Open Source Democracy, by Douglas Rushkoff.
Politics is a discipline of philosophy that I usually try to avoid. It has the greatest potential to drive rifts between us because the issues that politics tackles are so fundamental to the human condition that everyone not only has a predetermined opinion, but a predetermined faith of what a good political system is. Everyone's naive theory of metaphysics or epistemology or even aesthetics is about the same, and easily mutable; however, almost everyone's naive theory of politics is ingrained within them. So I dare not tread in those places where it is impossibly hard to do good. To write about this book, I must retreat temporarily from that maxim.
Open Source Democracy combines two relatively recent movements. The political movement of modern democracy — characterized by giving everyone able to vote the right to vote — is incredibly recent: New Zealand became the first democracy to recognize a universal right to vote little more than a century ago. The Open Source movement is even more recent; perhaps less than thirty years old. The effect of both movements in the world can scarcely be glossed over in a spare paragraph. Rushkoff's book is not interested in the effect that the two have had on the world, but rather in the new opportunities for the two to influence each other.
Rushkoff has an essentially utopian view of the Internet as a globally uniting entity. Somewhere among these forums and (God forbid, I never wanted to node this fake word) blogs a new system of universal values that humanity will need if she ever brushes off the chains of multinational government is being forged. As I'm sure everyone is aware, the internet equalizes everyone's potential as members of the fourth estate. The only difference in the barrier of entry between CNN and http://johnqpublic.blogspot.com is credibility and bandwidth costs — and, with suitable advertisement packages, an increase in credibility can pay for the subsequent increase in bandwidth.
Back when the Internet was younger, I was a rapt, active participant in this unifying effect. Usenet was at that time a brilliant palace for the untrained mind to meet really, really smart people and learn from them. Even though I wasn't born early enough to experience a Usenet without AOL, it was still a damn good place to share ideas and learn from one another. The early World Wide Web, too had (amongst a good deal of porn) very good resources. Then the dot-com boom happened and overnight the Internet became a piece of crap. Seriously, outside of Everything2 and a few other collaborative projects, there are very few places on the internet that present the same unifying community effort.
Rushkoff traces the birth of media as following the same trend. A technology meant for communication becomes a technology for marketing and advertisement. While I don't buy his argument that the outbreak of overdiagnosing ADD and ADHD was a reaction to the remote control, the jist of the history is there. The New E2 itself could be thought of as a rebellion against the dot-com era and a re-embracement of that community that is unified in cyberspace but disparate in meatspace. Riiiiiight.
So, where it is in the authoritarian government's benefit to make all media into one-way, passive consumption, it is the democracy's benefit to have its people actively participating in its media. The people, then, can be not only the rulers, but the readers and writers as well. That is the shared link, the hidden sympathy between an open source media and a democratic government: in both the community holds the power.
Open Source Democracy spends far too much time hammering the duality between a centralized story-teller's tyranny and the decentralized Internet's democracy, but perhaps it is necessary because we all have forgotten just how crippling the former's grasp is. Being a citizen of the Internet has taught me more about other cultures and peoples than a lifetime of watching CNN would, but for many people older than me CNN — or worse: Al-Jazeera — is all they've got.
So, provided we can kick all the "closed source" influence off the Internet and learn, as a global culture, the values needed to run a global political structure, Rushkoff argues the next step — implementing that structure — is almost trivial. But what possible values could that be? The only value implied here is the old adage of Heraclitean Flux: "Everything changes." There are no dogmas, no religions, and above all no reduction of humanity that is possible. Everything is questionable.
The first stepping stone on this journey is, as expected, embracing an open source software development model. Without the technology, there isn't a foundation for interconnectedness to grow on.
There's more to Open Source Democracy than I've glossed here, but much of it has to do with that politics thing that I don't like touching. There's a lot of hatred towards modern governments for perpetuating closed source practices while acting like open source governments, and there's plenty of radical (or perhaps I should say visionary) community planning, for any of y'all who are in to that kind of thing. The book is free (of course) under the Creative Commons license for all who'd like to download it.
Link to download the full text | 
