Hey David, this is a great post and I generally support your theme and premise.
I did want to clarify the point you made about my "Leave Britney Alone-esque" rant... specifically: "that a major motivating factor for his rant was an effort to bring attention to his new consulting firm".
I mean, it's okay for folks to think what they want about the comments I made. But it's another thing to re-interpret the intent of my post. I think promoting my company was the last thing on my mind -- and in fact, I hesitated to post the thing in the first place out of concern for how it might come across.
Anyway, it's no big deal, and you don't have to believe me, but it's just laughable (to me at least!) that I would waste 50 minutes at 1am decrying what I felt was Mozilla's lack of direction to somehow promote my company. I mean, I spent 9 months working on Spread Firefox for free, and then I went on to help found Flock, which was built on the Mozilla platform... I was seriously concerned about Mozilla's potential ability to preserve the freedom of the Open Web if they didn't wake up and counter proprietary technologies like Silverlight and Air...!
So that's that. Otherwise, great post. ;)
Mark Kuznicki
· 1 year ago
Great post David. What is interesting to me is how technology and social movements in general appear to be co-evolving, locked in a dance with no apparent control centre. I think Paul Hawkens' ideas (Blessed Unrest, http://www.wiserearth.org/) are important here, which I wrote about recently.
The starfish of the Open Web movement mirrors that of other global social, economic and environmental justice movements. There is no central control, no unifying ideology; only a set of values and a complex, decentralized network of humans who hold those values and collaborate (sometimes explicitly, sometimes serendipitously) to solve practical problems of human need, usually with the intent (expressed or implicit) of dispersing pathological concentrations of power.
Taking these lessons and applying them here, I think that attempts by individuals to create an ideology out of this decentralized movement will fail. I also think it is unrealistic for believers to expect any one organization to take on a central role organizing a set of values, beliefs, standards, technologies, products and ideas as complex as those we could wrap up in the term the "Open Web".
I'm sympathetic to Chris' hopes and dreams for what Mozilla could be. But maybe we all need to take a step back, try to see the bigger pattern of what is emerging, and realize that there are many strategic points of influence in our movement(s).
Patrice Collin
· 1 year ago
David, Great post, I might be out of the loop, however it's the first time that I see someone specifically mention the fact that part of the success of this movement will come from the consumer power which will in the end beat out corporate infrastructure..in my opinion.
Having said this however, one issue I have always struggled with is the: techies vs non techies involvement...I lived this with the Linux debate/movement as well.
It seems everytime you want to get involved or help advance the movement or push the technology their is really not much you can do....because you are told you don't really "get it" ;-)
That just might be my experience with soe of the purists, but I believe it doesn't help advance the movement as a whole!
I am confidant it is getting better! And I agree that for this to go to the next level some form of leader organization will need to step forward.
CircleReader
· 1 year ago
+1 on the recommendation of Hawken's Blessed Unrest as a movement model; Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody springs to mind as well.
Those questions in the last paragraph are great! As a mostly non-coder and homeschooler, I am always looking for places to participate and learn that are open to non-professionals and newbies. It is an effort for passionate techie geeks to Make sure that "Joe six-pack" has a legitimate way to participate in the movement and become a passionate believer in the open web, with the values and practices it promotes, but it is an effort well-spent. The discipline of bringing newbies along forces experts to ask and answer deep questions about what they are doing and why it matters.
Doing that is, of course, another community practice that the open web community is learning how to manage. Alison McKee wrote in Homeschooling Our Children, Unschooling Ourselves that, "we did not need to know everything, we simply had to have a desire to help one another learn together." Asking where we can push harder on this in the open web movement is the right question.
Michael Anton Dila
· 1 year ago
David,
This is a great post. There are many things in it to praise. I particularly like that you chose the word "open" among many others you could have chosen.
I think they way that you call attention to the fact the the Open Web is a value or, to put it another way, an ideal, is HUGELY important. Lessig has tried for years to call to attention the fact FREEDOM is not something simply given, but that must be defended and struggled for.
I think the most critical point you make in your suggestion that people who value the Open Web are part of a movement is the the dynamics of power (and implicitly those of action) are different that from those of previous "mass" movements.
I know why you say, "This social movement is different in that, so far, it has been able to derive its power from a narrow set of people...", but I think you are a bit wrong about this. I think that the deliberate agents may be small in number, from hacktivists to the Mozillites, but that it is precisely the mass character of the collective action represented in things like your Mozilla download maps that indicate the social power these few have awakened/enabled.
I think this is more than a semantic point and I suspect it is something you already agree with. Your suspicion about this movement's tolerance (perhaps its requirement) of decentralization is dead on.
If I may make a suggestion, derived in part from a recent conversation with Mark Kuznicki: it occurs to me that one of the shifts we are seeing in the dynamics of social networks as online tools become more central to their organization and growth is the emergence of a type of social network based on connection rather than relationship. This means or may mean, that traditional social bonds like kinship, cultural values, political values, moral values give way to apparently more superficial forms of identification, like affinity, aesthetics, and the language and attitude of dissent. Its not the fact that these things are new per se, but that new technologies of connection make possible forms of collective action that do not require mass agreement on values as a precondition for action. It is precisely this feature that enables the "ridiculously easy group forming" behavior that Shirky is rightly so interested in.
In such circumstances, leadership remains powerful but is ultimately more important in providing focal points for action than in providing a unifying ideology. So while to some, things like the Mozilla Download Day might look like marketing, I think the deeper phenomenon in play is that of focusing the force of a social movement into the effort to punch daylight into formerly closed markets.
What is it, after all, that we most want to open? the "we" implicated in the myriad networks spawned by the social or Open Web? Aren't we after the Open Society that is the promise not only of the ideal of democracy, but of market capitalism before it was hijacked and separated from its twin: democracy. It is not just the Web that is at stake in this struggle, but the web behind the web, the power of human connection beyond narrow institutions and organizations, beyond states and nations: a web of the People, unified by nothing more than the architecture of freedom.
All Comments
I did want to clarify the point you made about my "Leave Britney Alone-esque" rant... specifically: "that a major motivating factor for his rant was an effort to bring attention to his new consulting firm".
I mean, it's okay for folks to think what they want about the comments I made. But it's another thing to re-interpret the intent of my post. I think promoting my company was the last thing on my mind -- and in fact, I hesitated to post the thing in the first place out of concern for how it might come across.
Anyway, it's no big deal, and you don't have to believe me, but it's just laughable (to me at least!) that I would waste 50 minutes at 1am decrying what I felt was Mozilla's lack of direction to somehow promote my company. I mean, I spent 9 months working on Spread Firefox for free, and then I went on to help found Flock, which was built on the Mozilla platform... I was seriously concerned about Mozilla's potential ability to preserve the freedom of the Open Web if they didn't wake up and counter proprietary technologies like Silverlight and Air...!
So that's that. Otherwise, great post. ;)
The starfish of the Open Web movement mirrors that of other global social, economic and environmental justice movements. There is no central control, no unifying ideology; only a set of values and a complex, decentralized network of humans who hold those values and collaborate (sometimes explicitly, sometimes serendipitously) to solve practical problems of human need, usually with the intent (expressed or implicit) of dispersing pathological concentrations of power.
Taking these lessons and applying them here, I think that attempts by individuals to create an ideology out of this decentralized movement will fail. I also think it is unrealistic for believers to expect any one organization to take on a central role organizing a set of values, beliefs, standards, technologies, products and ideas as complex as those we could wrap up in the term the "Open Web".
I'm sympathetic to Chris' hopes and dreams for what Mozilla could be. But maybe we all need to take a step back, try to see the bigger pattern of what is emerging, and realize that there are many strategic points of influence in our movement(s).
Great post, I might be out of the loop, however it's the first time that I see someone specifically mention the fact that part of the success of this movement will come from the consumer power which will in the end beat out corporate infrastructure..in my opinion.
Having said this however, one issue I have always struggled with is the: techies vs non techies involvement...I lived this with the Linux debate/movement as well.
It seems everytime you want to get involved or help advance the movement or push the technology their is really not much you can do....because you are told you don't really "get it" ;-)
That just might be my experience with soe of the purists, but I believe it doesn't help advance the movement as a whole!
I am confidant it is getting better! And I agree that for this to go to the next level some form of leader organization will need to step forward.
Those questions in the last paragraph are great! As a mostly non-coder and homeschooler, I am always looking for places to participate and learn that are open to non-professionals and newbies. It is an effort for passionate techie geeks to Make sure that "Joe six-pack" has a legitimate way to participate in the movement and become a passionate believer in the open web, with the values and practices it promotes, but it is an effort well-spent. The discipline of bringing newbies along forces experts to ask and answer deep questions about what they are doing and why it matters.
Doing that is, of course, another community practice that the open web community is learning how to manage. Alison McKee wrote in Homeschooling Our Children, Unschooling Ourselves that, "we did not need to know everything, we simply had to have a desire to help one another learn together." Asking where we can push harder on this in the open web movement is the right question.
This is a great post. There are many things in it to praise. I particularly like that you chose the word "open" among many others you could have chosen.
I think they way that you call attention to the fact the the Open Web is a value or, to put it another way, an ideal, is HUGELY important. Lessig has tried for years to call to attention the fact FREEDOM is not something simply given, but that must be defended and struggled for.
I think the most critical point you make in your suggestion that people who value the Open Web are part of a movement is the the dynamics of power (and implicitly those of action) are different that from those of previous "mass" movements.
I know why you say, "This social movement is different in that, so far, it has been able to derive its power from a narrow set of people...", but I think you are a bit wrong about this. I think that the deliberate agents may be small in number, from hacktivists to the Mozillites, but that it is precisely the mass character of the collective action represented in things like your Mozilla download maps that indicate the social power these few have awakened/enabled.
I think this is more than a semantic point and I suspect it is something you already agree with. Your suspicion about this movement's tolerance (perhaps its requirement) of decentralization is dead on.
If I may make a suggestion, derived in part from a recent conversation with Mark Kuznicki: it occurs to me that one of the shifts we are seeing in the dynamics of social networks as online tools become more central to their organization and growth is the emergence of a type of social network based on connection rather than relationship. This means or may mean, that traditional social bonds like kinship, cultural values, political values, moral values give way to apparently more superficial forms of identification, like affinity, aesthetics, and the language and attitude of dissent. Its not the fact that these things are new per se, but that new technologies of connection make possible forms of collective action that do not require mass agreement on values as a precondition for action. It is precisely this feature that enables the "ridiculously easy group forming" behavior that Shirky is rightly so interested in.
In such circumstances, leadership remains powerful but is ultimately more important in providing focal points for action than in providing a unifying ideology. So while to some, things like the Mozilla Download Day might look like marketing, I think the deeper phenomenon in play is that of focusing the force of a social movement into the effort to punch daylight into formerly closed markets.
What is it, after all, that we most want to open? the "we" implicated in the myriad networks spawned by the social or Open Web? Aren't we after the Open Society that is the promise not only of the ideal of democracy, but of market capitalism before it was hijacked and separated from its twin: democracy. It is not just the Web that is at stake in this struggle, but the web behind the web, the power of human connection beyond narrow institutions and organizations, beyond states and nations: a web of the People, unified by nothing more than the architecture of freedom.