Three items here. First a summary of Evgeny Morozov’s treatment of Tim O’Reilly as the bogeyman that distorted “open government” into a dystopia. Amidst the mischaracterisations and polarization features that are the hallmark of Morozov’s interventions, there lies a good point that standard open government approaches may be too reformist and simplyfying. But I fundamentally disagree that because open government and transparency are not sufficient, they are ‘bad’ things, on the contrary, they are necessary building blocks for more fundamental changes. Nothing good can be borne out of ignorance and secret government data. Openness and transparency are the very conditions for civic participation. As they say: necessary but not sufficient.
Because of Morozov’s mischaracterizations of his political enemies, I also publish two comments by Tim O’Reilly.
1. Annalee Newitz on Morozov on O’Reilly
(excerpt only)
“Morozov explores the fascinating history behind the use of the word “open” here, tracing it back to a late-1990s schism between free software advocates and entrepreneurs. The “free” in free software, as movement leader Richard Stallman is fond of pointing out, means “free as in freedom, not as in beer.” Free software is released with all its source code open to the public, and anyone in the public is free to alter and use it as they like — as long as they also make their software code open to the public. It’s viral anti-marketing, with each new piece of software spawning more free software, and so on. In 1999, Neal Stephenson wrote a terrific nonfiction essay, “In the Beginning . . . Was the Command Line,” explaining how free software works.
The problem was that companies could sell free software, but they weren’t always happy about the public mucking around in their code and changing it. So O’Reilly helped a group of entrepreneurs come up with the alternative term “open source” software, which described a bunch of different licenses that people could use to release software in ways that free software would not allow. You might say that open source allowed companies to release code that was partly open, but partly closed. In some cases, people could read the source code, but not change it. In others, they could change the code, close it, and then resell it as proprietary software.
The legacy of open source software is today’s app marketplace. Companies like Facebook and Google make parts of their code publicly available so that other companies can develop apps that work with Facebook, Android devices, whatever. The software isn’t free, because you can’t download Facebook’s source code, tweak it to be awesome, and start your own social network called Assbook. But you can get bits of that Facebook code (for a price) so that your Friendfucker app works beautifully on top of Facebook.
What disgusts Morozov about the slide from free software to open source is that a revolutionary idea — radical transparency, radical sharing — became yet another corporate landscape with a little bit of cooperation between companies. Morozov blames O’Reilly’s “meme engineering” for this shift, for popularizing open source at the expense of freedom.
The real problem, however, is the way this shift to open source has spawned a creepy kind of political futurism devoted to “open government.”
Morozov writes:
– All the familiar pathologies of O’Reilly’s thinking are on full display in his quest to meme-engineer his way to “Government 2.0.” The free software scenario is repeating itself: deeply political reform efforts are no longer seen as “moral crusades,” but are reinvented as mere attempts at increasing efficiency and promoting innovation . . . A decade earlier, O’Reilly had redefined “freedom” as the freedom of developers to do as they wished; now it was all about recasting “openness” in government in purely economic and innovation-friendly terms while downplaying its political connotations.
The problem, for Morozov, is that this new open government — the thing that Silicon Valley types would love to inject into our actually existing government — wouldn’t be about accountability to its citizens and political transparency. It’s would be about making government data available to companies that will mine it for profit. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with making a buck, that’s not the main role that government should play. Morozov adds that there are many things the government should do that will have absolutely no benefits to entrepreneurs and innovators. After all, the government should be devoted to ensuring that its citizens are protected from abuses of power, and that it is accountable to those citizens, even when those citizens don’t have money or lots of followers on Twitter.
Morozov writes:
– How do we ensure accountability? Let’s forget about databases for a moment and think about power. How do we make the government feel the heat of public attention? Perhaps by forcing it to make targeted disclosures of particularly sensitive data sets. Perhaps by strengthening the FOIA laws, or at least making sure that government agencies comply with existing provisions. Or perhaps by funding intermediaries that can build narratives around data—much of the released data is so complex that few amateurs have the processing power and expertise to read and make sense of it in their basements. This might be very useful for boosting accountability but useless for boosting innovation; likewise, you can think of many data releases that would be great for innovation and do nothing for accountability.
Ultimately, Morozov’s key point is that Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are trying to get involved in politics by directly translating technical ideas into political ones. The problem? The ideas of “distributed intelligence” developed by companies like Google to optimize search can’t really help us with getting humans to participate in political change:
There is nothing “collective” about such distributed intelligence; it’s just a bunch of individual users acting on their own and never experiencing any sense of solidarity or group belonging. Such “participation” has no political dimension; no power changes hands . . . O’Reilly wants to redefine participation from something that arises from shared grievances and aims at structural reforms to something that arises from individual frustration with bureaucracies and usually ends with citizens using or building apps to solve their own problems.
Morozov is worried that the memes of Silicon Valley will reshape our government’s future in a way that sounds democratic and progressive on paper — but will turn out, in practice, to create a nation whose citizens are impoverished and disempowered. Government will abdicate responsibility for providing its citizens with basics like roads, schools, scientific research, and health care. Instead, it will create an “open platform” that allows private industries to plug their private schools into the government system. That’s fine for the people who can pay for those schools, but leaves the rest of us saddled with the burden of “solving our own problems” by creating a Kickstarter to fund our kids’ elementary school science education.
More importantly, Morozov believes this future will fragment our citizenry, eroding group solidarity and turning us into little monads who can’t organize a protest or social movement. After all, we’ll be busy trying to set up DiY schools and build roads that our government stopped providing because doing so was inefficient.
It’s a dystopian vision of the open future, and one that’s worth paying attention to.
As a coda, it’s worth noting that Morozov’s rhetorical style in this essay has a history that stretches back as far as the one he attributes to O’Reilly. This is the kind of article that made The Baffler famous back in the 1990s, when founder Thomas Frank ran the zine as the intellectual wing of an indie movement whose biggest political enemies were artists and thinkers who had “sold out” to corporate capitalism. Morozov’s essay eviscerates O’Reilly’s career in order to out him as a fake progressive who confuses entrepreneurialism with political freedom. In this story, O’Reilly is the indie rocker who sold out — or maybe the hipster marketer who induced other indie rockers to sell out. Either way, O’Reilly’s foundational crime is taking something radical and transformative like free software and mainstreaming it by making it palatable to entrepreneurs and consumers. And this is the kind of mainstreaming that also turns participatory, responsible governments into pathetic tools of crony capitalism and (in a worst-case scenario) privatized military forces.”
2. First response by Tim O’Reilly
“Annalee,
I think you do a real disservice to both open source and the open government movement by accepting uncritically the distorted history that Morozov provides. As Kevin Marks points out, there is a rich history of open source software that predates the GPL and Stallman’s “moral crusade.” My “meme engineering” was to set the record straight, to help people appreciate both the architectural elements that made Unix and the Internet such a fertile ground for code sharing, and what I considered the more generative and intellectually generous tradition that animated the Berkeley Unix project, the X Window System, and the Internet.
Yes, Stallman made moral arguments for free software, and the open source movement made practical arguments that turned out to be more acceptable. But the open source movement was inspired by a morality that puts Stallman’s to shame: a gift with no strings attached, a culture of generosity that expects the best of human nature rather than the worst. And despite the success of Linux, it was the more generous tradition represented by the Internet and the World Wide Web that had the biggest impact.
The notion that it was the ascendancy of the open source meme over the free software meme that led to the domination of the net by commercial interests is profoundly ignorant of both technology and history. It was the shift to the cloud that did that.
And frankly, I warned about the dangers of that architectural shift very early in my open source activism – you might look at the exchange I had with Richard Stallman in Berlin in 1999, where I warned him that no free or open source software license would constrain Google, since its software was never distributed, but only performed on its own servers.
Recognizing that the world is changing is one way that you prepare for it. In 1999, Richard Stallman said that the danger I was pointing out “didn’t matter,” that it didn’t infringe on his freedom because it wasn’t happening on his own computer. Finally, some years later, far too late, the FSF recognized the problem, but GPL3 was the wrong solution. As I’d come to realize, one consequence of free and open source software was commoditization, and once software became commoditized, data would become valuable and the new source of lock-in. I urged the FSF and others to focus on open data, not just free software.
I could go on and on. But the point is that Morozov’s history is profoundly wrong, both as an account of the past and as a guide to what to do about it.
Morozov’s account of my role in the open government movement, and your retelling of it, is equally distorted. For example, you say:
“Government will abdicate responsibility for providing its citizens with basics like roads, schools, scientific research, and health care.”
My notion of “government as a platform” is that those basics are precisely what government *should* be focusing on. Roads, schools, scientific research, and healthcare are all examples of fundamental “platform services.” The analogy with computer platforms like the web or the iPhone is to suggest that a more conscious focus on services that are generative for society can multiply government’s effectiveness.
Technological examples I’ve given of platform services include weather data (which powers the commercial weather industry) and GPS. Government as a platform means that it’s better for the government to provide satellite data than to provide all the satellite applications. If government policy had been that the government would provide a navigation application for cars, rather than a more fundamental data service, we not only would have more expensive and less powerful navigation services, but we also wouldn’t have all the other creative uses for location data that the private sector is now coming up with.
The idea that this is some kind of techno-libertarian plot is a product of Morozov’s fevered imagination. I don’t know anyone in the open government movement whose goal is to have government “abdicate responsibility.” Instead, we’re urging government to adopt technology so that it can keep up with the private sector. (For example, my idea about “algorithmic regulation”, which Morozov eviscerates, is a thought-experiment about what kind of more powerful regulatory system the government would need to combat bad actors in the high speed, high tech financial industry.)
I wonder sometimes if Morozov’s disinformation campaign is a deliberate sabotage, an attempt to discredit those who are actually working to achieve the participatory ideal that he claims to be protecting.
Open data can be used both to enhance government transparency and accountability and to enable private sector innovation; technology can be used to enhance both citizen participation and government efficiency. There is no hostility between these ideas. Those of us who are working in the field rather than throwing brickbats from the sidelines are deeply committed to both goals.
Anyone who actually reads the many sources that Morozov links to by way of given the illusion of legitimacy to his narrative will find much in there to contradict his extremely selective and inflammatory exposition.
I don’t mind Morozov’s petty mischaracterizations of my motives; it’s what he does to garnish attention and I make a convenient target. But I do mind when someone like you, who ought to know better, accepts his twisted history rather than doing the homework to discredit it.”
3. Tim O’Reilly’s second response
“I didn’t really take it personally – in fact, I was rather flattered, both that Morozov gives me so much credit, and that he had such a difficult time twisting me into the necessary bogeyman. Even he had to resort to resolving the contradictions in his account by attributing some of my statements to the “good cop” and others to the “bad cop.”
I wish that I could be as charitable as you are and say that Morozov is raising good questions. He *could* be, but he works so hard to make dialogue impossible that he actually impairs discussion of the questions he purports to raise. And his misrepresentations, accepted by those who don’t know much about the topic, do harm the work of people who happen to fall in the crosshairs.
It would be terrific if Morozov were saying that there are people co-opting the idea of open government, or web 2.0, or open source, or whatever, and rendering these terms less useful, pointing back to their original impulse and real meaning, but instead, he uses the presence of pretenders to deny that there was ever any merit to the movement in the first place.
I find it rather sad that the kind of attack media that has degraded our politics is now being unleashed on the technology world. We’ve now got our own Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter. I don’t think public discourse about important topics is improved by any of these figures. Polarization is their game. I leave you to divine the motive.”