Hacker ethics understood as a simultaneous and global game in the search for structural changes in any area of society

Comunes Collective
Version 1.0

Our intention in this text is to extrapolate some ideas extracted from struggles and conquests in the digital world, and apply them in the search for change in other areas of our society.

We can identify a relevant “game” played in recent decades, a game with a clear strategic potential: the one confronting Free¹ Software against proprietary software of large corporations such as Microsoft.

© cc-by-nd-nc diagonalperiodico.net

The effort that the collective creation of software represents is not always obvious, and is typically only made apparent through a practical perspective (“this works better than that” or “I’m more used to this than that”). However, in the end, what is really at stake are our liberties, our privacy and our independence as individuals and as a part of society; in short, the common good.

Free Software is gradually finding its way to our PCs (either through programmes such as Firefox or operating systems such as Ubuntu) and even to our mobile phones (via Android). Still, it is something we use indirectly all the time, since most of what we understand by “the Internet” works because of it, including large proprietary service companies such as Google or Facebook.

One of the most important lessons we can learn from Free Software is that we can play and win in this great game of the global fight for our liberties and the common good, and that we can change the unsustainable and unjust historical present.

Despite the hundreds or thousands of programmers large companies may hire, how can they compete with Free Software that has been created by hundreds of thousands of enthusiasts collaborating all over the world and that has been improved, translated, adapted and released as a common good for the rest of humanity?

Besides, we can reach other areas, such as Free Culture. As Eben Moglen says “if all knowing, all culture, all art, all useful information can be costlessly given to everyone at the same price that it is given to anyone. If everyone can have everything, anywhere, all the time, why is it ever moral to exclude anyone?” If it does not cost us anything to share, why exclude other people artificially?

The best current example of Free Culture is Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, created, managed and maintained the same way as Free Software: by thousands of people like us, while made available to everyone in many languages. It is a good example of a “digital common good”.

Which commercial encyclopedia can compete with this collective, permanent and selfless effort that Wikipedia represents? None. Encarta, Microsoft’s encyclopedia, stopped publishing in 2009. It’s as if the old ice factories tried competing with refrigerators.

But the fact is that this is only the beginning.

Beyond Free Software: A Global Game to Play

In an effort of extrapolation, why should we only target Free Software or encyclopedias and Free Culture?

One of the most interesting things is that Free Software shows us a winning game that can be played not merely against Microsoft, but also against any threat to our freedom (such as transgenics, hybrid seeds which cannot be replanted, privatisation and merchandization of health or education, etc.).

It also shows us that producing for our common good (be it bits or vegetables) is a healthier practice than simply producing for commerce (thus justifying war, illness, planned obsolescence, environmental devastation…).

For further extrapolation, a simple cross-multiplication is sufficient. It is clear that Free Software makes us more free in the face of abusive, monopolist and captive computer and Internet practices. So what other similar practices can make us free in the face of other problems? We can think of examples such as seed monopoly, life patents, unfair pharmaceutical laboratories (which, for instance, prefer to research in lifelong medication), lack of transparency of institutions (and their control by unethical corporations)... you name it.

Something we can learn is that both individually and collectively we can play and win in similar games against opponents which put the common good and our liberties at risk (whatever the issue: food, environment, health, education…)

We must be aware that anyone can take part in these games, so we can convert the current historical situation into a great board of simultaneous and decentralized games. The more participants in each game, in a search for the desired structural change, the greater the possibility of any one of us finding the winning move (such as Wikileaks) and thus, the greater the possibility of success as society. If we win these games, we all win.

Eric S. Raymond said “Given a large enough [collaborators] base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone”.

You too can play... or better, you too can hack

May we explain this in another way: A hack could be an ingenious solution to a problem. A trick, a brain wave, or that idea that just surprises you or makes you laugh because of its ingeniousness.

Hacking is the act of doing hacks, and hackers (originally “woodcutters”) are those that perform hacks —nothing to do with computer piracy. On the other hand, hacktivism, the use of hacks for political purposes, can be seen as a quest for freedom in our society.

Free Software is a great hack and shows us how something, such as our economic system, can be changed or hacked for the benefit of humanity and the common good. It shows us a fissure and how, even under the same game rules of this unjust system, this same system can be beaten.

We must be aware that everyone can be a hacker and may dare to hack in areas other than software, and in other fields of life which restrict our freedom, beyond computers and the internet. A good example in the field of journalism is Wikileaks. It’s a great winning game that can be played in other areas (for instance, by disclosing the unjust practices of corporations and local administrations) in favour of transparency and our freedom.

Our society needs hordes of “woodcutters” to search for and chop up the fissures of corporations and institutions which are against freedom and put the common good in jeopardy.

To oppose is not enough; neither can we do just anything

More ambitious strategies are necessary, focused on the collective quest for those winning games which can end current unjust situations. Sometimes it is a matter of learning from games played by other people and groups, and adapting them to our environment or improving them.

We encourage everyone to play, hack and become social “woodcutters”. Our aim should be to clean up and prune the rotten apple trees which are affecting our communal forest and future.

We challenge you to participate in this simultaneous game for a better world. Whatever your field is (agriculture, biology, music... anything), you can in all certainty hack against what harms us. If your game is a winner, we will all win; and if other games are winners, we will all win too.

This text is an attempt to encourage simultaneous games to fight practices which jeopardise the common good, but it is only one “game strategy”. More effective game strategies may occur to you. Think about it.

Happy hacking!

© 2010-2012 Comunes Collective cc-by-sa

¹ “free” as in “free speech”, not “free beer”

English translation from Spanish by Christine Lewis Carroll

If you see waste in a forest, you can inform the guard, but the ideal is to look after the forest between all of us.

You can see rubbish in a forest and think, “how dirty” and do nothing about it, not even tell anyone.

But if between all of us we are able to take some kind of action, to take part, to maintain and protect our common goods like the forests, etc, at the end it will revert into the common good of our community.

Ostrom noted in a study about a hundred protected forests in fourteen different countries, that shows that the cooperation between the local people is more important to preserve those goods, than any national government, state workers or any kind of supervision of these forests.

The Nobel price in Economy Elinor Ostrom, in an article about the best ways of managing the common goods in OnTheCommons

Extrapolating

Same thing happens with the Free Software and the Open Source. We can see something that doesn’t work properly and maintain passive while thinking “this is not working” or “why is this ununderstood” etc. But the ideal situation is that between all of the people do participate in improving this common good. Do not propose, do:

• Lets inform about the errors, or bugs, about typographycal mistakes

• Lets think and suggest possible solutions, proposes.

• Even we can try to invent and resolve ourselves

• Lets translate to our own language

• etc

At the end between the all of us and thanks to the participation it will revert to the common good of all…

Comunes is a non-profit collective dedicated to facilitating the use of free/libre web tools and resources to collectives and activists alike, with the hopes of encouraging the Commons.

We encourage you to check our Manifesto which explains our approach.

A quick summary of our initiatives is as follows:

Web Tools & Services

Ourproject.org is a web-based collaborative free content repository. It acts as a central location for offering web space and tools for projects of any topic, focusing on free knowledge. It aims to extend the ideas and methodology of free software to social areas and free culture in general. Thus, it provides multiple web services (hosting, mailing lists, wiki, ftp, forums…) to social/cultural/artistic projects as long as they share their contents with Creative Commons licenses (or other free/libre licenses). Active since 2002, nowadays it hosts 1,000 projects and its services receive around 1,000,000 monthly visits.

Kune is a platform for encouraging collaboration, content sharing & free culture. It aims to improve/modernize/replicate the labor of what ourproject.org does, but in an easier manner and expanding on its features for community-building. It allows for the creation of online spaces of collaborative work, where organizations and individuals can build projects online, coordinate common agendas, set up virtual meetings and join people/orgs with similar interests. It sums up the characteristics of online social networks with collaborative software, aimed at groups and boosting the sharing of contents among orgs/peers. It is still under development, with the support of the IEPALA Foundation. You can check our demo.

Move Commons (MC) is a simple web tool for initiatives, collectives and NGOs to declare and visualize the core principles they are committed to. The idea behind MC follows the same mechanics of Creative Commons tagging cultural works, providing a user-friendly, bottom-up, labeling system for each initiative with 4 meaningful icons and some keywords. It aims to boost the visibility and diffusion of such initiatives, building a network among related initiatives/collectives across the world and allowing mutual discovery. Thus, it can facilitate the climb up to critical mass. Added to which, newcomers could easily understand the collective approach in their website, and/or discover collectives matching their field/location/interests with a simple search. Although there are a few initiatives already with their MC, it is still a beta-version under development, with the support of the Medialab-Prado Commons Lab .

Other projects

• Alerta! is a community-driven alert system
• Plantaré is a community currency for seed exchange
• The World of Alternatives is a proof-of-concept initiative that aims to classify and document collectively alternatives of our “Another World is Possible” in Wikipedia
• Karma is a proof-of-concept gadget for a decentralized reputation rating system
• Massmob is a proof-of-concept gadget for calling and organizing meetings and smart mobs
• Troco is a proof-of-concept gadget of a peer-to-peer currency
• Brick (temporal nickname) is a forthcoming initiative for guiding student assignments towards the solution of real problems and the sharing of their results for reusing/replicating/adapting the solutions
• Ideas (temporal nickname) is a forthcoming initiative for brainstorming ideas of possible social projects related to the Commons

If you found interesting any of our projects, you should have a look at our Join page… who knows? Maybe you would like to join any of our activities! On the other hand, you might be a FLOSS geek: then this is your corner.

• Mozilla Drumbeat Festival, Nov 3-5, Barcelona
• Medialab-Prado, Nov 25, Madrid
• Chaos Communication Congress, Dec 27-30, Berlin

“In many areas, people collectively develop shared representations of the quality of artefacts. Scientific communities produce collective evaluations of what counts as good research in their field. Teenagers evaluate music, fashion, and what is ‘cool’ amongst themselves. Families develop shared opinions about what is good and bad, which they transmit to their offspring. Collaborative annotation systems allow large communities of Web users to rank the quality of content in a decentralised way.”

The workshop has had pretty interesting talks, as we can see from the list of presentations, such as:

• Food quality as a public good: cooperation dynamics and economic development in a rural community
• Scientific Collaboration, Publishing and Education in the Future
• Crowdsourcing Real-Time Impact Factors and a Semantic Research Database
• Simulating cultural dynamics in peer production environment

However, there is one in particular that should be stressed over the others: Open sourcing financial functions and institutions:

“Peer-to-Peer technology has created disruptive outcomes for both media distribution (bittorrent), knowledge creation and distribution (wikipedia) and money lending (zopa). Also open source software powers the web (apache). What binds these advances together is a commitment to decentralisation and opening of the social structures that produce the quality outcomes we all benefit from. Neither capitalist monopoly practices nor socialised central control are productive and hence peer production is taking an increasing role in our lives. The question I want to ask is “can we extend these trends to provide the functions of financial institutions?”. Put simply could we envisage a P2P open source bank or money system? I would like to provoke a debate – is this a viable and desirable project and what would we need to do, now, to bring it about?”.

This full paper is available, together with the others, in the public workshop proceedings of the workshop.

The enclosure movement in England during the 15th and 16th centuries limited the access to land and its benefits to its owners, thus making it inaccessible to the public as it had been traditionally. This initiated the process of the privatization of common human necessities. Subsequently, the world was ruled under the logic of the capitalistic system of production, in which everything can be transformed into money, and industrialization engendered mass production. The process of privatization, linked to an unrestrained mercantilization, aggravated greed and competition.

As a result, nowadays, the human civilization is in crisis ; one that could inevitably lead to the destruction of the human species on Earth. With the endurance of the most aggressive aspects of modern societies: the growth of social inequalities, consumeristic frenzy, destruction of nature, militarization of international affairs, the confiscation of public power by the market and productivism, the violent appropriation of the natural resources, and democracy retrogress

On one hand, in the schizophrenia of our times, the production of arms is an endless source of profits; destructing the environment is how economic growth is attained; the pharmaceutical industry obtains astronomical gains by only making their products available to those who can afford to pay their exorbitant prices; the control of the production and selling of seeds is death to small farms because of the debt they incur; The creation of money as an instrument to make exchanges easier is privatized by banks that, even when showed as the heart of a casino economy, speculative and unlinked to the real economy, are reinforce by governmental medicines to the running financial crises.

On the other hand, the knowledge that would allow parcels of the population the access to solutions for their problems is not made widely; the preservation of the forest, necessary to the continuity of life on the planet, is considered an obstacle to progress; scientific research has not served in the struggle against endemic diseases that decimate entire populations; discoveries and useful advancements to human development become inaccessible, protected by blindly defended patents and author’s rights; large agricultural productions with unknown environment effects spread throughout the earth to supply enough fuel to keep the wealthy minority at their standard of living.

The World Social Forum of 2009, at Belem – Pará, Brazil, is happening at a very special moment in time. It is a time when neo-liberal globalization, boosted by financial movements, unfettered by public control and legitimized by the ideology of the free market fails spectacularly.

The moment is also very special because simultaneously, the whole world is emerging into a new consciousness built on the premise that there are resources that under no circumstances could be privatizatized and mercantilized, by the fact that they are common goods and should be available to all human beings and nature itself.

The undersigned of the present Manifest, released in the World Social Forum of 2009, call all citizens of the world and their organizations to engage in the struggle for the deprivatization and demercantilization of these goods, as a flag raised by all of Humanity.

Everyone in their various locations and on their respective battle grounds, must assume the spirit of cooperation,which is essential to human life, and mobilize themselves in order to :

• amplify and nurture the new consciousness that is emerging;
• offer support towards the efforts of the organizations that launch themselves to the defense of rivers, land, seeds, knowledge, science, forests, seas, wind, communication and intercommunication, culture, music and other forms of art, public services such as education, health, sanitation, money, ancestral wisdom;
• fortify the endeavors of their own organizations, mutually reinforcing themselves, in the campaigns and initiatives proposed and developed towards these objectives.

The undersigned of this Manifest pledge to exhaustively act to recover, for the common use of their fellow human beings, in co-responsibility and under social control, all of the goods and services necessary for life.

Source: Sergio Amadeu’s blog.