Project of the Day: Fork Freedom

Project site: http://fork-freedom.tumblr.com/

Tim Burden:

“The alternatives to liberal democracy leave me wanting: communism puts too much power in the hands of the State; anarchy (or libertarianism) too much in the hands of the corporations. Neither seem to address the imbalance of power that we think is at the root of the current economic and environmental crises.

So I want to fork, rather than overthrow. I want systems – like the P2P Internet – that work inside the current infrastructure, systems which tend to redress the imbalances. I think we can lessen the hold that corporations and governments have on our lives while still letting them do the good work they can do – and that worker co-ops and community-supported agriculture and the like probably cannot do – such as large office buildings, transportation systems, space programs, and expensive fundamental science research.

I was discussing some of these issues with a friend who came up with the phrase ‘fork freedom’. I loved the term. It reflects three ideas: first, that we can fork rather than revolt; second, that by improving the robustness and autonomy of the Internet, we enhance the freedom of those who might otherwise be oppressed; and third, that forking the Internet can serve as a model of how to change the system from the inside and help restore an economy of balance.

So, since then, I have been using the #forkfreedom hashtag when tweeting news about SOPA, or the Investigative Powers act, or the Arab Spring, or the P2P Internet. I hope you will join me.”

5 Comments Project of the Day: Fork Freedom

  1. Øyvind HolmstadØyvind Holmstad

    Here it’s not separated between classical liberalism and modernist liberalism, which is opposites, hence positive and negative freedom. For modernist liberalism ALL power is shared between the state and the corporations, nothing is left to the individual and local communities. Our only “right” is to think what we like, while ALL important decisions are left to the technocracy of experts. This is the situation of today!

    For classical liberalism all this is turned on the head, where self-organization and re-localisation is the very core! I want to quota Charles Siegel:

    – Classical liberalism believed in positive freedom, the right of people to manage their own affairs and to govern themselves.

    – Victorian liberalism had two aspects. One of these two is well known: laissez-faire liberalism accommodated the industrial economy by inventing the ideal of negative freedom, the notion that freedom is nothing more than absence of government control. But there was also a more idealistic aspect of Victorian liberalism, which grew out of classical liberalism but which is largely forgotten today.

    – Modernist liberalism kept the laissez-faire idea of negative freedom but applied it to a narrow realm of personal behavior. It expected centralized organizations to make important decisions, so it believed that individuals could only have personal freedom.

    Laissez-faire and modernist liberalism redefined freedom as negative in order to accommodate economic growth. To revitalize the liberal tradition for our time, we need to revive the ideal of positive freedom.

    Charles Siegel’s book on Classical Liberalism is published as a free e-book here: http://www.preservenet.com/classicalliberalism/index.html

    Conclusion: We cannot fork modernist liberalism, we need to replace it with classical liberalism.

  2. AvatarJosé Canelas

    It’s hard to take an article seriously when it uses completely perverted concepts of communism or anarchy, all in it’s opening sentence. In a communist society there will be no state and anarchy has nothing to do with this “libertarianism” or placing power in the hands of corporations, it’s actually the opposite of that. Any dictionary will tell you this.

    Maybe there could be something valuable in there. If you want to draw attention to it, say it clearly and point out whatever misconceptions, even if briefly, so that people don’t mistake your linking with endorsement.

  3. AvatarMichel Bauwens

    Hi Jose, the p2p blog is a curation mechanism that aims to provoke thought and does not endorse all the curated material, we are pluralist but joined by a common interest in p2p … the overall majority of the world population has this mainstream misunderstanding of the historical concepts you mention, and this is very hard to police. If you look at the basic thought and feeling of the article, then it goes in the right direction.

  4. AvatarJosé Canelas

    Michel, this is not a matter of policing. A curation act implies choice and is certainly editorial and political. All I’m saying is that a brief comment is desirable here, like you all often do write to contextualize. Otherwise, we’ll just be disseminating capitalist lies of the most damaging sort. There is a battle going on for language, concepts and words and the class that gains advantage will shift the framing of discussion. We’ve been under occupation of thought and discourse by neoliberal ideology for many years. This domination is under threat now, don’t feed into it – oppose it so that we can regain control of meanings and concepts and so that we can think critically and get our bearings right for political action. Surrendering to “mainstream misunderstanding” is giving up on the core concepts that allows us to talk about our liberation from exploitation. Dmytri Kleiner just wrote an excellent piece about this, btw: http://www.dmytri.info/communism/

  5. AvatarMichel Bauwens

    Yes, you are right. However, there is in my opinion a difference between what you call ‘capitalist lies’ and people who may be genuinely concerned with what they see in oppression in former historical experiences, so what they call anarchy is not the historical movement for emancipation, but the lack of order, and communism not a fight for equality, but bureaucratic dictatorships. My reading of this piece is that the heart is in the right place, i.e. the desire for emancipation is there. So some people will use the anarchism/communism concepts critically because they use the mainstream framing but are emancipatory at heart, while others will criticise it precisely because they are emancipatory and their is a huge difference between those two approaches. You are right that I could do more framing and contextualizing myself, but right now, I’m overwhelmed by the need to generate income and working on a research contract, and at least until the end of March, have to use a much lighter hand. But I hope that remarks like yours serve a similar educational purpose.

Leave A Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.