Metaconsciousness: Mythology for a Post-Civilized World
Chapter 8 | Contents | Chapter 10
Eric Raymond points out an interesting incongruity in the open-source movement between their stated ethos and their actual practice. According to to the Open Source Definition, and to software licenses compliant with it, such as the GNU General Public License,1 as Raymond puts it, "anyone can hack anything. Nothing prevents half a dozen different people from taking any given open-source product ..., duplicating the sources, running off with them in different evolutionary directions, claiming to be the product."2 This particular form of "promiscuity" – sanctioned by (alleged) consensus, and by the letter of OSD-compliant licenses – is called "forking," and is almost never done in hacker practice. The real consensus among the hacker tribe, as disclosed in actual practice, adheres to a much more "puritanical" ethic, and certain taboos are rarely if ever violated.
In particular, ownership of an open-source project is treated as sacred among hackers. Because software is not a "manufactured good," but an ongoing service to its clients, an open-source project has a dynamic evolutionary life, potentially involving the creative input of many hackers over the course of the project's lifetime. "The owner(s) of a software project," Raymond writes, "are those who have the exclusive right, recognized by the community at large, to re-distribute modified versions."3 A project owner, "recognized by the community at large," may be an individual or a group, and may acquire project ownership in one of three ways:
The first of these is obviously rock-solid, and is universally recognized as such. The second is sometimes necessitated by the owner's inability or loss of interest in the project necessary to sustain the responsibilities of ownership. In such cases it is incumbent upon the owner to find a competent successor to carry on project ownership, maintenance, and oversight. The third possibility may occur when an individual or group of hackers take an interest in a project which has no evident or active owner.
In the latter case, elaborate measures are taken, first if possible, to locate the project owner, or failing that, to establish among the community that the project really has no owner, and that the hacker(s) taking an interest in the project are competent to resuscitate and support it. This may take some time, to allow every opportunity for the real owner to surface, and / or for any contention to the proposal to be brought forward and publicly aired. And even at that, the tribe may reserve judgment on the new owner until he, she, or they have significantly improved the project from the wellspring of their own creativity. The same may be true even of a publicly anointed successor to an open-source project.
Meanwhile, there is no taboo against privately (i.e. not for public distribution) modifying and recompiling the source of an open-source distribution for the purpose of adapting it to a particular computing environment, or giving it customized capabilities for a specific task. This is what open-source software is for.
These measures, universally adhered to by members of the hacker tribe, are not "required by law," i.e. by the Open Source Definition; yet they are given universal respect and observance by the tribe. Why is this?
Raymond suggests that these practices have evolved among the hacker tribe at least over the extended period he has personally observed them, and that they have much in common with parallel practices that have similarly evolved in entirely different contexts. He observes that
...as these customs have evolved over time, they have done so in a consistent direction. That direction has been to encourage more public accountability, more public notice, and more care about preserving the credits and change histories of projects in ways which (among other things) establish the legitimacy of the present owners.
These features suggest that the customs are not accidental, but are products of some implicit agenda or generative pattern in the open-source culture that is utterly fundamental to its operation.4
I submit that these customs, peculiar to the hacker tribe, have evolved in the way they have because they work. And they consequently have much in common with social patterns that have similarly evolved throughout the entire spectrum of Life. They also have much in common with the so-called "Golden Rule,"5 and with the version of it that I have repeated many times elsewhere,
No one wants to have their project ripped off or "forked" by a rogue hacker; and so – no one in the hacker tribe does this. And any that do may be quickly labeled a loser, bogus, or worse,6 throughout the tribe. The same dynamic manifests in naturally occurring social organizations of all kinds. The fish that joins a school, or the bird that joins a flock, and habitually bumps into those around it, doesn't remain long "in school." Conversely, the fish is part of the school, the bird is part of the flock, the elk is part of the herd, the wolf is part of the pack, the hacker is part of the tribe... because of the advantages thereby afforded to each individual member of the social organism. These advantages are highly valued, and this value is preserved to the extent it is honored by each individual. They, we, all of us, are guided by the invisible, always-everywhere presence of the metaconsciousness that occupies the nonlocal, nonlinear interstices among "All Things" – if we allow it. Dominator civilization does not allow it; which is precisely and succinctly why dominator civilization doesn't work. It is also why civilizations have been abandoned by their builders in the past, and why we must abandon civilization today, if any of us are to survive and carry the human experiment beyond civilization.
Yet the open-source hacker tribe evidently thrive within the civilized milieu – something that tribes for the past five thousand years have consistently failed to do. How do the hackers do it?
They do it for the most part not by fighting the "cathedral-builders" – although they have the street-smart savvy not to take any wooden nickels from them either – but by pursuing their "bazaar-style" inclinations just for the fun of it, because hacking is what they like to do best. They are self-selected, and each hacker works on the project of his or her choice. There is no hierarchy, no one makes "assignments" for anyone but him or herself, and there is no supervision, or effort at "quality control," as is found among the "cathedral-builders." The peer review and dynamic consensus of thousands of other hackers covers all these allegedly "necessary" components of the "cathedral style."
Some of the lessons that we, who would walk away from civilization, may take from the tribe of hackers, are to
Mainly, allowance, liberty, and responsibility are inseparable compliments; one cannot exist without the others. Dominator civilization provides neither allowance nor liberty, and is a deliberate mechanism for evading responsibility. Even the pharaohs, for whom, and by whom civilization was created, are without real liberty, all their plundered wealth and so-called "power" notwithstanding; for their tenuous and ultimately unsustainable position is parasitically dependent upon the functioning of sustainable social systems – which they suicidally hunt down and disable or destroy, because they cannot otherwise control them. Similarly, the supreme "cathedral-builder" in the software domain has (so far without success) attempted to sabotage, stifle, and destroy the Open Source Software movement – not by producing an honestly superior product line, but by preempting and polluting the open protocols upon which the open-source market depends. This is not competition: this is war, the underlying foundation and final bulwark of dominator civilization.
The greatest lesson from the the bazaar, it seems to me, is this: There are alternatives to 'rolling over and playing dead' when confronted by preemptive force, or war, or civilization. Let us explore this line of thought further.
The tribe of hackers is not a tribe of "revolutionaries." Their primary objective is not to "change the world" – although that seems to be one of the outcomes of what they naturally do. Mainly, hackers like to hack; so that is what they do. Further, early in the gestation of what has become the hacker tribe, there developed a widespread ethic of sharing their individual creativity; i.e. sharing their code. In my vocabulary, this is a prototypical example of fomenting metaconsciousness. To have one's code adapted into a different application – with attribution – became a badge of honor, in one's self-image, and in the view of one's peers. "Theft" of "intellectual property" simply was not, and is not an issue among open-source hackers. Because hackers place a high value upon having their creativity adapted and shared (with attribution) in the works of their peers, they take scrupulous care to give full attribution to the authors of works they adapt into their own creative projects.
They treat their peers, in other words, as they themselves appreciate being treated. This reflects an attitude that is almost entirely unlike that found at large in civilization – notwithstanding all the lip-service paid in civilized societies to the so-called "Golden Rule." Hackers do not preach, "Do unto others as you would that they should do unto you." They practice it amongst themselves, and it works quite nicely. Civilization, on the other hand, in contrast to what they preach, practice an entirely different "Golden Rule:" "He who has the gold makes the rules."
I sift from these observations two lessons: a) the open-source ethic is a manifestation of a fundamentally altered state of mind from that which prevails in the "mainstream;" and b) it is evidently possible for such an "altered state" to emerge spontaneously in large numbers, and proliferate on a global scale. Nobody planned for this to happen; nobody "orchestrated" it, or lobbied for it, or organized a "movement" to bring it about. Richard Stallman7 became personally determined not to run proprietary software on his computers, and commenced developing Free Software alternatives. Linus Torvalds began hacking on an alternative to the proprietary Unix kernel; growing numbers of other hackers thought this was cool, and joined in the fun; and hay presto! GNU / Linux emerged as the best operating system on the market, and continues to improve, "even as we speak." Meanwhile, Tim Berners-Lee developed a set of protocols for sharing information across diverse hardware and software computing platforms, and voilà! The World Wide Web. These are developments which have occurred during the past twenty years or less; and they have had a profound impact upon the conduct of human events during this almost instantaneous interval. These developments have occurred not because of civilization, but in spite of it – yet not in opposition to it.
Also, I think it important to mention that the universal behavior of the open-source hackers is not a product of "legislation." What has been in a sense "legislated" in the open-source community, and generally acknowledged as such, is the Open Source Definition; yet this is not a reflection of how hackers actually behave. They govern themselves significantly more strictly than "the law allows." This further confirms my conviction that human "legislation," upon which civilization allegedly relies to maintain "civil order," is actually superfluous, inconsequential, and is at best an encumbrance, not an aid, to the social dynamic.
Now, it must be admitted that the idea of contemporary hackers constituting a tribe can be stretched only so far. Their culture and behavior have many elements in common with those of functional tribes in many other times and circumstances; yet few hackers, I speculate, would object to being described as "civilized," and many might object to being characterized otherwise. Most hackers live in cities, or on college or university campuses. They depend upon contemporary industry and technology for their lives, their sustenance, and even for their sense of who they are. They eat food, buy gasoline, rent rooms or have mortgages, just like "ordinary civilized folk," and I have not heard a deafening cry from the hackers that their number-one priority in life is to walk away from civilization. The hacker tribe exhibit their tribal qualities in an artificial "space" created by computers and telecommunications networks – a "noosphere," as Raymond terms it, and their ethics have evolved organically, in response to the peculiarities of hacker culture in its contemporary context, not in emulation of prehistoric or contemporary tribal patterns.
For all of these reasons, I find the hackers such an interesting and compelling example for those of us for whom walking away from civilization is a high priority. They did not deliberately set out to bring about their combined accomplishments. They simply did, individual by individual, what they individually wanted to do; each hacker "scratched his or her own itch," to borrow Raymond's metaphor. The emergence of the GNU / Linux operating system, and the amazing suite of highly functional software that runs on it, are what I would call a direct manifestation of "metaconsciousness in action;" and as mentioned earlier, the metaconsciousness of the group is always transcendent of that of the individuals comprising the group. Individuals, in other words, are not necessarily conscious of the metaconscious agenda of the group in which they participate.
To illustrate, by contemplating an entirely different scale: what "conception" might a single neuron, or a synaptically-connected group of neurons, have of the creative experience of the human in whom they are participants? I do not pretend to know, yet I can imagine that a single neuron has very little "comprehension," at its scale, of the nervous system of which it is a part; and similarly, that we humans have very little comprehension of the metaconsciousness of which we are a part. That is why I can also imagine the metaconsciousness of civilization well advanced in the process of committing apoptosis, even while we individual "cells" wring our hands at the daily disclosures of contemporary events. Forgive us, for we really do not know what we are doing!
What I am suggesting, then, is not that the hacker "tribe" have found "the answer" of how to deal effectively with the human predicament, and have pioneered the path through the jungle which will conduct the rest of us, if we follow them, safely beyond civilization to higher ground. I am suggesting, rather, that they have developed an ethos, and a tribal practice which has demonstrated its effectiveness in the marketplace,8 and is in many ways quite distinct from the "mainstream" practices which prevail in civilized societies. The hackers have demonstrated an approach to life, work, and commerce that is strikingly distinguishable from "standard operating procedure" in the "mainstream," and have done so on a scale large enough to have made an unmistakable impact upon global commerce and human events. This is by no means "the end of the story," after which we are all assured of "living happily ever after." It is, however, a clear signal that there are alternatives, even at this late hour, to the "business as usual" approach offered by the "mainstream." And I am suggesting that we explore and develop these alternatives further, and apply them more broadly than the hackers have done in the specialized field of software development.
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1. See www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html.
2. "Homesteading the Noosphere," Raymond, 1999, p. 87.
3. Ibid., p. 89, emphasis in original.
5. See "The Golden Rule Across Religions".
6. See The Yellow Book.
7. Richard Stallman is the founder of the GNU Project.
8. The sine qua non of "success" in the civilized world.
Metaconsciousness: Mythology for a Post-Civilized World
Chapter 8 | Contents | Chapter 10