informage

I’m not big into television – in fact these days I never watch it. Except that is for certain specific shows – almost always on DVD or via BitTorrent – that get recommended to me as a notch above average. Recently one such show has been 24 (yup I caught on rather late). The recommendation came, rather insistently, from my friend Callan, as did the first couple of seasons worth of shows. If you haven’t seen 24 – and you have any kind of appreciation for visual entertainment – watch it. It is superb, and that’s all I’m saying on that.

More recently the rather unlikely candidate of the “re-imagining” of cheesy 70s space opera Battlestar Galactica has hit my radar. I hardly watched the original, but I had some toys and a book and loved the concept. This makes me the perfect viewer of what is seen as a travesty by the dyed-in-the-wool deep-nerd fans of “the original series” (TOSsers in online lingo). The new series takes the basic premise of the original, keeps the characters with the odd gender and ethnicity alteration to add spice, and basically retells the story as though it really happened rather than throwing out yet another piece of hammy space theatrics (*cough* any of the Star Treks *cough*)

The new Battlestar Galactica is to TV sci-fi what 24 is to TV crime thrillers. It has a gimmick (remake of a cult show, rather than the real-time of 24), it has the peerless Edward James Olmos (Bladerunner) where 24 has Kiefer, it has the gritty verité cinematography, it has the “no-one is quite who they seem” mystery appeal, it has top-class acting and character development, and it has the edgy minute-by-minute sense of crisis. In essence both shows manage the conjuring trick of combining a raw down-to-earth documentary feel with epic context and plot. Of course TV crime thrillers have always been a bit better than TV sci-fi, and indeed Battlestar Galactica isn’t quite as good as 24. However it’s the best sci-fi series I’ve ever seen, and I’ve pretty much watched them all. Long live Galactica!

I was brought up by a Feminist and a Marxist. This has its good and its bad sides. The good is that I was embued with a deep sense of equality and humanity and a strong critical sensibility. The bad is that it sowed within me a rejection of humans, of humanity, because I was brought up to believe that humans are bad. More specifically I was brought up to believe that men and capitalists are bad, but being a young man living in a capitalist society I interpreted this rather broadly.

When I was around 21 years old, after having been politically active in quite a negative way for some years, I had an epiphany about this. This wasn’t sudden; it took place over the course of several years and arose out of a whole range of influences. The epiphany was this: humanity is wonderful.

This isn’t a denial that the horrors and injustices I see around me are evidence of systems that contradict life. It’s a recognition that right now, with this particular set of systems, is where humanity has got to so far. If I reject that I alienate myself both personally and societally from that which I want to improve and love, humanity itself.

It comes back to something that I heard during the pre-program for this year’s Pioneers of Change summer school: “If you want to change a system, you have to be loyal to that system, you have to believe in it”. If I wish to change human systems I have to believe and trust in humanity and human systems – the systems of the past *and* the systems of the present. And sometimes I find that very hard to do.

The introductory motto on the Pioneers of Change webpage is “A new type of action rooted in a new way of thinking”. Of course what we put forward as a network isn’t really “new”, isn’t entirely detached from the past with no relationship to it, and yet nor is it exactly the same as anything from the past.

The issues that we face as human beings today are radically different from those faced by peoples of the past. I believe that we can learn from their wisdom, some of which has been forgotten, and we can also learn from today’s wisdom, and from all this wisdom we can synthesise something new and revolutionary.

“I am because we are” is the most elegant translation I’ve heard of the Nguni word “Ubuntu”, where Nguni is the collective name for a group of Southern Africa languages including Xhosa and Zulu. It’s a beautiful sentiment, sometimes also translated as “humanity to others”, with implications that extend much further. It lies behind much that is deeply appealing about African culture. It’s also the name of a new version of Linux.

Ubuntu Linux is arch-lucky-geek-that-we’d-all-like-to-be Mark Shuttleworth’s new GNU/Linux distribution. (Actually there’s a lot of Free Software luminaries behind it, but Mark was the instigator). I’ve had some near-misses where I’ve got to know and collaborate with people who work with Mark, but I’ve actually never met the guy. This is probably A Good Thing as I’d have to resist the envy-driven urge to let out a primal yell and scratch out his eyes!

Anyway I spent a couple of hours yesterday installing and getting to grips with Ubuntu, and it *rocks*. It’s the first version of GNU/Linux that I’ve tried where I’d really feel comfortable giving it to any reasonably competent computer user as a replacement for either Windows or Mac OS. It’s all in the details, and these guys have put a lot of thought and energy into making a distribution that gives you just one application for each task, and integrated them into a nice clean computing environment. I’d wager that most Windows user would quickly feel more comfortable using this than they ever did using a Microsoft OS.

In fact it’s so good that I think I can forgive Mark all his ridiculous good fortune and offer him a hefty pat on the back for bringing together all this goodness in one package (the name, the philosophy, the software – even the pseudo-erotic imagery).

Crikey – a 6 metre long granny-eating shark is on the hunt here in Cape Town. And who’s to say it’s just after grannies? Well I think that puts pay to any ideas about taking up surfing again. Or anything else involving any kind of proximity to ocean water for that matter. I can’t help but think that the increase in chumping to attract sharks for “cage dive experiences” is making matters worse – shark attacks have increased significantly in the last few years – despite some lame protestations I’ve heard that it couldn’t possible be connected. Yeah, right.

Talking of behemoths, our local brewery – no less than the largest in the world after swallowing those notable Wisconsin brewers whole – seem to have a rather nasty grudge against Justin. I don’t know him that well, but he seems like a decent fun guy and certainly doesn’t deserve this for having a rather clever light-hearted poke at a completely legitimate target.

Now I am not a black chopper guy, apart from anything else I think that there’s enough bad crap out there that’s openly admitted without distracting our attention with tenuous stories.

However, the more articles like this one on commondreams.org (amongst other sources) that I read, the more I wonder exactly how “free and fair” this little election the other day was.

Reserving judgement right now, but I’m keeping an eye on this story. (2004-11-08)

UPDATE: Simon responded with a link to a Salon article that concludes “The system is clearly broken. But there is no evidence that Bush won because of voter fraud.” I don’t really argue with that, although the suspicious voice inside me wonders what percentage of actual irregularities the evidence covers. As I said, I’m not a black chopper type, so I’ll leave it at that for now.

Whether there was any deliberate wrong-doing, or just smatterings of incompetence and error, it makes the arrogant US attitude that they don’t need foreign observers at their elections look even stupider than it did anyway – see for example this BBC article. (2004-11-11)

(by the way, Simon complained that comments are no more here. Well, I got bored of cleaning up spam. Anyone is welcome to email me comments which I will post verbatim if requested to – for those that don’t know my email address you’ll have to email sean@informage.net and look carefully at the bounce. Sorry about the hoops, but that’s the way its gonna be).

Marianne Böjer, one of my Pioneers of Change colleagues, asked me to write a comment on her article ‘Changing the Game’ (429kb PDF file).

The idea of ‘Changing the Game’ is that we live in systems governed by old games played according to old rules, ‘finite’ games involving winners and losers. In Pioneers of Change we believe that we can change the rules of the game, that we can instead play win-win ‘infinite’ games. My comment considers free software to be one of these new games.

I am passionate about free software, also called ‘open source’ (the ‘free’ refers to freedom rather than lack of cost). Through the Changing the Game workshop and through this article I’ve realised that free software is a new game played by different rules. The free software movement is all about giving users the freedom to modify and redistribute at will the software they rely upon. This runs contrary to the old rules of the ‘proprietary software’ game which were about keeping the means by which software can be modified (the source code) secret. The old game is about playing to win, about having my code triumph over competing code, and when I’m playing to win it makes no sense to give away my secrets.

Free software is an infinite, or win-win, game. The global community of coders collaborate to produce the best software we can. Within this infinite game there can be finite sub-games, just like Mille and Anthony’s game of sustainable living. I can start a new project that tackles a problem differently to an existing project and compete with it for mind share (I was involved in one project whilst it underwent a revolutionary design shift through exactly this process). If my approach is better then others will move over to my project, and the developers of the old project will be free to join in. If my approach doesn’t work then I can still participate in the old project. Through this kind of ‘collaborative competition’ the conditions for innovation are created. New ideas can compete with old ideas and every player can draw upon the work of every other.

The players of the old game of proprietary software don’t always understand why I play this new game. I have been asked by programmers I used to work with: “Why would you give your code away? Why would I when that makes me more likely to lose out?”. If I ask them in return “Why would you keep your code secret?” they respond “because that’s how I make money” – in other words because those are the rules of the game. The fact that I have successfully earned a living through my participation in free software won’t necessarily convince them. I’ve even had a conversation with a potential business partner where he expressed great enthusiasm for free software, particularly for the benefits we could glean by making use of it, and then turned around and said “but of course we must keep our own code proprietary, otherwise how shall make any money?”

Sometimes just playing the game has been its own reward. During the time I did my most intense free software work I had the email signature ‘humani sum: nihil a me alienum puto’, a well-known Latin quotation that roughly translates as ‘I am a human, nothing human is alien to me’. A conversation on our email list that began as a request for explanation ended with me being given translations of the same statement in about ten different languages – from French, German and Spanish to Czech and Polish – representing the diversity of the community’s members. It was a great pleasure to rotate my signature through all these languages knowing that I’d been provided with each translation by a distant colleague.

Of course this new game is not without challenges. Within the rules of the old game the way in which my work as a coder earned me a living was well established: I kept my code secret and sold access to it. In the new game we are still experimenting with different survival strategies. I make money by doing custom modifications of free software and following up with support. Some make money by selling CDs and books and some are sponsored by institutions or companies.

One of the biggest challenges is from those, like my potential business partner above, who believe they embrace the new game but come to it with the old rules. They don’t see the paradigm shift needed to play the new game, and so they think that they should still keep some code secret or they want to restrict the participants in the game (to just non-profits say). This creates legal confusions that threaten to undermine our new game. Part of playing the new game is helping myself and others to clearly see the differences between the games and their rules – and it is precisely in causing me to conceptualise in terms of games and rules that this article has hit its mark.

Indymedia have frequently clashed with the authorities, it’s an inevitable consequence of what they do. Recently they had two servers seized in London and no-one will tell them why or even who they were seized for. The FBI was responsible for the seizing but they’re not talking, the UK government won’t say if they even knew about it. The whole thing is creepy as all get out.

Salon have a decent article about the seizure which also acts as a mini-history of Indymedia’s legal battles (subscription or daypass required). The perenially useful wikipedia has an informative entry and of course there’s Indymedia themselves.

I wasn’t at any point convinced that Kerry was going to be anything particularly inspiring, except in being “not Bush” and the slight difference in tone that would bring. Historically Democratic administrations have been at least as belligerent in their foreign policy, if not more, than Republican administrations, and as a non-US citizen this has to be my primary area of concern. (I recognise that for US citizens the difference may well have been less superficial).

I believe that there is a fairly consistent belief amongst those I regard as peers that the change we are looking for is on a much more profound level than the change from Republican to Democrat, from Bush to Kerry. A US ruling elite that believes it has the right to violently impose its will on both its own citizens and the citizens of the world is unacceptable to me. Unacceptable whether the figurehead appears to be an incompetent monkey or a sophisticated technocrat.

This article I regard as relevant because it highlights that a leader like Bush is a consequence of the systemic pressures on the politics that governs us. I don’t believe too much blame can be laid at the hands of the people that elected him when their cultural context demands that they judge individuals as either worthy or unworthy of the mantle ‘president’ on very superficial criteria. When I try and ‘redirect’ to the kind of assessments the average middle American is making, I can see why they vote Bush. They know who he is, they understand him, they are familar with him.

So, although there is a feeling of defeat and depression around what seems a reactionary election result, I don’t believe and don’t feel that we should be too demoralised in the struggles and projects we are dealing with day-to-day. I believe they have the same chances of success as they had a week ago, and that those chances are high.