Don't get mad, get political
John Naughton Sunday July 13, 2003 The Observer
Here's the unpalatable truth: software has become political. It's unpalatable because most engineers detest politics as the epitome of the hypocrisy and muddle they sought to escape by choosing a trade that values consistency and logic. But it was inevitable that the two worlds would intersect as soon as the web became a mass medium. Control of information has always been a tool of regimes, and anything that threatens to loosen that grip will be resisted.
Note that this isn't just about content. Some of the content published on the web - whether in the form of subversive information, political discourse or entertainment - does attract condemnation, prosecution, suppression or worse. Content certainly has a political dimension.
But content isn't software, so why is that political? Answer: because software determines the architecture of cyberspace, and thus determines what you can do with and in the space. For example, the software facilitates anonymity and free innovation. The first gives us unparalleled freedom of expression - and spam; the second enables disruptive innovations such as instant messaging, streaming media, file-swapping and internet telephony - all of which threaten the established order.
The establishment responds by running to the courts, which is why there are three Bills about spam doing the rounds of the US Congress - and why there exists a statute that grossly restricts freedoms to write certain kinds of software. This is politics with both small and large Ps.
Because geeks don't like politics, they tend to avoid it. Big mistake. The lesson of recent history is that if you don't want the established order to nobble legislators and enact daft, repressive or biased laws, then you have to mix it with the politicos. The software community needs to start thinking like the environmental movement, and develop some of the same political adroitness.
It also needs to start using its technical skills. Two heartening examples have just come to light. The first is Ed Felten's response to the US Supreme Court ruling that publicly-funded libraries must use filtering software to control users' access to the net. The problem is that commercial filtering software is opaque and unaccountable - the implicit values which determine what's blocked are secret and the companies are very aggressive about not disclosing them. Why not then, says Ed, write some open-source software that librarians can use? That way, they can comply with the law, but in a way that enables them to make professional judgements about the filtering to be applied.
The other initiative comes from the MIT Media Lab. It's called 'Government Information Awareness' and is based on a simple proposition: if governments now feel entitled to keep us under cyber-surveillance, why not use software tools to keep them under surveillance too? The MIT folks are building a system which will collate all publicly available information about all public officials in the US.
We could do the same for the UK. Imagine a site that would automatically collate information about MPs' financial interests, voting behaviour, Commons attendance, speeches, publications, campaign literature, friends, attentiveness to constituents etc and make it available on the web? Later we could extend it to cover corporate bosses and the quangocracy.
Our rulers might then begin to realise that accountability is a two-way street.
john.naughton at observer.co.uk
==================================== To this day, no one has come up with a set of rules for originality. There aren't any. [Les Paul]