[P2P-F] a new type of platform?

Tue Jul 19 11:42:10 CEST 2011

On Monday, July 18, 2011 09:00:40 pm Nicholas Roberts wrote:
> personally I think that while the OSE project is idealistic and technically
> interesting, its also totalitarian, naive and a dangerous distraction from
> existing social systems, craft movements and appropriate technology
> 
> its a kind of utopian new age totalitarianism, with a digital fabrication
> and software development festish... if you cant model it, design it, it
> doesnt exist

Everything in our world has a structural design.  Our bodies, our machines, 
our systems of production, our forms of government, and our environment.  Open 
source is about the absolute freedom to communicate and modify designs.   This 
empowers people to understand, repair, replicate and customize the structures 
around them.  What's your beef against understanding the world?

We live in the information age.  Software isn't a fetish, it's just the way we 
manipulate information.  Our new information tools are certainly 
revolutionary, but I don't see anything utopian about them.

> real-life just doesn't work like that, you might be able to insulate
> yourself from that if you've got a stream of volunteers, a large number of
> donors etc, but really it only works for those principals at the core

Open source works for whoever wants to take advantage of it.  What you said 
could be said about any human endeavor.

  "Super-stardom only works for artists who can attract enough fans!"
  "Free markets only work for capitalists who can sell to enough customers!"
  "Representative democracy only works for voters who can get their candidates 
elected!" (Heh... and not even then)

> the problem isn't a design problem, it's a social and political one

I agree, where the social problem happens to be that the designs for all the 
products we use and the institutions we must engage with are not open and 
easily modified.  Ha!  I take that back, the problem is very much a design 
problem - a problem of social design.  To advocate that people ought not spend 
time learning about the structure of things and communicating this knowledge 
to others is totalitarian.

-Karl