The early internet was built by enthusiasts on ideals of freedom, equality and openness. Thanks to them, Open Source produced a profusion of products: content-management systems, media engines, messengers and much else.
ForkLog has repeatedly discussed the practical importance of open code in pieces about copyleft and open source. Today Anatoly Kaplan suggests considering why it matters to return to the humanist values of the early internet in the face of the “corporate Antichrist” and a crisis of the global financial system.
Liberating money, losing data
The spread of the internet set in motion a global liberation of information. Bitcoin, in turn, challenged central banks’ monopoly on issuing money. Now anyone with basic technical literacy and a modest budget can create their own digital currency and the infrastructure to use it.
But as money was being freed, information was rapidly monopolised by the operators of large media systems, most owned by tech giants. Today the internet user is not only constrained in their ability to control their data; they often do not even understand what is happening, while every action on a social network makes a corporation richer and, as a rule, leaves the user less free.
At first there were merely certain restrictions to enforce platform rules, which seemed reasonable. Then users gradually lost the ability to choose the content they would receive in social networks, thanks to recommendation systems with a decidedly double nature. Later they were denied the right to watch or not watch particular advertising, again on the basis of recommendations.
This is predictably evolving towards full verification with documents, photos and biometrics. A striking example is the World project: disclose your identity, hand over your biometric data and receive a neat badge or tick confirming that you are a real person. As a bonus, you are tossed a digital coin.
The corporation, however, gets something more: your time, attention, content, data and money for paid platform services. That is how a digital caste society is built. Ironically, leading tech visionaries, venture capitalists and intellectuals have reinvented one of the least efficient social systems, in which by definition there can be neither freedom nor equality—and thus no future.
As the process of data liberation began to devour itself, it is reasonable to expect something similar with blockchain systems, cryptocurrencies and new digital money. It already seems to be happening via regulation, the launch of ETFs, and scam tokens from a nuclear power’s president and his “libertarian” counterpart.
A war to the last human
Corporations are moving towards total digitisation and subsequent “cloning” of users. The more data you have on different real people, the more clones and variants you can create. It recalls the blockchain game CryptoKitties, where you can breed cats to obtain new NFTs—only here the cats are living people.
Thanks to AI-like systems such clones will become practically autonomous agents, able to participate fully in the economic cycles of digital reality. And humans will keep feeding these simulacra fresh data—on the rights of “smart” goods servicing “smart” products.
And if you think the corporate Antichrist has saved you a warm spot in that bright future, we have bad news.
A new proletariat and its revolution
Modern society is primed for a global revolution through the expropriation of the gains of technical progress. The crucial factor is not only source code but also the basic architecture of processors and microchips. Without fully liberating every production technology, the caste system of the digital era cannot be overcome.
The new proletariat has nothing to lose but its data. The only thing restraining the revolution is the global financial system, in decline and disintegration. The process is gradual, but it cannot last for ever.
The revolution will begin as soon as the financial system built on petrodollars and perpetual war collapses, triggering a string of dramatic events. Among them will be failures in global server infrastructure and, in some places, severe limits on access to the open network. On how preparations for internet localisation are proceeding in different parts of the world, see here, here and here.
Something more important will happen, too. Billions will lose their familiar roles, pause their participation in economic processes, look up from their smartphone screens and ask a fundamental question: who am I? Old meanings and aims will vanish. At the same time there will be a huge demand for a qualitatively new vision of the future.
Your personal Antichrist
What will corporations offer society? Likely the same as the biblical Antichrist: safety and comfort in exchange for the remnants of your soul. And this will be a very advanced Antichrist, oriented towards the personalisation of user experience through AI systems controlled by corporations.
What can society offer as an alternative? Expropriating the fruits of progress: socialising technologies for manufacturing processors and microchips, fully disclosing the code of AI systems and related software.
Of course, none of this is a panacea capable of solving accumulated social, historical and economic contradictions. It is, above all, a foundation on which to posit fundamentally alternative models of the future.
Corporate transhumanists and singularitarians paint alluring visions in which the post-human has overcome nature and lives in a utopia served by machines. Look closely and it is elitist isolationism, with no real conversation about the social system, education or the political process of tomorrow. Peter Thiel and his “neoreactionary” friends, it seems, sincerely believe they will turn into magical half-robots and fly to Mars to have coffee and play golf with a scammer-president and his thieving entourage.
In fact, the core narrative of corporate transhumanists continues the trajectory set by corporations: gradually dispensing with people as they become less necessary. They think of themselves as at least superhumans, if not modern gods.
Rethinking how we interact with technology
An alternative ideological platform could be the concept of technological mindfulness, proposed in 2021 as follows:
“I am not my smartphone or my social networks.
I am not my personal data.
These are merely masks for my mind in different worlds.
Technologies are tools for my mind, helping it carry me from one reality to another.
I exist beyond technologies and the mind.
I am the centre of absolute will.
I determine what is my reality at this moment.
This world is entirely virtual—so I can create and define my worlds using technologies and the mind.
But I am not the mind and not the technologies. I exist beyond the mind and technologies.”
In 2023 ForkLog examined this concept in the context of gamifying the post-capitalist economy. Its idea is to rethink principles of interaction with technologies in the digital era so as to minimise potential harm from liberating code and machines.
Releasing source code and production technologies, given a stable moral and ethical base, would let humanity not only defeat the corporate Antichrist and escape digital slavery, but also make the leap into a qualitatively different reality, overcoming post-capitalist depression.
Sabotage: do nothing and help open source
Open source is a way of thinking in which human civilisation is seen as a single whole with shared interests. That is what distinguishes it from modern globalism, where the world is one only so that hegemons can oppress others and call it a “good deal”.
Full disclosure of technologies for manufacturing processors and microchips does not mean anyone will be able to build their own machines. Beyond knowledge, specialists and production infrastructure are needed. But secrecy creates monopoly and imbalance in civilisation’s development. Expropriating the gains of technological progress demands a systemic approach.
It is not only about direct action, but also about inaction, which remains one of the few ways to protest effectively and non-violently. Non-doing, proposed in a more abstract context by a project such as doNONdo, is an effective weapon against the corporate Antichrist who has seized power in the boardrooms. Inaction is a refusal to participate in the socio-economic system built by corporations.
Put your gadgets aside and stop spending time on the corporate Antichrist’s platforms, and you no longer provide them with data; you stop serving them. That is the beginning of liberation—inaction as a tool for refusing to take part in the final enslavement of humans and their minds.