Week 2 assignment for Open Source Studio class, ITP, Fall 2018, Guillermo Montecinos
Human beings as social individuals are political individuals. We have built tribes, families, companies, countries and confederations of countries. We have built organizations that need base communities to function. And every organization we have built need an structure that allow the political process flow properly inside it, some of them structured and some unstructured.
Particularly, to me, the open source community is more a community than a formal organization, composed by enthusiasts who work together -or separated- in a common environment toward a diversity of goals. In this perspective, the open source community looks like a decentralized structure in which participants make horizontal exchanges of information.
But instead of being a decentralized structure, open source community is the farthest to an apolitical organization, actually is one of the most politically active structures I can see nowadays within my social networks. It is -probably- because decentralization itself raises an idea of anarchism in which agents act and govern their acts independently of the rest of the group, but meeting a previously engaged code of conduct -sometimes de facto and sometimes written- that allow decision making in a fruitful and sustainable way.
On the other hand, open source seeks to develop software tools that are unhidden to the users, which source code can be reached and sometimes modified. This places the community in a provocative position toward capitalism itself, because open source software is commonly free which attempts to dispute the exclusive-use-under-paid-licence status that great companies pursue in order to make their profit sustainable in time. This is what Processing pursues when declaring its software as an alternative to payed image processing tools.
This, in a time of apolitical-ish declarations is a powerful movement, an energetic claim of activism in the digital age, where internet is one space of many that must be disputed to capitalism's mechanism in order to make human race great again.