Because, of course, when software is a product, then the network consists of a lot of places where products hide themselves, protect themselves, secure the benefit of their owners rather than the benefit of their users. Software begins to do things like enabling other people to make money at the expense of its own users. For example, if you have security problems, you create a security industry to cover the holes you don’t actually patch, right? You create an opportunity if you create spam by having poorly designed mail readers, for telecommunications companies to make large profits selling bandwidth wholesale to spammers. And some large telecommunications providers will then make a lot of money selling wholesale bandwidth to spammers and everybody will regard it as a regrettable institution, but one that they certainly wouldn’t want to do anything to interrupt the profitability of, and so on. In other words, low quality and poor service to the user become profit centers to somebody else. And profit centers had a vast level of success.
This would be only bad news to business, were it not for the fact that the net came to contain all those other products that we depend on for our sense of community. Music, remember, when we last saw it, was being trapped in a can. Music was scratches on a vinyl surface, music was analogue data etched on physical objects that allowed arbitrage of the need for community, but then digitization happened to music.
At this moment an astonishing thing happened. Music leapt off the CD. It ceased to be oxidized aluminum foil bumps inside a glassine sandwich, and became everybody’s music, again. A guy in Japan – actually an immense collective calling itself Akio Morita or Sony – put music inside your head, with headphones. That music became your music, the private soundtrack to your life. The idea that somebody else owned your music became increasingly difficult to understand. A generation which grew up only with portable music didn’t really grasp what people were talking about when they talked about who owned the record, much less the recording contract. And that was before it all went digital.
Now, there really was no physical substance left to music anymore, no thing, no object, no imprisonment, it was just people getting together and experiencing the sense of community around music. Somebody brought it, not necessarily in a violin case, maybe in an iPod, but everybody went back to sharing and you didn’t have to be in the same place. Music became a way that people at a distance could relate to one another without the intermediary of a product, or a radio with an advertisement in it, or a television set, or a music video. Just music.
And video started to come out of the can, too, leapt off the DVD. Why? Because a kid in Norway figured out how a DVD worked. I made a joke in a California courtroom about that kid’s lawsuit with the movie industries. And next thing I know, the kid in Norway has been arrested. His father had been arrested too. All their computers and cell phones had been taken away from them. The Norwegian Government, at the behest of the Disney Corporation, spent almost 3 years trying to make a crime out of understanding how DVDs worked. They didn’t quite get there. But that wasn’t Jon Johansen’s fault. He could’ve been a felon many times over by then, if it all had broken the other way.
Culture defended itself with law. Culture defended itself with the idea of property. Culture defended its right to be a product, and it’s slowly, slowly failing. Bruce Lehman, former Commissioner of the patent and trade mark office in United States and one of the authors of the Digital Millennium Copyrights Act, said five weeks ago at a conference in Canada that the DMCA had failed. That the Clinton administration’s policy of ensuring incumbency in the culture businesses, through the use of technical measures backed by law, had proven to be a failed experiment. “We are now entering”, Bruce Lehman, of all people, said, on tape, in Canada, “we are now entering”, he said, “the post copyright period for music.” I thought that was pretty nice, I said that in 1999. But I was glad that by 2007 that even Bruce Lehman agreed with me.
The post copyright period for music. So what is happening? The network is becoming ours, not theirs. The software that runs it belongs to all of us. Nobody exclusively controls it, nobody can tell us what to do with it. We made rules that allow us to share software. Everybody ignored us ’cause we were geeks and it didn’t count. But with that software that nobody could tell us how to use or what to do with, we did culture over. We did rip, mix, burn and then Mr. Jobs stole our rip, mix, burn but we didn’t care because it wasn’t our property. He was free to take it under the BSD license. He can also take the phrase, so he did, “rip, mix, burn”, he said. And everybody loved him and they loved his iPod; it’s OK with me. But the real effort was the effort to free the code. That’s what made all of that possible.
Google comes into existence. Well, we made that possible, too. Google without free software is unimaginable. The 21st century without Google is unimaginable. Hence, transitively and perfectly accurately, the 21st century is unimaginable without free software. We’d better understand that, because they’re beginning to and we should take credit. Credit is due to us, we made it happen. But with it comes a responsibility to understand what happens next.
We made the 21st century. We made it in the sense that we gave proof of its concepts and we produced running code that operates it. Here’s the proof of concept. In the 21st century, it’s not people who make things, it’s not factories who make things, it’s communities that makes things.
The fundamental unit of economic production in the 21st century is a community, consisting partly of what we call producers, and partly of what we call users, and partly of what we call students. That is to say, people who already make the thing, people who already use the thing, and people who would like to understand the thing better; those are the people who produce in the 21st century. Agility matters, modifiability matters, the ability to reduce costs by taking advantage of everybody else’s improvements matters. At the end of the day, making a thing your users can’t understand, can’t fix, can’t improve and therefore can’t fall in love with is not a good way to to be a manufacturer of anything. People who make stuff as simple as underwear and socks now want to have community about it. They want you to come to their website, they want you to read their blog, they want you to feel part of their company. Because in the end it’s community which produces value, not having the mills or the cotton or the workers, only.
So what we got, when we started to free the network, was proof of the concept that community is what makes, because we make by community and we produce the central raw material of the 21st century. So we gave the proof of concept – community is what makes value. And we produced running code. That’s to say, we produced an actual running example of how to generate more communities using our stuff. When I started working for Richard Stallman in 1993, there were probably 6 to 8 people in the United States and maybe 10 to 12 people in the world making a living out of free software. IBM’s investment in free software manufacture, promotion and distribution last year was measurably in excess of $2 billion, HP’s investment was measurably in excess of $700 million.
In other words, we’re beginning to talk about the possibility that people now think that there’s, you know, somewhere in the neighborhood of $80 billion or $100 billions a year around the world in an economy consisting of free software, a thing which had an economy embracing maybe 12 or 15 people a decade and a half ago. That’s a story about the 21st century economy. Those who pay attention to it tend to find it rivetingly interesting, because 9 order of magnitude growth over short periods of time is an unusual event in economic history. In fact, it’s an unusual event in the history of the universe.
This is an inflationary universe scenario in an odd kind, right? Wait a minute, what happened? A $100 billion came out of nowhere over the course of a decade and a half, without any substantial capital investments, based on the work of a few dozen people? Well that’s running code. Right? That’s the actual ability to produce results based on concept in verifiable fashion. Microsoft has gotten a little larger in the past 15 years too. But had Microsoft grown 9 orders of magnitude in the last 15 years it would extend past Pluto now and there would be no hope for the human race. We grew much faster than they did and the cosmos is damn lucky that it’s true. That’s what we proved with the running code. We also proved it’s really hard to own or control bitstreams if the people who make and use computers don’t want you to. We also proved that it’s really difficult to tell 12-year-olds what to do, in the global economy, and the 12-year-olds can do stuff in the global economy all by themselves if you let them. Those two were valuable lessons which came to have an important role in subsequent cultural history.
Alright, so now I’m ready to conclude. Here’s what happens. Free software frees the executable layer of the network. With the executable layer of the network, it produces devices that are controlled primarily by their users and which their users use to create community. The One Laptop Per Child laptop is a pretty good example of a kind of device that a free software might produce. It’s small, easy to operate, extremely rugged against the various ways in which human beings use machines, non-toxic, easy to take apart, simple enough for a child to take apart and understand, capable of being powered by nothing more than the pull of a string, human muscles, creating a communications network that can embrace a village or a continent. And what happens with that hardware? We begin to share pictures, music and video together. We begin to create the sense of being one. We create the sense that a child in Tierra del Fuego and a child in Norway and a child in Myanmar can be working simultaneously on something together. They can be shooting documentary film together. They can be making music together. They can be writing literature together. They can be making software together. We create a platform for community which replaces products with an actual sense of being together.
This could not actually happen so fully as to make industries go away, could it? Well, let me give an example. There was, after all, another collective at the opening of the 20th century. It was called Eastman Kodak. It produced a product called the Brownie camera, which made a thing called snapshot photographs. Snapshot photographs were a way for people to be together. And eventually, Kodak ceased to be a company which sold cameras primarily, and became primarily a company that sold memory. I don’t mean digital memory I mean your memory, the memory of the wonderful times you shared by taking pictures using Kodak film – analog memory. That was the razor blade, the razor was the camera, it was cheap, you gave it away. It was the memory that cost money, like the ink in an inkjet printer, oops, I shouldn’t have said that. So the Kodak company went through the whole long history of photography and then fell off a cliff when it went digital. No more complex analog chemical memory, thank you very much, we have silicon.
And Flickr became bigger than Kodak. But Flickr doesn’t actually do anything with pictures. Flickr simply permits human beings to interact with one another around pictures. Flickr, in other words, provides the service of creating community. People provide the pictures. Now let’s talk about the thing called YouTube. Well, I haven’t anything to say about YouTube because YouTube is just Flickr with moving photographs, that is to say, human beings relating to one another through video which human beings provide, but it’s not the video which is the product, it’s the community.
So, throughout the entire network, what happens at the opening of the 21st century is a system of staged collisions, like dominoes falling, in which, outwards from this executable zone of free software in the network, cultural ownership patterns fall. And cultural patterns of the resurrection of community through services provided in the network by software come to replace them. Google, Flickr, YouTube, Reddit, Slashdot, Digg. And we begin to constitute the new cultural landmarks of the 21st century. They are services provided by free software, whose goal it is to enable community which produces more content, more free software, more new ways of relating to one another through the network using the very same technologies. In other words, the mill that ground salt in the 20th century, the structure that produced products, one after the other, is now running backwards. It is eating products and producing services that enable community.
This is good news. This is a happy event. This is nice for almost everybody, unless your middle name is “capitalism”, this is exactly what you have been hoping for, for the longest time. But there are a few incumbents left, right? There are a few disapproving souls. They consist of Microsoft and Disney and Verizon and Deutsche Telekom and even Rupert Murdoch or two, or three, or four. However many Rupert Murdochs there may be. In other words, the people who benefited from the structure that was the product and proprietary culture. Oh, and then there are some governments that benefit too from unfreedom of culture. They too manufacture products: consent, obedience, war, bombs. They get those products by the creation of anti-community, by the construction of difference, by the announcement of the extinction at the boundary between self and other. They are troubled deeply by the freedom that produces this wash across borders, that eliminates the lines among legislators, that moves from government to people the power to agree or disagree.
The most powerful intelligence service on Earth in 2020 will not be the KGB, and it won’t be the CIA, and it won’t work for the Chinese government except to the extent that Google already works for the Chinese government, because the most powerful intelligence service in 2020 will be Google. And we’re going to have to deal with that. Not necessarily in a hostile way, we all love them to death and everyday we use them. But we are going to have to ask what it means, that we succeeded in turning products into services but we succeeded to the extent that those services became part of our identity. That our very way of constructing ourselves is now embedded in a net made by free software. There isn’t any end of history, you understand. I have no Hegelian point to offer you. I am not leaving us a synthesis in a happy resolution of all things. The end of proprietary culture is in sight. Free software is an engine that makes it happen. But free software is one aspect of the long struggle for human freedom. Not a very powerful aspect in the history of the struggle for freedom, because it only arose yesterday. When the long history of the struggle for freedom in our lifetimes is written, after we are gone, free software may seem a little bit important, as it was for a few crucial years at the end of the 20th century, when free software enabled the transformation of society that moved us into what became the 21st century’s crucial stage.
But we still have more to worry about. A great deal more. Because, after all, free software is just software trying to assist freedom. And freedom is still a contested subject. Freedom is still an issue, freedom is still a concern, freedom still has enemies. The triumph for free software – I’ll give you very good odds, that’s nearly a certainty. The triumph for freedom? It’s still too soon to tell.
Thank you very much.
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