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Chapter 1: Boot Time | page 1, 2, 3
I am far from the first person to have latched onto the grass-roots potential of the Internet's rhizomelike characteristics. Activists of every political and ideological persuasion are wont to seize upon the Net, imagining it the perfect organizational tool for energizing do-it-yourself campaigns. Whether the cause is Tibetan independence, the right to keep and bear arms, pro-choice or pro-life fanaticism makes no difference. Only the willfully blind fail to recognize how fast e-mail and the Net can transmit information and rally the faithful. Even if the Net's early pioneers didn't label it with botanic precision, they knew what they were seeing. As John Gilmore,* a well-known programmer, "cypherpunk"* and free-software advocate has often been quoted as saying: "The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." The description sums up more than just the resilience of modern telecommunication networks -- it's a dandy summary of how a rhizome survives in a hostile environment. Libertarians like Gilmore have long viewed the Net's decentralization as a welcome refuge from Big Government control. As they zip their most private, confidential information from hidden node to hidden node in cryptographically encoded sheaths, they imagine that they may elude the heavy hand of the tax man or the censor. Their version of rhizome liberation is escapist in a most practical sense. But they aren't the only people placing their bets for transcendent change on the Internet. Philosophers, idealists and visionaries of all stripes employ the Net as a magic mirror to reflect the object of their most ardent desire. The libertarians crave escape, while other revolutionaries cry for rebellion. For some philosophers the metaphor of the rhizome seduces with a promise to discombobulate all normal power relations and dynamics, to enable "resistance" to the status quo, however that status quo is defined. For their online-savvy disciples, the Internet is an attractive embodiment of such theory. Unmappable, inchoate, ever changing, ever growing, contemptuous of geographical borders or legal restrictions -- what better home could there be than the Net for a myriad of "temporary autonomous zones," "pirate oases" welcoming dissidents of every description? There's just one nagging problem. A close review of the Net's impact on society doesn't automatically prove that the Net is actually accomplishing significant political or social change, despite its obvious potential for enabling grass-roots campaigns. One reason, of course, is that the tool has no inherent bias -- anyone can use it. If, for example, both Republicans and Democrats take to the Net in a U.S. Senate election, the net advantage to either side, so to speak, is negligible, a wash. Virtual organizing doesn't always alleviate flesh-and-blood oppression. What difference has e-mail yet made to religious freedom in China? But the Net is making a difference in the arena of software development. And, unlikely as it may seem, there is a connection between the arcane intricacies of how best to write complex, powerful code and the question of whether the Net will or can change society for the vast nonprogramming majority. Free software is the leading edge of what is to come, the first product of the indigenous culture of cyberspace. That shouldn't be a surprise. Programmers built the Net and were its first inhabitants; naturally, they would be the first to understand how to most fully exploit its potential. What is really eye-opening, however, is how different the culture that those programmers created online is from the culture that dominates the offline world. One can even argue that this new programmer culture -- the culture of free software, the so-called gift economy -- has grown up in resistance to the standard operating procedures of the technoeconomy. The "gift economy" is a phrase originally coined by the French anthropologist Marcel Mauss to describe certain practices of exchange he observed in tribal peoples of America's Northwest and the Southeast Pacific. In a gift-economy society, people volunteer their services or goods to others and in turn benefit from similar volunteer efforts. For example, the Chinook Indians regularly held "potlatch" gatherings in which all participants contributed their own offerings -- the ancestor to today's potlucks. By giving to others, you expressed your own status and also incurred in the recipients of your gifts a reciprocal obligation. Many years later, digital anthropologists seeking to explain how the Internet grew in its early years began to use the "gift economy" phrase to describe how programmers contributed their own software tools to the Net community without expecting direct recompense, but nonetheless, by their own example, encouraging others to also give freely. Microsoft does not operate according to the gift economy, nor do most icons of modern capitalism. The gift economy is an oddity, a culture in which ways of living that, to put it bluntly, simply feel good pay off. The gift economy, based on sharing, collaboration and openness, is only now translating into an economic windfall, and none of it could have happened without the spread of internationally linked computer networks. One lesson of free software is that highly complex projects can be undertaken on an essentially volunteer basis, if there is an infrastructure available that seamlessly enables tapping the resources and abilities of a large enough group. The Linux explosion is the gift economy's greatest single success, save for, of course, the Internet itself. Linux has proved that certain truths heretofore held self-evident about how to become commercially successful don't necessarily hold water. To succeed, you don't need brute force, a $100 million-dollar marketing campaign or a ruthless determination to own or crush any competitor. Even more fundamentally, you don't necessarily need to spend money to make money. We live in a world where software increasingly underlies every aspect of human existence. Good software is a necessary tool for survival. Linux, and a vast toolbox of other useful items provided to the world by the free-software movement, can be used to build efficient organizations, run companies, allocate resources and, wherever there is a bootstrapping need, fill it. Whether they know it or not, the free-software programmers are helping to change the way the world does business, by empowering the little and afflicting the big. I had contemplated, in general terms, the free-ranging nature of the Internet's infrastructure many times before, but until that moment when I stood, leaning on my mattock, staring into the heart of the rhizome, I hadn't made the connection between the Internet's fundamental characteristics and the vigor of free software. Free software programs are the shoots springing up from the Internet's multitudinous nodes. Wherever there is a crack in the software industry's pavement, they'll squeeze through and grow like mad. Chop one off, and a hundred more will spring up -- just like bamboo shoots after a spring rain. And like bamboo, the Net's decentralized structure makes it resistant to nuclear devastation and to the digital equivalents of poison or rampaging backhoes. Chinese poets have long compared the snapping cracks of fast-growing new bamboo shoots to the sound of thunder and lightning. In the 11th century, Ou-yang Hsiu wrote: As startling thunder cracks a maddening whip,
As I swung my mattock with renewed energy, excited by the insight proffered me by the bamboo, that startling thunder cracked its maddening whip on my own reporter's soul. How high would free software tower?
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