Despite its aspirations and mythological treatment, the internet has never been some perfectly connected “net” capable of regenerating like Wolverine. While that goal was an underlying assumption of a variety of protocols that became popular and helped shape the development of the internet, the internet in practice is not an organic mesh of individuals, but a few thousand organizations that are loosely tied together in clusters. In theory each organization controls the connections that comprise its internal network and, again in theory, they build physical links and negotiate contracts with one another to pass packets between networks. This peering takes many forms, passing traffic at different speeds and costs, but the traffic itself has largely been treated homogeneously.

Well, okay, this isn’t entirely true. Governments around the world have installed routers and machines capable of Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) wherein a packet is routed based on its content. This is one way the People’s Republic of China, for example, has blocked connections to the Tor network.

But there are good reasons for an organization to peek inside packets and adjust their prioritization accordingly. DDOS attacks or merely bandwidth intensive but not pressing traffic can flood the network slowing down transmission rates for other content. The problem isn’t a lack of neutrality; neutrality is usually artificial, only possible where there are universally shared preferences or no pressure to optimize.

If the internet survives the next twenty years it will undoubtedly look quite different. Radicals working on overlay networks to the existing infrastructure, like Tor, I2P, GnuNet, Tahoe-LAFS, and FreeNet, are fighting the more immediate battle, but so long as only a few hundred or thousand organizations control the material connections that everything travels on we will always be in danger of the state. Even a hundred thousand networks could still be beaten into collaboration with a censorship regime. Right now the future sits on a knife edge, poised to fall into new enclosures, with state access cards and comprehensive whitelisting. And even if we win, the day still might come where the state wakes up and considers technological society itself too high a risk, sabotaging and tearing apart our centralized infrastructure.

To head off such retreats, to keep the statists on the playing field, we must build a world of proactive, individual-scale connections. In the more trivial ad hoc limit this can look like peer-to-peer connections between the phones of passing strangers, but when it comes to building lasting resilient bonds there’s no replacing on the ground community organizing. The sort of projects anarchists have long taken the lead in, building one-on-one relationships of trust and strengthening the human roots upon which all other relations are built.

There are many community mesh wifi projects with radical sensibilities, some like those of Athens, Catalonia and across Germany are already quite established and supported. Hundreds of others are still just attempted sprouts. Focusing on those in the midrange we’ve chosen to invest over six hundred dollars in People’s Open Network in Oakland, California, Kansas City Freedom Network, and AlterMundi in Argentina to provide an extra push as well as highlight their radical sensibilities and work at building community.

We at the Center for a Stateless Society believe strongly in the potency and importance of persuasion in building a freed world, but we also know that world won’t be built without hands-on grappling, activist organizing and building commons. That’s why we started the Entrepreneurial Anti-capitalism project, to pay forward the good fortune we’ve received and provide a helping hand to those doing amazing, necessary, frequently thankless work with very little.

It is our hope that others will follow our lead in donating to these great projects. Each one accepts bitcoin at the following addresses:

• People’s Open Network: 12RxU4DpLpdWcmEBn7Tj325CCXBwt5i9Hc
• AlterMundi: 12mVSq3NBKTs3tCpWXyJqwdHq8p92ka6fq
• KC Freedom: 1Jmjmf2hDWsrSfnxiM27GZtNWmWGbPNEQM

Of course, our brothers and sisters in Ukraine do not have the option of staying uninvolved. The wolf is at their door, it seems. While we of course wish them well, a sober analysis of the military situation does not hold out a great deal of hope for the Ukrainian government. However, not all is lost for the Ukrainian people; indeed, as recent events in Iraq have shown (paying attention, Comrade Teson?), a popular insurgency can achieve results a traditional military cannot. A complete after-action review on the successful insurgency in Iraq would run to hundreds of pages, but the bottom line is simple, classic guerilla warfare. Ukrainians today would do better to trust their liberty to themselves, rather than to a brittle, easily destroyed institution like the government in Kiev – or the one in Washington, D.C.

For the forces of information freedom, and other movements associated with the successor economy, to attempt to fight the established interests of the existing system for control of the state, is like an army trying to capture control of an entire infrastructure mile-by-mile – and to do so when, far from possessing material superiority, it is outnumbered ten – or a hundred-to-one by the defending enemy. It’s utterly stupid.

Lawrence & Wishart’s views of revolutionary praxis, as evidenced in the website’s official statement and in public remarks by managing editor Sally Davison, are a virtual parody of the most authoritarian and bureaucratic aspects of Old Left culture. As far as their worldview is concerned, the most innovative and interesting theoretical currents in Marxism, and the Left in general, the past few decades might never have happened.

The Old Left of the mid-20th century conceptualized revolution within a mass-production age framework, as the political seizure of all the commanding heights of the political and economic system, like the state and large corporations.

The best strands of recent Marxist thought, on the other hand — like for example autonomism — all involve the idea of prefigurative politics and “exodus.” That is, they see the transition to a post-capitalist society not as some sudden and large-scale event in which all the powerful institutions are captured and put under new management. They see it as a prolonged transition from one historical epoch to another like that from feudalism to capitalism, in which the successor society grows out of a whole host of seeds within the old system. Marxists like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, or the German Oekonux group, see network forms of organization like commons-oriented peer production as the seeds of the future society within the present one. The latter group sees free and open-source software, and the p2p groups that develop it, as prefiguring a future post-scarcity society of abundance.

This is an approach that coincides in many ways with that of the free market Left. Like libertarian communists, we envision a society in which new technologies of abundance and liberation render state’s artificial property rights and artificial scarcities — and the capitalist rents on them — unenforceable. And we envision a society in which the radical downscaling, distribution and cheapening of the means of production (cheap, open-source micro-manufacturing hardware, permaculture, desktop information production, etc.) bring production outside the control of large bureaucratic institutions like corporations, and integrate it instead into the economies of households, neighborhoods and local communities. This means a large and increasing share of our production to meet our daily needs will be shifted outside the wage system, and even outside the cash nexus altogether and into the sharing economy. Like libertarian communists, we of the free market left see many areas of life as ideally managed as social commons rather than by states or corporations. In virtually every area of life, horizontal networks of equals replace the old bureaucratic hierarchies.

At the same time, the interesting and truly progressive forms of Marxism are centered on the idea of exodus. Exodus was at the center of Hardt and Negri’s analysis in Commonwealth. Rather than storming the Bastille or the Winter Palace, the working classes treat the existing system of power, as much as possible, as irrelevant. We evade it. We bypass it. We secede from the state-corporate economy and build our own counter-economy within it. We shift as much of our production and consumption into the social realm as possible, cooperatively producing and sharing or exchanging with each other, taking advantage of new communication and production technologies that render the old institutions irrelevant and free us from dependency on them. This, too, is an idea that the free market left shares with libertarian communists.

Put the two principles together, and you get a model of “revolution” based on starting from the myriad seeds of the future society within the present system, growing and nourishing them, and building the new system within the shell of the old. Meanwhile, we starve the old system by shifting increasing amounts of our labor, money and resources out of it and into the new one of our own making. Eventually the growing seeds will coalesce into a full-blown system that supplants the old one, and the old system will survive only as shrinking islands of authority and exploitation within a fundamentally different society based on freedom and abundance.

The combination of prefigurative politics and exodus is in many ways similar to Gramsci’s “war of position,” in which the workers’ movement achieves victory not by storming the ramparts of the old system (a “war of maneuver” in his terminology), but within the larger culture and economy itself. Only after we have shifted the overall correlation of forces in society at large can we launch the final assault on the institutional commanding heights of the old system. But our approach differs from Gramsci’s in one important respect: we don’t ever need to launch that final assault.

The conventional Marxists of the mid-20th century saw large-scale, capital-intensive production as inherently more efficient. Indeed, progress itself was practically defined by the accumulation of capital. So it followed that the most efficient and productive society would continue to be one in which functions were carried out by large, hierarchical institutions. They would just be placed under working class management.

We, on the other hand, see small-scale, distributed, low-overhead production technology as the wave of the future. We believe horizontal networks and small cooperative shops can do everything that the old bureaucratic dinosaurs used to do, only better. So we don’t want to storm those old institutions. They have nothing we need.

So for us, the revolution is in the here and now, starting with the many ways that people are already creating the kind of society, work, lives and institutions we want to live in. The ends we are struggling for are embodied in the very means we use.

Lawrence and Wishart has no use for this model of revolutionary transition. In their official statement (“Lawrence & Wishart statement on the Collected Works of Marx and Engels,” April 25), they dismiss the whole free and open-source movement, and the idea of information freedom, as

a consumer culture which expects cultural content to be delivered free to consumers, leaving cultural workers such as publishers, editors and writers unpaid, while the large publishing and other media conglomerates and aggregators continue to enrich themselves through advertising and data-mining revenues and through their far greater institutional weight compared to small independent publishers.

The open-source and free culture movements are at war with the single monopoly — “intellectual property” — which is structurally most central to corporate capitalism as we know it. And yet Lawrence and Wishart equate it — in language that might have come from managerialist liberals like Andrew Keen or Thomas Frank — to the dotcom capitalism of the nineties.

Their managing editor, Sally Davison, dismissed the very idea of prefigurative politics (Noam Cohen, “Claiming a Copyright on Marx? How Uncomradely,” New York Times, April 30), coming just short of quoting Lenin’s dismissal of left-wing communism as an “infantile disorder”:

We don’t live in a world of everybody sharing everything. As Marx said, and I may be paraphrasing, “We make our own history, but not in the conditions of our own choosing.”

In other words, never mind all that stuff about building the kind of stuff we want here and now. That’s something we can worry about after the revolution is over. Post-capitalist society as something that will be officially put together by competent authorities after the revolution has been safely fought and won (under the leadership of those same competent authorities, of course).

Far from building a post-capitalist society within the interstices of the old, dying system, Davison and her comrades favor accepting the domination of our lives by the exploitative nature of the present system until it officially comes to an end. Far from building alternatives to the institutional monopolies and rents of capitalism, Davison wants to accept them as inevitable — to embrace them — so long as the present system survives.

Lawrence & Wishart, in pursuing a business model based on the most central monopoly of capitalism, and treating it as just and right, remind me of Hardt and Negri’s statement in Commonwealth that the Social Democratic agenda is basically “to reintegrate the working class within capital.”

It would mean, on the one hand, re-creating the mechanisms by which capital can engage, manage, and organize productive forces and, on the other, resurrecting the welfare structures and social mechanisms necessary for capital to guarantee the social reproduction of the working class.

Lawrence & Wishart, despite their proclaimed stance of revolutionary socialism and enmity toward capitalism, find themselves perversely not only rejecting the seeds of post-capitalist society within the present system, but actively embracing and trying to strengthen the monopolies the present system depends on.

And Teson’s reaction to being so outstandingly wrong? He is simply shocked that the Iraqis are not more grateful for the privilege of enduring a decade plus of chaos, civil war, and mass death. The last time Teson urged action, the United States suffered a tremendous strategic blow and the people of Iraq suffered a tremendous catastrophe. And now Teson urges us to “side with Ukraine against Russia,” because Russia has done a bunch of bad things. Curiously this moral logic only applies to foreign countries; Teson does not urge us to stand with Iraqis against American aggression or Yemenis against American bombing. No, we are simply to stand with Ukraine.

Fernando Teson, you were wrong on Iraq. Very wrong. And a great many people without your credentials and platform were right, and said at the time that you were wrong, and predicted accurately what would follow an American invasion. No one should pay you the least mind when it comes to foreign affairs. And if you want to stand with Ukraine, by all means, book a plane ticket to Kiev and see if they’ll have you. A fight with Russia is sure to be a desperate one, and I am sure they would be grateful to have you manning a machine gun or running an artillery crew. Good luck.

And what should we do on Ukraine? If you, dear reader, feel standing up for the Ukrainian government against the Russian government is important, by all means- join future Private Teson at the front. In all sincerity, as a former soldier, I will have the highest respect for your courageous, principled stand. But if you think the American government can do anything but make things worse, you haven’t been paying attention.

Of course, our brothers and sisters in Ukraine do not have the option of staying uninvolved. The wolf is at their door, it seems. While we of course wish them well, a sober analysis of the military situation does not hold out a great deal of hope for the Ukrainian government. However, not all is lost for the Ukrainian people; indeed, as recent events in Iraq have shown (paying attention, Comrade Teson?), a popular insurgency can achieve results a traditional military cannot. A complete after-action review on the successful insurgency in Iraq would run to hundreds of pages, but the bottom line is simple, classic guerilla warfare. Ukrainians today would do better to trust their liberty to themselves, rather than to a brittle, easily destroyed institution like the government in Kiev – or the one in Washington, D.C.

This is why it’s such a waste of time to devote serious effort and resources to working within the system to affect the form the law takes. Doing so amounts to fighting the enemy by the enemy’s own rules, on ground favorable to the enemy, where the enemy has the advantage of a prepared defense.

German Blitzkrieg war theorists had a term, Schwerpunkt, for the decisive point at which an armored formation penetrated the enemy forces front lines, and then immediately bypassed the main body of the enemy’s forces and cut them off and encircled them from the rear. John Robb, a leading theorist of networked “Fourth Generation Warfare” models, has coined the term “Systempunkt” for the analogous phenomenon in networked conflict.

In World War II, Allied strategic bombing campaigns over Germany destroyed entire infrastructures, one power station, power line, bridge, road, railroad, etc., at a time. They were able to undertake the enormously costly task of destroying an entire physical infrastructure, mile by mile, because of their overwhelming air superiority and much larger industrial output. The concept of Systempunkt, on the other hand, is illustrated by Al Qaeda Iraq’s practice of attacking only a few key nodes in an infrastructure, which – although amounting to one percent or less of the total physical infrastructure – disables and renders non-operational the other 99 percent left untouched. That’s a great deal more cost-effective.

For the forces of information freedom, and other movements associated with the successor economy, to attempt to fight the established interests of the existing system for control of the state, is like an army trying to capture control of an entire infrastructure mile-by-mile – and to do so when, far from possessing material superiority, it is outnumbered ten – or a hundred-to-one by the defending enemy. It’s utterly stupid.

We can render the corporate state inoperative, using maybe one percent of the resources required to actually capture the state through the political process, by attacking its ability to enforce the subsidies, privileges and legal monopolies of big business. Enforcement capability is the Systempunkt of the state capitalist economy.

The proprietary content industry, and all the other businesses that make money by extracting rents from patents, copyrights and trademarks, will always control the “intellectual property” policy of the state. I mean, that’s what the state exists for. Attempting to fight their money and political influence by the rules of the system would just be pouring resources down a rathole. But for a tiny fraction of the same money and effort, we can turn patents and copyrights into a dead letter through strong encryption, proxy servers, torrent downloads and moving webhosting to servers in countries that don’t take orders from the MPAA and RIAA (that’s why Center for a Stateless Society, the outfit I’m writing this for, is moving our site to servers in Iceland).

When the US government seized Wikileaks’ domain name, thousands of hosts around the world (C4SS among them) responded by mirroring the site. And many thousands of people blogged and tweeted the numeric IP address of Wikileaks sites in various countries so people could look it up directly by IP address rather than using the domain name. Then when the government carried out mass seizures of domain names of alleged “infringing sites” on behalf of the music and movie industries, the Mozilla Foundation came up with Firefox browser extensions that would bypass the domain name blocks by automatically going straight to the numeric IP address. As Bruce Sterling put it, “treating the law of the land as damage and routing around it.”

Now there’s Bit Torrent Sync, a utility which enables any two people who’ve installed it and know a common password to transfer torrents directly from one computer to another, with secure end-to-end encryption. It’s kind of like what happens when you use your cursor to move a file to the Dropbox icon – only the information’s not stored at a permanent location in the Cloud, and it’s encrypted. It’s a totally desktop-to-desktop, p2p file-sharing system. So it doesn’t matter if the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or any other draconian copyright legislation, passes. Any two people with Bit Torrent Sync who want to share a file can do so. Big Content has lost the war, once and for all. They’re dead – they just don’t know it yet.

Which leads me to the latest interesting development: Lawrence and Wishart, a Leftist publisher who owns the rights to the English language edition of the enormous (over fifty volumes) Marx and Engels Collected Works, has demanded that that the Marxist Internet Archive – an amazing online library that includes not only the Collected Works but an astonishing collection of other writers ranging from Luxemburg and Gramsci to C.L.R. James and Walter Rodney – take down Marx and Engels’ Collected Works by April 30. Happy May Day, Comrades!

As anyone at all familiar with the Web could have predicted, this led to a massive backlash of outrage from the Left that Lawrence and Wishart were – naturally – unprepared for. On Friday April 21 their website published an utterly whiny complaint (“Lawrence & Wishart statement on the Collected Works of Marx and Engels“) that they’d been subjected to a “campaign of online abuse” because they “asked for [their] copyright” (sniff) “to be respected.”

Aside from the rather contemptible display of self-pity and entitlement, the statement reflects more than anything else an utter lack of business sense. “Ultimately, in asking L&W to surrender copyrights in this particular edition of the works of Marx & Engels, [Marxist Internet Archive] and their supporters are asking that L&W, one of the few remaining independent radical publishers in the UK, should commit institutional suicide.” This is nonsense on stilts. The hard copy set of the Collected Works, if bought as a complete set instead of one volume at a time, sells for 1500 British Pounds, which is somewhere well north of $2000. If Lawrence and Wishart can show one person, anywhere in the world, who put off shelling out over two thousand bucks for a set of the dead tree edition of Marx and Engels’ Collected Works because a digital online edition was available, I will eat my own left hand – raw, and without salt. The Marxist Internet Archive’s online edition of the Collected Works is not costing Lawrence and Wishart a single solitary sale. The only thing the online edition is competing against is a trip to a university library. If anything, the online edition is free advertising for the dead tree edition. In other words, Lawrence and Wishart is governed by the same abject stupidity as the music and movie industries – the dying music and movie industries.

Not only is Lawrence and Wishart as stupid as the music and movie industries, its attempt to suppress free, infinitely replicable digital information is turning out to be just as big a failure as those industries’ attempt to do so. No doubt the Archive will be mirrored, with its existing contents, at plenty of sites around the world. But in the meantime, the entire English language contents of the Marxist Internet Archive – including the disputed edition of Marx and Engels’ Collected Works – is available for torrent download at The Pirate Bay <https://thepiratebay.se/torrent/6231000/Marxists.org_-_full_English_language_archive>. And the Collected Works by themselves are available as a .zip file at Sendspace <http://www.sendspace.com/file/l7wx0o>. I’ve got a copy of the latter on my hard drive, and it works just fine – the individual files open up in a browser tab and look exactly like the online version. I recommend anyone who expects to be at all interested in accessing the Collected Works online at any point in the future to download one of these files ASAP – and share them with your friends, far and wide, via Bit Torrent Sync!

Enjoy your copyright, Lawrence and Wishart, for all the good it may do you. I love the smell of burning capitalists in the morning.

I was surprised to open up the Columbia Journalism Review’s website last week and see this article by Steven Brill peering up at me: “Stories I’d Like To See: A fair view of the Koch brothers, and explaining bitcoin.”

This section in particular cracked me up:

This article in the Washington Post last week tried to link the Koch brothers’ support for the Keystone energy pipeline to their company’s economic interests. But it was so lame — none of their products is due to go through the pipeline — that it made me want to read a complete article, full of unbiased reporting across the range of their business interests. I want to know just how self-interested the brothers’ political spending spree actually is.

Sure, any political activism by rich people to limit taxes and government regulation is bound to be in their interests generally. But do the Koch brothers have a more specific agenda, as the Post article tried to prove? Or could it be that Charles and David Koch just happen to believe a conservative government is good for their country?

The brothers and their foundation have also given hundreds of millions to multiple charities that have nothing to do with politics. As this article in the Indianapolis Star points out, the Charles Koch Foundation “underwrites research and teaching at Brown, Mount Holyoke, Sarah Lawrence, University of Wisconsin at Madison, Vassar and some 245 other colleges.” The New York State Theater at Lincoln Center has been renamed the David H. Koch Theater because he’s such a generous benefactor.

These are not beneficiaries associated with hard right causes.

Brill is right, of course; while it might be easy to paint the Kochs and their corporation with one evil, monolithic brush, you can’t do it with any real consistency. But this article, as interesting as it was, wasn’t the reason I was headed over to CJR.

Over on their #Realtalk blog, journalist Ann Friedman listed out some common worries she heard from new journalism school graduates about their job prospects. One I liked – about the awkwardness of networking – described a very stigmergic scenario:

I know, I know. I need a network, but networking is for douchebags.

Networking is for douchebags if you’re only doing it to get a job or a promotion. (Or “connecting” with random journalists on LinkedIn en masse.) Instead, think of your network as a community—a group of professional collaborators with whom you share skills and ideas, contacts and advice—that you invest in whether or not you’re looking for a new job. This is what Robert Krulwich calls horizontal loyalty.

For now, your network is going to be made up of a lot of other entry-level journalists—like your classmates and fellow interns—plus a few people who have been your internship supervisors. You need to get over the feeling that you’re competing for the same three jobs and see other entry-level journalists as allies. You personally may only know three higher-up editors, but if you share the wealth, together you know six or 10 or more. Ask your friends to make introductions, and do the same for them. This is how to slowly expand the number of people you know while also investing in the careers of those who are important to you. It takes time, but the payoff is real.

And just in terms of straight media news, there’s an interesting project coming out of the Online News Association, called “Build Your Own Ethics Code.” According to CJR reporter Edirin Oputu, Build Your Own Ethics Code is “a toolkit to help news outlets, bloggers, and journalists decide on ethical guidelines that match their own ideas about reporting and journalism”:

The project, which includes the collaboration of ONA’s news ethics committee with roughly two dozen journalists and academics, will give reporters a chance to look at the issues that arise in the course of reporting and to draw up an ethical code based on the kind of work they do and the ethical help they believe they need, said ONA’s executive director, Jane McDonnell.

‘I think that when you get journalists in a room together, you can see that there is a complete will to make sure that their reporting and distribution is as close to perfect as they can get it. But the speed at which they work often kind of negates that, or makes it more difficult,’ she said.

ONA will also open the project up for crowdsourcing at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy, in early May.

That’s it for now! Check back in next week for more media news and anarchist tidbits.

Don’t be shy; say hi! Leave a comment telling me what you thought of this blog, or make a suggestion for future posts. Or, you can follow me on Twitter, where we can exchange profanities – or maybe even cause the next big libertarian schism!

For y’all keeping track at home, hyperlocal news means exactly what it sounds like: basically, a person or group of persons are covering events in a town, sometimes down to the individual street level, and publishing it for their friends and neighbors – and audiences beyond either – to see. (Sounds awfully like blogging.)

Almost every city in America has a website devoted to something along the lines of hyperlocalism, whether or not they call it that. Some consist of independent reporters covering things they’re passionate about. Others, like Journatic, are in the business of outsourcing hyperlocal, which has made for some interesting and sometimes cringeworthy times.

AOL wanted their network to be the largest in the country, which is not in itself a deplorable goal. Where they went wrong? Trying to flood out their smaller competitors and gouge advertisers for more than they could afford – natural, if you model yourself off your predecessors.

Media critic Jeff Jarvis wrote (“The Almost Post-Mortem for Patch”), “Hyperlocal works in town after town. What doesn’t work is trying to instantly scale it by trying to own every town in sight. That was Patch’s fatal error: acting like an old-media company.”

Instead of trying to own everything from the top down, new, hyperlocal media needs to be built from the bottom up. Stigmergic, decentralized outlets have already been proven to thrive and be as effective – if not more so – than old media sites.

AHOY, THERE BE A CLOSED SYSTEM THAT NEEDS OPENING!
This is an article about Open Source Finance. It’s an idea I first sketched out at a talk I gave at the Open Data Institute in London. By ‘Open Source Finance’, I don’t just mean open source software programmes. Rather, I’m referring to something much deeper and broader. It’s a way of framing an overall change we might want to see in the financial system. To illustrate this, I set up an analogy between computer systems and economic systems, and I then explore what financial ‘code’ might be. I then sketch out the five pillars that could underpin an open finance movement.

The Financial Status Quo: Power concentrated in intermediaries

Software code is the organising rule system that steers energy into activating hardware towards particular ends. So, extending this as an analogy, what might financial ‘code’ look like? A financial system, in a basic sense, is supposed to arrange for surplus resources (extracted from the earth), to be redistributed (in the form of money) via financial instruments (often created by financial intermediaries like banks and funds), into new economic production activities (‘investments’), in exchange for a return over time.

Here, for example, is a rough financial circuit: A person manages to earn a surplus of money (a symbolic claim on real things in the world), which they deposit into a pension fund, which in turns invests in shares and bonds (which are conduits to the real world assets of a corporation), which in turn return dividends and interest over time back to the pension fund, and finally back to the person.

Shares and bonds are extractive financial conduits that plug into a corporate structure, but if you look for how they are coded, you’d discover they are built from legal documents that are informed by regulations, acts of parliament, and social norms. They are supported by IT systems and all manner of payments systems and auxiliary services.

But it takes more than clearly-worded documentation to be able to create financial instruments. The core means of financial production, by which we mean the things that allow people to produce financial services (or build financial instruments), includes having access to networks of investors and companies, having access to specialist knowledge of financial techniques, and having access to information. It’s these elements that banks and other financial intermediaries really compete over: They battle to monopolise relationships, monopolise information, and to monopolise specialist knowledge of financial techniques.

And indeed, that’s why production of financial services mostly occurs within the towering concrete skycrapers of the ‘financial sector’, spinners of the webs of the code that is mostly unknown to most people. We have very little direct access to the means of financial production ourselves, very little say in how financial institutions choose to steer money in society, and very little ability to monitor them.

We have, in essence, a situation of concentration of power in financial intermediaries, who in turn reinforce and seek to preserve that power structure. And while I may be happy to accept a concentration of power in small specialist industries like Swiss watchmaking, a concentration of power in the system responsible for redistributing human society’s collective resources into new investments is not a good thing. It’s systematically breaking our planetary hardware by steering money into destructive activities, whilst helping to fuel a culture of bland individualistic materialism in increasingly atomised communities.

Opening access, reconnecting emotion, liberating creativity

The Open Source movement started with software – and in particular with the concept of copyleft and free licensing – but the principles extend far past software. At core, Open Source is a philosophy of access: access to the underlying code of a system, access to the means of producing that code, access to usage rights of the resultant products that might be created with such code, and (in keeping with the viral quality of copyleft) access to using those products as the means to produce new things. Perhaps the ethos is best illustrated with the example of Wikipedia. Wikipedia has:

1. A production process that encourages participation and a sense of common ownership: We can contribute to Wikipedia. In other words, it explicitly gives us access to the means of production
2. A distribution process that encourages widespread access to usage rights, rather than limited access: If you have an internet connection you can access the articles. We might call this a commons
3. An accountability model that offers the ability to monitor and contest changes: An open production process is also one that is more transparent. You can change articles, but people can monitor and contest your changes
4. A community built around it that maintains the ethic of collaboration and continued commitment to open access. It’s more than just isolated individuals, it’s a culture with a (roughly) common sense of purpose
5. Open source code that can be accessed and altered if the current incarnation of Wikipedia doesn’t suit all your needs. Look, for example, at RationalWiki and SikhiWiki

You can thus take on five conceptually separate, but mutualistic roles: Producer, consumer, validator, community member, or (competitive or complementary) breakaway. And these same five elements can underpin a future system of Open Source Finance. I’m framing this as an overall change we might want to see in the financial system, but perhaps we are already seeing it happening. So let’s look briefly at each pillar in turn.

Pillar 1: Access to the means of financial production

Very few of us perceive ourselves as offering financial services when we deposit our money in banks. Mostly we perceive ourselves as passive recipients of services. Put another way, we frequently don’t imagine we have the capability to produce financial services, even though the entire financial system is foundationally constructed from the actions of small-scale players depositing money into banks and funds, buying the products of companies that receive loans, and culturally validating the money system that the banks uphold. Let’s look though, at a few examples of prototypes that are breaking this down:

1. Peer-to-peer finance models: If you decide to lend money to your friend, you directly perceive yourself as offering them a service. P2P finance platforms extend that concept far beyond your circle of close contacts, so that you can directly offer a financial service to someone who needs it. In essence, such platforms offer you access to an active, direct role in producing financial services, rather than an indirect, passive one.
2. There are many interesting examples of actual open source financial software aimed at helping to fulfil the overall mission of an open source financial system. Check out Mifos and Cyclos, and Hamlets (developed by Community Forge’s Matthew Slater and others), all of which are designed to help people set up their own financial institutions
3. Alternative currencies: There’s a reason why the broader public are suddenly interested in understanding Bitcoin. It’s a currency that people have produced themselves. As a member of the Bitcoin community, I am much more aware of my role in upholding – or producing – the system, than I am when using normal money, which I had no conscious role in producing. The scope toinvent your own currency goes far beyond crypto-currencies though: local currencies, time-banks, and mutual credit systems are emerging all over
4. The Open Bank Project is trying to open up banks to third party apps that would allow a depositor to have much greater customisability of their bank account. It’s not aimed at bypassing banks in the way that P2P is, but it’s seeking to create an environment where an ecosystem of alternative systems can plug into the underlying infrastructure provided by banks

Pillar 2: Widespread distribution

Financial intermediaries like banks and funds serve as powerful gatekeepers to access to financing. To some extent this is a valid role – much like a publisher or music label will attempt to only publish books or music that they believe are high quality enough – but on the other hand, this leads to excessive power vested in the intermediaries, and systematic bias in what gets to survive. When combined with a lack of democratic accountability on the part of the intermediaries, you can have whole societies held hostage to the (arbitrary) whims, prejudices and interests of such intermediaries. Expanding access to financial services is thus a big front in the battle for financial democratisation. In addition to more traditional means to buildingfinancial inclusion – such as credit unions and microfinance – here are two areas to look at:

• Crowdfunding: In the dominant financial system, you have to suck up to a single set of gatekeepers to get financing, hoping they won’t exclude you. Crowdfunding though, has expanded access to receiving financial services to a whole host of people who previously wouldn’t have access, such as artists, small-scale filmmakers, activists, and entrepreneurs with no track record. Crowdfunding can serve as a micro redistribution system in society, offering people a direct way to transfer wealth to areas that traditional welfare systems might neglect
• Mobile banking: This is a big area, with important implications for international development and ICT4D. Check out innovations like M-Pesain Kenya, a technology to use mobile phones as proto-bank accounts. This in itself doesn’t necessarily guarantee inclusion, but it expands potential access to the system to people that most banks ignore

Pillar 3: The ability to monitor

Do you know where the money in the big banks goes? No, of course not. They don’t publish it, under the guise of commercial secrecy and confidentiality. It’s like they want to have their cake and eat it: “We’ll act as intermediaries on your behalf, but don’t ever ask for any accountability”. And what about the money in your pension fund? Also very little accountability. The intermediary system is incredibly opaque, but attempts to make it more transparent are emerging. Here are some examples:

• Triodos Bank and Charity Bank are examples of banks that publish exactly what projects they lend to. This gives you the ability to hold them to account in a way that no other bank will allow you to do
• Corporations are vehicles for extracting value out of assets and then distributing that value via financial instruments to shareholders and creditors. Corporate structures though, including those used by banks themselves, have reached a level of complexity approaching pure obsfucation. There can be no democratic accountability when you can’t even see who owns what, and how the money flows. Groups likeOpenCorporates and Open Oil though, are offering new open data tools to shine a light on the shadowy world of tax havens, ownership structures and contracts
• Embedded in peer-to-peer models is a new model of accountability too. When people are treated as mere account numbers with credit scores by banks, the people in return feel little accountability towards the banks. On the other hand, if an individual has directly placed trust in me, I feel much more compelled to respect that

Pillar 4: An ethos of non-prescriptive DIY collaboration

At the heart of open source movements is a deep DIY ethos. This is in part about the sheer joy of producing things, but also about asserting individual power over institutionalised arrangements and pre-established officialdom. Alongside this, and deeply tied to the DIY ethos, is the search to remove individual alienation: You are not a cog in a wheel, producing stuff you don’t have a stake in, in order to consume stuff that you don’t know the origins of. Unalienated labour includes the right to produce where you feel most capable or excited.

This ethos of individual responsibility and creativity stands in contrast to the traditional passive frame of finance that is frequently found on both the Right and Left of the political spectrum. Indeed, the debates around ‘socially useful finance’ are seldom about reducing the alienation of people from their financial lives. They’re mostly about turning the existing financial sector into a slightly more benign dictatorship. The essence of DIY though, is to band together, not via the enforced hierarchy of the corporation or bureaucracy, but as part of a likeminded community of individuals creatively offering services to each other. So let’s take a look at a few examples of this

1. BrewDog’s ‘Equity for Punks‘ share offering is probably only going to attract beer-lovers, but that’s the point – you get together as a group who has a mutual appreciation for a project, and you finance it, and then when you’re drinking the beer you’ll know you helped make it happen in a small way
2. Community shares offer local groups the ability to finance projects that are meaningful to them in a local area. Here’s one for a solar co-operative, a pub, and a ferry boat service in Bristol
3. We’ve already discussed how crowdfunding platforms open access to finance to people excluded from it, but they do this by offering would-be crowdfunders the chance to support things that excite them. I don’t have much cash, so I’m not in a position to actively finance people, but in my Indiegogo profile you can see I make an effort helping to publicise campaigns that I want to receive financing

Pillar 5: The right to fork

The right to dissent is a crucial component of a democratic society. But for dissent to be effective, it has to be informed and constructive, rather than reactive and regressive. There is much dissent towards the current financial system, but while people are free to voice their displeasure, they find it very difficult to actually act on their displeasure. We may loathe the smug banking oligopoly, but we’re frequently compelled to use them.

Furthermore, much dissent doesn’t have a clear vision of what alternative is sought. This is partially due to the fact that access to financial ‘source code’ is so limited. It’s hard to articulate ideas about what’s wrong when one cannot articulate how the current system operates. Most financial knowledge is held in proprietary formulations and obscure jargon-laden language within the financial sector, and this needs to change. It’s for this reason that I’m building the London School of Financial Activism, so ordinary people can explore the layers of financial code, from the deepest layer – the money itself – and then on to the institutions, instruments and networks that move it around.

Beyond access to this source code though, we need the ability to act on it. A core principle of OpenSource movements is the Right to Fork. This is the ability to take preexisting code, and to modify it or use it as the basis for your own. The Right to Fork is both a check on power, but also a force for diversity and creativity.

In the mainstream financial system though, there are extensive blocks on the right to fork, many of them actively enforced by financial regulators. They won’t allow new banks to start, and apply inappropriate regulation to small, new financial technologies. The battle for the right to fork therefore, is one that has to also be fought at the regulatory level. That’s why we need initiatives like the Disruptive Finance Policy program.

The Right to Fork needs to be instilled into the design of any alternatives to mainstream finance too though. I don’t want to replace a world where I’m forced to use national fiat currencies with one in which I’m forced to use Bitcoin. The point is to create meaningful options for people. (To the credit of the original designers of Bitcoin, the right to fork has indeed been built in, and there has been significant use of the original Bitcoin sourcecode to create other cryptocurrencies, albeit it takes more to create a currency than merely deploying new code).

Ahoy! We set sail for the Open seas

EXPLORE THE DEEP

We may be in the early phase of a slow-moving revolution, which will only be perceptible in hindsight. As projects within these five pillars emerge, the infrastructure, norms and cultural acceptance for more connected, creative, open financial system may begin to emerge and coalesce into reality.

I hope this article has been of use to you, whether you’re looking to design actual open source finance platforms, programs and free software, or pioneer a new element of open access and open data, or whether you’re just keen to help beta-test new ideas as they get released. The financial sector is a big heavy conglomerate that is a perfect challenge for the adventurous pirate-meets-hacker-meets-activist-meets-entrepreneur. Please do tell me about anything you’re up to, and, in the spirit of Open Source, please do leave suggested amendments to this article in the comments section. I’ll try patch them into the next version of this.

La tentazione è comprensibile. Dopotutto i droni (combinati con operazioni mobili come l’assassinio di bin Laden a maggio 2011) sembrano aver dato agli Stati Uniti la possibilità di eliminare i capi della resistenza organizzata come al Qaeda in maniera molto più economica del vecchio modello rappresentato dalla controinsorgenza.

Estrapolando, non è difficile immaginare gli Stati Uniti che si evolvono in un regime tecno-fascista completo in grado di ritardare il collasso dello stato corporativo usando droni e soldati telecomandati per distruggere i server islandesi che ospitano Wikileaks o Mega, uccidere gli organizzatori di M15 e Syntagma (e gli organizzatori di Occupy a Oakland), radere al suolo i garage dove si clonano prodotti brevettati dalla General Electrics e altri, o semplicemente assassinare i dissidenti politici che intercettano informazioni da Fort Meade.

Anche John Robb, il mio autore preferito di libri sulla resistenza in rete e sulla guerra asimmetrica, sembra pessimista sugli effetti di lungo termine dei droni. Il vantaggio principale delle comunità resistenziali, questa è la sua opinione, è che sono troppo piccole, decentralizzate e radicali per rappresentare un obiettivo di alto profilo degli stati che si dibattono tra gli spasimi della morte.

Secondo me, questa opinione è troppo pessimistica. I successi spettacolari dei droni in Afghanistan, Pakistan e Yemen sono in realtà dovuti al fatto che questi aerei telecomandati danno un vantaggio temporaneo a chi li utilizza per primo. Noi non possiamo immaginare gli sviluppi della tecnologia quando i costi caleranno, così come non potevamo immaginare gli effetti della cibernetica e di internet sulle istituzioni quando alla fine degli anni quaranta comparvero i primi mastodontici computer a valvole.

È facile immaginare che droni assassini sempre più sofisticati e autonomi saranno soggetti ad un calo esponenziale dei costi di produzione secondo un modello paragonabile alla legge di Moore. Possiamo aspettarci, da qui a qualche anno, droni armati, telecomandati o autonomi, disponibili come tecnologia open-source pronta all’uso. I movimenti di resistenza potranno pilotarli con un computer economico dal garage di casa.

Quando questo accadrà, e la “Superpotenza Mondiale Unica Sopravvissuta” avrà perso il vantaggio del primo arrivato, la tecnologia dei droni andrà a vantaggio della parte con l’infrastruttura organizzativa più decentrata e diffusa, e con i punti di comando più dispersi e determinati. Questo colpirà sproporzionatamente la parte più centralizzata e organizzata gerarchicamente perché è un bersaglio più facile da individuare. Avete capito a quali parti corrispondono queste due descrizioni?

Immaginate, se volete, un mondo in cui ci si può procurare un drone facilmente e a buon prezzo. Ora fermatevi e pensate all’Impero e agli interessi corporativi serviti dall’Impero. Pensate a quanto sarebbe facile individuare come bersagli le case, le chiese e i campi da golf di manager e dirigenti delle compagnie aerospaziali che fabbricano i droni americani; i loro consigli di amministrazione, i centri di comando; le fabbriche; tutta la catena di comando dell’Asia meridionale, da CINC CENTCOM giù giù fino ai singoli battaglioni e i comandi di volo; e la catena logistica, compresi i punti delle basi aeree da cui si pilotano i droni. Capite dove voglio arrivare?

Anche allo stato attuale, il vantaggio americano in materia di droni è dovuto al fatto di avere un’esclusiva nel campo delle tecnologie a basso costo (come i missili Sunburn capaci di affondare una portaerei, le mine, e altro). All’interno delle cerchie di potere USA, la paura di perdere questa esclusiva è così forte che l’ultimo numero della Guida alla Difesa Americana punta sulla necessità di evitare che le capacità di espansione degli Stati Uniti siano sorpassate da semplici, economiche tecnologie: immaginate l’esercito più potente del ventunesimo secolo sconfitto da guerriglieri armati di trappole punji e unità logistiche in bicicletta.

Sarà per una questione di agilità, capacità di ripresa, azione/reazione, ma la società decentrata che sta emergendo comincia già ad assediare il dinosauro del vecchio stato corporativo gerarchico. Come ho detto tante volte, il ventesimo secolo è stato il secolo delle grandi istituzioni gerarchiche. Alla fine del ventunesimo secolo non sarà rimasto molto da seppellire.

Tradotto da Enrico Sanna.