as the Linux kernel and allowed us to see the inner machinations of the code that is responsible for many aspects of our daily lives. There is much to be said for open practice.And yet, there are some troubling aspects of “openness” that often go unexamined by those who fetishize the concept. The most obvious of these is the conflation of personal and public in demands for transparency: the famous ironic quip that if one has nothing to hide, one has nothing to fear. The other is the way in which rhetorics of openness seem co-genetic with the growth of neoliberalism, the political rationality in which politics is displaced by economics. Indeed, the idea of open practices as reducing “transaction costs” of interactions (whether societal or technological) is an example, par excellence, of neoliberal rationality's ubiquitous language of economics (Brown 2015; Davies 2014). We thus begin to see a tension between those who believe that open practices, across all spaces, might contribute to social justice and those who, ever more, claim the openness a panacea in terms of economics, proselytizing transparency, visibility, rationality, trust, and individual libertarianism while all the time resting upon the theology of the invisible hand.Robert David Steele, the author of The Open-Source Everything Manifesto, is, by my reading, of the latter persuasion. Steele's biography makes the most of his previous career as a CIA spy but goes light on his prominent claims that all recent terrorist attacks in the United States—including Sandy Hook and the Boston bombings—were “false flags,” that is, conspiratorial events that did not really happen. Steele calls Ron Paul—the Republican who denies the reality of global warming, opposes all abortion, supports the rights of businesses to discriminate on sexual orientation, and believes all hate crime laws to be unconstitutional—“ethical and consistent” (19). (What I take Steele to mean here is that Ron Paul is not corrupt; he really believes what he campaigns for and can't be bought. Why this merits both the terms ethical and consistent I am unsure. I would say that it is purely the latter.) Furthermore, for all his critiques of trickle-down economics as “what is really concentration of wealth” (144), Steele's book comes across as somewhat naive, triumphalist, and uncritical in its approach toward openness. Indeed, to continue the religious strain of the preceding paragraph, Steele comes to openness with the fervor of a True Believer, and his manifesto, in the way of that genre of course, is the Holy Text.And be in no doubt: there's theology in this book. The word God appears alongside its patriotic counterpart of saintly nationhood, “We the People,” on many occasions throughout. This is counterbalanced, however, by the author's insistence on jam-packing the volume full of near-indecipherable, and near-unexplained, technical diagrams and military-style acronyms (such as “M4IS2” [22]) for future progress. This intersection of the religious and the scientistic will certainly appeal to those in utopian studies as an object of study. For Steele posits a plan for what he calls a “World Brain” through openness that will achieve the positivist x-axis goal, as time unfolds, of a “100% of Humanity World that Works for All” (115).Futile as it would be to give a chapter-by-chapter summary of Steele's book—the text is freewheeling and associative—the author's open future is rooted in the familiar right-libertarian critique of centralized government. “Central planning,” Steele tells us, “does not work—the nanny state attempts to micro-manage what it does not understand” (xv). While it is true that such systems can be prone to “glossing over high crimes by financial enterprises,” this view neglects the serious achievements of centralized systems and resource pooling when they work well (the United Kingdom's National Health Service, for example). For Steele, though, the answer is better found in his application of Émile de Puydt's concept of “panarchism,” the idea that open information flows between nonhierarchized individuals will result in a society of trust in which “normal average human beings … [will] arrive at better conclusions than experts or elites who rely on ‘secret’ information” (xv).Some of this thesis may be true, but its logical problems can be unpacked by readings of statements such as “The essence of this manifesto is found in the proven fact that transparency and truth foster trust, and trust lowers the cost of doing business” (139). This is far from being a “proven fact” (Steele's panarchic society does not exist!), and a counterargument would be that the demand for transparency rests upon a complete culture of distrust. If I trust someone, my spouse, for example, I have no need to demand that she transparently furnish me with her day's itinerary. The jealous lover, on the other hand, may feel such a need. If I distrust my bank or government, that is when I need transparency. Sometimes, there is very good cause to distrust such entities; not all of Steele's conspiracy theories are farfetched. But let us not pretend that this has created trust. It came about and is maintained as a disciplinary, panoptic-style mechanism whose underlying engine is a culture of distrust and mutual behavioral reinforcement through gaze-like scrutiny.Second from this sentence, the assertion that “trust lowers the cost of doing business” is contentious. The decentralized, panarchic mode of societal (non)planning that Steele proposes can be seen as analogous to debates in computer science about micro- versus macro-kernels. In theory, micro-kernels, in which many autonomous modules trade information freely with each other, are the most efficient, secure, and rational way to build operating systems. In practice, Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows are all macro-kernels. The reason is that the “transaction costs” of transferring information, marshaling it into the correct structure, and enforcing interfaces between modules turn out to be enormous compared with those in a macro-kernel approach. For the societal analogy, governmental planning of, say, railway gauges so that they meet at the same size across states would be a good example of how a centralized approach can work out as more efficient and correct than a purely decentralized system. Steele would doubtless counter that such an approach would be achieved in his mode by the data being openly available. I'm just less convinced.Steele's heart seems to me to be in the right place. His utopian urge to create a better world is strong, and he seeks a pragmatic path. He writes correctly of the fragmentation of knowledge through the disciplinary division of labor and the pernicious divide between the “humanities and sciences” (54). But time and time again Steele begins well only to shoot himself in the foot. For instance, in his discussion of the historical marginalization of women and “Others,” Steele writes that a patriarchal history neglected “women and their potential.” This does not progress to a sophisticated account, though, of female equality. Steele believes, very loosely citing through gesturing as a whole to Carol Gilligan et al.'s (1990) book on how the sexes speak of justice, that there is a “nuanced feminine instinct for compassion versus the male inclination to focus on black-and-white ‘justice’” (103). Steele does not, though, ascribe any value to women here other than their compassion.Overall, Steele's manifesto for technoliberation was most interesting for me as a representative of the utopian genre. The positivist pathology that afflicts the work is reminiscent of other technological-fetishist discourses that were historically shown to lead to disaster (futurism, for example). While Steele may encourage a world in which all is open, however, I cannot but recommend to readers that they leave this book closed.