The Rise of Open Source, Network-Based Movements

national | miscellaneous | news report Wednesday February 19, 2003 12:23 by Graham Caswell - Various caswell at indigo dot ie

Growing Another World

The vast, coordinated protests that occurred worldwide last Saturday were just the latest manifestation of the power of the loose, non-hierarchial, evolutionary movements that have been enabled by the development of the Internet. And this fundamental social change is just beginning.

Last Saturday between twelve and twenty million people around the world took to the streets to protest the rush to war with Iraq. While the millions marching in major cities received most media attention, there were also protests in thousands of smaller cities, towns and villages world-wide. Letterkenny saw 15 marching, 600 demonstrated on the Shetland Islands and even McMurdo Station in Antarctica saw 50 people voicing their opposition to war. While the numbers of people involved in the global demonstrations will never be fully known, what is clear is that these were the largest co-ordinated protests in human history.

Yet the question of how these demonstrations came about has been conspicuously absent from discussion of this momentous event. What group is capable of organising such a co-ordinated human effort on such a vast scale? How can so many people from so many backgrounds in so many places work together in such a focused way towards a common goal? And why were politicians, media analysts and even the local organisers themselves so surprised at the vast scale of the protests? What's going on here?

The nature of the group that called last Saturday's global demonstrations gives an indication of the forces at work. The European Social Forum (ESF), a meeting of over 60,000 trade unionists, peace campaigners, socialists, environmentalists and other activists held in Florence, Italy last November, is one of the new, network-based movements that are revolutionising civil society but which barely appear on the radar of conventional media and political discussion. These movements are non-hierarchical, processed-orientated and evolutionary and share a common distrust of large-scale corporations and establishment economic ideology and thinking. They also share a common reliance on the revolutionary communicative dynamics of the Internet for their existence and explosive growth.

Consider the following:

-The World Social Forum (WSF), of which the European Social Forum (ESF) is an offshoot, was first held in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 2001 to shadow the World Economic Forum of world business and political leaders held annually in Davos, Switzerland. It represents a vast variety of non-governmental organisations and groups and presents an alternative to the neo-liberal economic thinking that so many blame for environmental destruction and social inequality. In only two years regional, national and local social forums have blossomed around the world (plans for an Irish Social Forum are underway). Social forums provide an 'open space' for communication, sharing, networking and co-ordinating among diverse groups and individuals working towards environmental sustainability and social justice.

-Indymedia, the non-commercial volunteer media movement that relies mostly on the Internet for publication, now has 108 national and local Independent Media Centres around the world and is growing rapidly. By several measures Indymedia is already the world's largest news organisation. Yet, as a non-commercial, non-hierarchical, evolutionary 'movement' that rejects advertising and allows anybody to publish, it is too different from Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation or the BBC to be understood in the same way. And so while many mainstream journalists use it and even participate in it, Indymedia rarely makes the news itself.

-Linux and the Open Source software movement is making growing inroads into the corporate software industry. Highly skilled but mostly unpaid programmers develop and enhance a vast and growing collection of software motivated not by money but by idealism and a distrust of the corporate profit motive. They co-ordinate and disseminate their work via the Internet.

-The 'anti-globalisation movement', the diverse collection of protestors that have gathered at almost every significant international economic or political meeting since the pivotal Seattle World Trade Organisation protests of November 1999, continues despite the chill following the September 11th attacks. These events highlight issues often ignored by world leaders and are almost completely organised and co-ordinated via the Internet.

These are the largest and most visible of the network-based movements but are not the only ones. From virally-circulated emails to online petitions and the campaign to make 'A Nation Once Again' the world's favourite song, the huge and growing variety of Internet-mediated campaigns only rarely, if ever, break into the awareness of mainstream media.

An important common denominator is that network-based movements largely operate outside of the monetary economy, and so are invisible to many conventional measurements of size and impact. For example, Indymedia does not accept advertising and does not depend on sales and so it is not seen as competing with conventional media. Music freely distributed online does not show up in the sales-based charts, and so is largely ignored by the music press. The incessant growth of open source software is not reflected in any stock market valuation and its qualities are not promoted in any advertisement. Because money is not a major part of these movements they tend to be underestimated. Yet they have very real effects.

In millions upon millions of daily creative acts and informational transactions, the online community by-pass conventional media and economics to create what is almost a parallel world. It's not an exact representation of the real world, but then neither is the conventional media and economy. It's only when the effects of promotion and discussion and campaigning in this parallel world result in something unprecedented, as it did last Saturday, that the established, comfortable, commercially-dependent media and political establishment take notice. And even then only briefly.

The Internet can be called a 'meta-medium'. It IS text, but it is more than text. It IS radio, but it is more than radio. It IS television, but more than television. It in fact encompasses all electronic media and more. While bandwidth restrictions constrain the possibilities of the Internet, it is already possible to see an end point in which all electronic content forms are immediately publishable by anyone and accessible to everyone, always and everywhere. One hundred years from now it may be difficult to think of the telephone, the fax machine, the radio and the television as separate technologies. Instead these isolated and immature media may be seen as mere forerunners of the development of the Internet and the centralised, controlling informational bottlenecks that accompanied them will be anachronisms.

Thanks to only a few decades of mass media, human perspective has become homogenised to a greater extent than ever before, a homogenisation that is reflected in sport, in culture, in politics and in the economy. But by undermining and subverting this 'official view' of how things are, the Internet and the movements that grow from it are fundamentally changing the way in which we see the world, and thus are changing the world itself. The medium is indeed the message and just because the stock market drastically and myopically misunderstood the meaning of the Internet does not mean that it is anything less than revolutionary.

Another world is not only possible -its happening.