I have decided that the best route for our purpose is a blog.
Technical suport is not really necessary anymore from groups.
Activism, however, is more important that ever.
Cleary, to activists, Globalism is pure evil. So I have invented
Localism, responisibility to where you are, where you are from, the
people that
have helped you.
And especially to the environment.
http://linux-society.blogspot.com
First Article:
The Natural Life of a Networked Machine:
Defining the Information Society in Terms of Humanism
In a momentary departure from the usual cycle of the development of
control systems by the Orwellian types of industries, the Internet
sprang into being as a collaboration of some unusually nice folks
working in the labs of the then phone monopoly, and students at the
then most radical school in the world, Berkeley.
There are many versions of the birth of the Internet. It is true that
it was started to facilitate military development during the Cold War,
but like army fatigues, it quickly became a symbol of freedom and the
free access to information as well as a democratic path to
participation in the creation of information.
What is remarkable about the Berkeley effort, is that it presented a
publicly owned version of one of the phone monopoly's controlling
computer systems, Unix, as well as adding an important feature called
sockets. With a socket system, one computer, in effect, opens a socket,
and another binds to that opening to create a communication connection.
A web server, for instance, offers sockets to computers out on the
Internet, and user applications such as web browsers bind to them.
During the development era, a server was always called a daemon and was
graphically represented by a cute little devil. The Unix system they
developed is the BSD Network Release. This system is still well used
and continuously added to and is considered the most reliable. Linux is
a similar system in many respects especially the part about public
ownership but it came later. The unbelievable growth of Linux was a
phenomenon to be respected, but it could not have started in void.
There had to be futile ground for its sudden development.
The Berkley system was developed with the help of people using the
Stanford University networks, and when they graduated, they named their
company for the network, Sun Microsystems. The inspiration for
de-isolating individual machines and joining them into vast networks
was termed open systems and Sun's favorite slogan was that the whole
network was now the computer. It was a purely capital based movement,
but anyone with computer talent could easily gain employment and access
to these new machines, called workstations. Because of the intentional
openness of the environment, technologists formed into groups and
enhanced their machines with openly developed software, creating a
concept that the protection of the freedom of openness was protected by
secure software, security for the first time equals freedom.
Socket software and daemons are very special. Only in cartoons and in
toys have technological devices taken on lifelike traits. Because
sockets work with computers and computers can attain nearly lifelike
status, as in a Turing machine, and because sockets are for
communication they are well loved and have been well nurtured and cared
for. .
This mindset may actually be a thing of the past, affectatious
connections with old computers, feel difficult. Unlike old houses or
classic cars, their value does not persist, and many of the old-timers
of the computer age, because they were senior and well paid, were fired
during the crash of the technology economy in early 2000. It feels
dangerous to think about the early days of the Internet and the
networked computer, there seems to be a psychic trap of falling into
the old patterns where hard work, imagination and a kindly boss would
result in prestige and a good paycheck.
Nonetheless, as it happened, groups of people and their networks of
computers, experienced a high level of synergy. They all worked
together using the same conditions for facilitating successful groups
that Carl Rogers had formulated. Other social concepts and
technological philosophies also applied well to the inventions leading
to machine intelligence. Ruth Benedict's synergy helps balance the uses
of the machines between capital growth and social contributions.
Buckminster Fuller's sophisticated geometric structures, another
definition for synergy, foreshadowed the matrix of the world of
Internet users. He also predicted public polling through information
technology. His vision was the use of the telephone whereas today the
Swiss government uses the Internet for direct polling.
Sadly, success blinded the new technologists to the darker realities of
the cycle of the development of major innovations.
The 1990s experienced slow steady and healthy growth pulling the
nation, and much of the world out of a recession that had really
started in the 1970s as a result of debts incurred by the US because of
the Viet Nam War. Relationships were surreal; bankers embraced
longhaired technicians who society would have normally banished to
garages and basement laboratories. International investment, in
particular, took on a beneficial cause, bringing capital to the
impoverished parts of the world while creating information technologies
to efficiently facilitate the process. This good will was previously
unheard of and any innovative and hardworking person could make
incredibly good money doing only good deeds. Bringing internetworked
technology to the emerging world would fuel the tide that would raise
all ships.
Necessary services such as insurance and banking could be handled in
the relatively uncorrupted nations of the US, Canada and in Europe.
Citizens and businesses in unstable countries could function safely and
the first world would presumably continue the globalization of the
Internet and support growth in these nations in rational and
well-conceived ways. The single biggest indicator to the immense
synergy of this new culture was that the communicating and thinking
machine would provide its developers huge benefits purely by creating
efficiency and reducing waste in our world of eight or more billion
people.
But unfortunately, things didn't work out that way, corruption in the
US banking industry came to critical mass, and suddenly we were working
with the older more cynical definitions of the investment industry,
which is to separate good people from their hard earned money. We were
wakened to the reality that jobs and workers are commodities traded by
owners and managers who take possession of the inspiration that
ultimately provided to us by society's synergy. The fallout was huge
and resulted in a seemingly endless recession that could be called a
depression at its lowest level. In the end, almost none of the
corrupting forces felt the slightest punishment for record fraud and
stock manipulation. The worst of the offenders, those at the very top
of the banking pyramid, are oddly still protected even by the investors
who lost the most, probably because the banking culture and the owners
of industry have long responded to signals from above, the conditioning
of vast sums of money being so strong.
Lewis Mumford, in the thirties, and Christopher May, in the new
millenium, talked about the growth of technology as being the structure
for the development of humanity, and information is the substance that
creates technological innovation. Power, or failure, also rests in the
transport of information, which is communication. Transportation and
communication were virtually the same thing prior to the electronic
inventions of the telephone and the radio. The big empire of the Romans
died as a result of cuts in the lines of communication and was replaced
by smaller cultures who where barbarian at first but then formed small
nation states able to accumulate their wealth without the threat of
attack by some empire. Gradually, wealth, knowledge and good intentions
brought us to the most important invention of the past thousand years,
the moveable type printing press. It is hard to say that a book can be
bad, but not all innovation was so beneficial and ultimately some,
particularly in mining and manufacturing, brought back the controlling,
authoritarian and enslaving principles of long gone empires. Here
Mumford and May describe cycles of innovation where common but very
intelligent people, working almost as craftsmen, invent things that can
potentially boost the overall value of the society. But then, control
over these innovations gets taken from these common people, often
without financial compensation, and put to the task of building bigger
and better mechanical and financial empires.
Mumford used the inventions of the steam engine and flying shuttle as
examples where the innovators were never compensated despite the strong
patent laws in place at the time, and the immediate used of these
beneficial developments was actually to degrade humanity. Industrial
owners reduced conditions to levels far worse than the slaves of
antiquity had even co-opted religious leaders to help raise the birth
rates to cheapen a key resource commodity, human beings.
Because freedom is associated with the inspiration to create great and
helping inventions by common people, Mumford refers to this portion of
society as the Democratic Technic. The culture that dominates mass
numbers of people to create singular yet diffuse empires is called the
Authoritarian Technic. The Democratic Technic is more natural, where
its members work everyday for the enrichment of their lives, and
ultimately settle into a live-and-let-live version of the life cycle.
The Authoritarian Technic functions based on principles where work is
done for work's sake where effort is always pushed upward to level
where benefits are only enjoyed at a higher stratum. The Democratic
Technic is often manifested as the revolutionary throwing-off of the
chains of empires demanding tribute. The Authoritarian Technic manages
to lie dormant, often for centuries, yet always returns to assimilate
the innovations, ultimately self actualizing them by advancing them
completely in its own, inefficient, development facilities (Microsoft).
Clearly the Authoritarian and Democratic Technics are polar opposites
in the view of history, but their differences are not so clearly
defined in modern technology. While computer innovation requires
liberally applied freedoms to achieve increasingly complicated
solutions, its operational aspect requires near military discipline.
Keeping networks online and accessible to a world of information
workers requires a complete denial of self. There will be no innovative
reactions to system outages, just a review of similar problems, often
using just memory, where hopefully solutions will manifest themselves
quickly. A good analogy could be the airline pilots union. They are
democratic by definition, being loyal to a union and to their trade and
not to the leaders of industry who loathe unions. Yet, when they
protest in strikes, they march in precise military step, giving comfort
in that they seriously follow procedure to specific detail while
operating their sky vessels. There have been no unions in the major
computer operations, though they would be very helpful, not so much in
securing wages, but in helping prevent corruption associated with the
controlling stratum by allowing operations technicians the option of
obeying the law and keeping malfeasance from reaching operational
levels.
In the creation of software, adherence to controlling principles is
also necessary. Where an artist creates the best art for art's sake,
the programmer needs to be continually mindful of how his audience will
be using his creation, if others can improve it and if it can be easily
fixed when broken. These needs are too often unmet since much of it is
funded based on market timing analysis.
The relatively new Linux operating system is fine example as a product
of the Democratic Technic. The license that governs its use and
creation is actually socially inspired by a well-known figure, Richard
Stallman, who has forgone possible millions in personal profits to
promote free software. Quite surprisingly, important publicly developed
software systems are vastly more reliable than their commercially
developed counterparts. Peer review is used to assure quality and the
review process can be brutal.
There appears to be a greater adherence to the disciplines of
innovation in recent years. The ultimate corporate example of the
Authoritarian Technic, Microsoft, who runs a monopoly that would make
the Caesars blush, cannot for the life of its existence, write reliable
and secure software. Only by illegally side stepping American anti
trust laws can they survive. When plans to force free competition on
the operating system level failed after the first election George W.
Bush, the dominance of the faulty XP operating system was guaranteed.
Had the Justice Department succeeded in its plans to separate the
office software divisions from the XP operating system division, the
much more reliable and free Linux system would have obsoleted the XP
operating system, instantly halving the market value of the richest
corporation in the world. This is not apply to all commercial operating
systems. Some systems boast perfect reliability, especially those in
aircraft and military controls but they occupy a minor computer niches,
and will never touch the majority of people.
Definitions of the publicly owned software, their guiding copying
licenses, have varied considerably. Richard Stallman likes to say his
umbrella operation, GNU (which stands for "GNU is not Unix"), is
copylefting. Software is copyrighted in the name of all people to
prevent any single entity from proprietarizing this software. The use
of the word left is a symbol of his socialist leanings. Another license
version is Open Source, which is more businesses friendly, has been
created by Eric Raymond. The differences are minor though they enjoy an
annoying, yet amusing rivalry.
It should be noted that the majority of web pages come from the
publicly owned and developed Apache web server.
When digesting all that Mumford's Technics and Civilization, and after
regretting not reading his book before the technology crash (he could
have saved me many tens of thousands), I compared it to humanistic
thought in relation to the freedom principles of the publicly owned
software movement. It seemed natural that the Technic version of the
newest chapter of the Information Society should be called the Open
Technic. Mumford deserves to be recognized in this way though he
probably had nothing to do with computers during his lifetime. He,
along with fellow technologist Buckminster Fuller, is associated with
the group that organized the humanists, Maslow's Third Force.
Rogers, the leader of the Humanistic school, was not afraid of
technology in any way. He pioneered the use of tape recorders and film
in therapy to help other therapists learn from his experiences amid the
protests of other therapists. He attributed these complaints to a fear
that their therapy might not be revealed to be as successful as they
claimed. He was dogmatic in systematically quantifying the success of
his efforts, though he insisted that subjective feelings are often more
relevant even than scientific thought. He cited how Albert Einstein had
used his mind, in a form of meditation, in modeling conditions or
problems, to conceive his theories describing our existence. As
computer modeling came along towards the end of his life, Rogers
encouraged his students to experiment. Rogers was a revolutionary, but
he certainly was not prone to the Luddite tendencies of hating
technology. This is a difference that helps define the Democratic
Technic's efforts from, say, Anarchistic rebellion. It also helps to
show Humanism as an integral part of society, whereas the Third Force's
offspring had been marginalized as a result of the political and
cultural struggles associated with rebellion and often with the
alternative drug culture.
Strong evidence linking Humanism to the openness of computer systems,
which I now call the Open Technic, is circumstantial in that it relies
to a large degree on similarities of concepts and terminology, but it
is possible that the idea is so obvious that it has never seemed
interesting. Now that Authoritarian Technic monopolization has appeared
to grab control of the Information Society in the form of unreasonable
and probably illegal knowledge systems control laws, there is a call to
the Humanists to continue Rogers's quiet revolution. A disappointment
probably breaking the hearts of Humanists is the failure of the WSIS to
enhance the clauses of the UN Charter guaranteeing the free passage of
knowledge over international borders by extending it to include the
electronic, packetized, passage of knowledge. They effectively denied
digital communication's unique two-way capabilities for dialog as an
open avenue to resolve disputes and old hatreds through connectiveness
and empathy.
Here is chart comparing systems concepts with Humanism, joining them
into the Open Technic.
Networked
systems communicate openly
Open
communication must exist between therapist and client
Trust
between systems on a network frees
systems and
users from fear and allows
open
communication and mutual support
Genuineness
between client and therapist, between facilitators of peace and groups
in conflict.
ICTs require
two way communication, allow the questioning of information presented.
Allow persons to bridge as individuals.
Free
exchange between client and therapist, especially where the therapist
reflects feelings on the healing process. The bridging of peoples with
communication to end hatreds.
Democratic
Technics
Quite
revolution, emerging persons
Evolutionary
development of open systems (Technics)
Self
actualization
Vast new
communication potential through telecom, travel and now the Internet.
New person
emerging since the 60s, where today's influences are more
quiet (subtle)
Internet
e-mutualism
Volunteerism,
quite revolution, emerging people
Cyberspace
Inner space
Synergy --
Buckminster Fuller
Synergy --
Ruth Benedict
Information
access (conglomeration) based on interest, without the interference of
bias
Empathy
Digital
divide keeps some nations in a state of ignorance
Discrepancies
between rich and poor creates the basis for hatred
Dystopia
Utopia
E-mutual
development
Self
discovery, experimental and experiential learning
Order in the
computer and on the network frees the user by creating safety and an
effective work environment. Standards are not used to judge people but
create predictable systems conditions so that computers know what to
expect from each other (prevent Tower of Babel syndrome)
Structured
conditions for effective healing create a comfortable environment for
the free expression or the client and the helper's empathy.
Similar conditions create a climate where the personal bridges can be
made between individuals at meetings to resolve bias issues.
Open systems
scale to the globe by their design
Rogers's
solutions ultimately earned him nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize
The most important invention of the last millennium, as surveyed by
Time magazine, was the printing press. While the printed book is
historically a relatively new invention, hence a luxury in the long
scheme of things, it is hard to imagine a world without books.
As a new technology, printing was hard to control by the controlling
crafts guilds of the time. They had successfully developed monopolies
of their crafts prior to the invention of the press and moveable type.
Guilds provided some benefits for their monopolistic control; offering
protection from foreign controllers, social benefits, economic
stability, civility in trade and a good working and living environment.
Early intensely capitalized industries were established away from the
civilization. Mineral mines were usually near mountains and energy,
either in the form of wood or coal, was also found in remote forests.
Wood was used for making glass, and metal refining first relied on
charcoal and then coal. Being remote, they easily escaped the civil
guidance of the crafts guilds and city governments. They where able to
create local economies without having to offer the protections and
support which civilized society would have required of businesses
through the guild system. One mill and one mine in a forested area
would create a town, but a number of mills and mines would blight the
land with soot. Once powerful enough they were able to ignore any civil
controls and they degraded society and the environment in their
industrialized areas for centuries. With the dawn of our present age of
information sharing and social protection workers finally became able
to organize and create unions to engage in collective bargaining.
The printing industry existed within cities, yet it escaped the control
of guilds. In its inception it was more of a craft than an industrial
process, and it utilized the arts of language and print pictures as the
basis of its product.
Part of the printing process was the dissemination of the music and the
dance and music halls of the early industrial society. No matter how
bleak environmental and economic conditions may have been, music has
been alive, moved forward, and has been available to the vast majority
of the people both in live performances and printed music. Music today
is still far ahead of the rest of artistic culture, in recent decades
every compositional potential has been explored, yet older genres still
feel fresh and relevant in the popular culture.
Education certainly benefited from the printing industry where books
could be used and reused giving virtually anyone interested enough the
opportunities to develop a sophisticated professional life.
In the most recent era of the last century and a half, technology
becomes sophisticated enough to join the contributions of renaissances,
that where with educational systems and popular culture. Factors of
growth in the public support system have created vast new fields of
social thought developed with scientific theory. Though this social
activity is very likely not entirely new, it has been buried so long as
to appear to be a recent invention. Activity is certainly much greater
and the exchange of knowledge has increased steadily to the most recent
chapter in the information age. With the use of the Internet,
information distribution has exploded to the point of being considered
an overload.
All of society benefits from social support systems; even
stay-at-home-moms contribute by raising children with more potential by
having dialog with those who study their development. Nurses, doctors
and teachers all also contribute indirectly to the daily activities of
the general economy, including the vestiges of early industry that
cannot be dislodged.
Probably the most important contributions bringing society into an
enlightened community are the efforts of the more experience-based side
of social research that seeks to make everyday life important unto
itself, where everybody can share in the world's body of knowledge.
Very much linked to the revolution of the 1960s, which, in the US,
centered on the Viet Nam War and equal civil rights for all, it has
only so far planted a seed. Rogers states flatly that a true advances
are slow to perfect and even slower to be accepted. Gestation periods
can be measured in half centuries. The final stages leading to the
introduction of the recent age of electronic communication where
blindingly fast and society is only grasping the new breadth of
potential global access. The other revolution, one to enhance the new
age with enlightened principles only partly succeeded. Much of the
failure in the US is attributable simply to the infiltration of
gangsterism brought about by globalization and by exploitation of age
old biases to continue the domination of control by the few elite, on
all sides of the political and industrial spectrum.
The New Economy was probably the most obvious example of the Humanist
revolution affecting technology, but it was doomed for a number of
reasons, least of which is that the older economy, the one based on the
destructive and exploitative industries, was not going to let it
succeed. Instead the industrial capital markets skillfully translated
the excitement of a new age into financial corruption where the stock
trading divisions of most financial firms offered stock along with over
valued perceptions while selling the stock that they themselves owned
in a manner so coordinated that could only have been operated from the
very highest levels.
None-the-less, the few seeds planet in the name of openness that
nurtured socially during the 1960s and 1970s proved their value during
the 1990s with the highly synergized growth of the global electronic
network. As failure struck Humanism during the 1980s when cocaine and
heroin weakened the youth culture, Humanism reasserted itself,
ironically, in the high synergy of the corporate world of the 1990s.
By 2000 a recession had been engineered that resulted in mass layoffs
and the transfer of stock values away from liberals interested in
promoting the Information Society to the original controlling elite of
the financial and industrial cultures. Workers were also stripped of
their savings, sometimes with the usual corrupt methods but also
because of their optimistic faith in the future of the Information
Society. Particularly painful was the double loss endured by technology
workers who lost both their saving as well as their jobs. All of the
technology and global stocks plummeted while the main US bank raised
interest rates. It was obvious that a small amount of inflation would
have to be endured to maintain US domination of the information
technologies, a necessity, because US capital leads the world economy.
Yet the main bank continually raised interest rates starving the
research community of necessary investment capital. The only
explanation offered by its leader was intensely arrogant. "Investment
is risk", he said. Even more telling to the need to hurt the economy
was a statement by New York's unpopular billionaire mayor. He stated
that he liked recession because it allowed him to fire teachers.
Still, progress cannot be stopped, as industrialists know. The most
recent attempt to make bring the Information Society to its potential
was, on the surface, a failure. The UN's World Symposium for the
Information Society was convened to strengthen the 19th article of the
UN charter, to remove barriers of information caused by international
borders. Instead, the controlling elite used it to confirm nationalized
control of information, no matter how despotistic, and the monopolistic
accumulation of information property and technology patents by those
with the greatest capital resources, the elite.
The very notion that all nations could benefit form information has
been enough to bring together, through the Internet, socially aware
people, who will very likely adapt existing technology to in fact bring
isolated cultures into the Information Society and enhance the social
aspects of the wealthier nations. By virtue of the physical nature of
the electron, from which information packets are constructed, there is
no controlling force that can prevent its traveling through the air,
across international borders.
And because of the two-way nature of Internet communications,
technological and social advancement will continue to support each
other. The technology of the Information Society, organized within the
facilitative environments created by the Humanists, will grow along a
path of goodwill by tapping into the positive resources of every
individual.
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