A New Global Technology

Marshall McLuhan, media theorist responsible for coining the term “global village,” noted the effects triggered by the distribution of radios to Algerians in the late 1950s. The Voice of Fighting Algeria radio show became an instrumental force in mobilizing the Algerian people against French occupation and turned a technology that was originally used as a virtual arm of the occupying power into a tool that unified a resistance movement. Half a century later there is a battle going on for control of a new rapidly evolved global communications system, in particular what has come to be known as the Internet. Questions abound over who should own, police, limit, access or create not only the content of the Internet, but also its underlying structure, its nodes and synapses of wire or electromagnetic spectrum, its licensing apparatus and its accompanying global technology and ownership standards.

This may at first appear to be a technical issue with limited cultural significance, but an examination of how such questions were resolved in past technological evolutions, and how the sciences, arts and even basic freedoms of interpersonal communication are being effected today yields a host of socio-cultural issues which deserve significant dialogue. Without a rapid re-evaluation of the effects of private enterprise, intellectual property and trade liberalization on this developing global communications systems there is a risk that freedom of thought, access to often life-saving information and the ability to freely build upon past human discoveries will simply be commodified and sold as products in a global information market. This paper is an attempt to explore the geo-political and cultural implications of a global battle being fought in court rooms, internet bulletin boards, street protests, trade negotiations and artists studios over the relationship between ownership and information.

Free Software

There is an ideological battle being fought in the world of communication technologies which has exploded out of its technical closet into the wider cultural, societal, scientific and philosophical undercurrents of 21st Century thought. On a simplistic level, this struggle is over computer software and whether it is something to be owned or shared. On a more abstract plane it is a struggle for the freedom to participate in the technological developments of our time and to understand their significance. Free Software, along with its less radical counterpart Open Source Software, is a flourishing collection of collaboratively developed, freely editable and accessible computer code that has been developed since the birth of computing by people who see programming as their art. These programmers are determined to secure their freedom to change, improve, learn from, teach with and freely share the substance of their creative work. Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) is a combination of computing without the commercialism, gift culture in the high-tech arena and alternative development models brought to life by self-proclaimed “geeks” who occupy disparate nodes of a global computer network.

Under the FOSS model of software development, a computer program can be created by a group of volunteers, often spread across the globe and political spectrum, whose common interests are in creating a piece of digital code that can be used and edited by its creators and shared with the world at large upon completion. The vast majority of FOSS programmers are fundamentally opposed to the traditional applications of intellectual property to software for the simple reason they limit the ability to tinker with, or “hack” the code. Contrary to the popularized media representation, “hackers” are simply people who thoroughly enjoy programming computers and playing with the possibilities made available by computing.