Setting Fire to Hollywood's Plans for the Net: The GeekPAC Story

The work of thought is one of
the most ancient and useful activities of humankind. To generate
thought is to create life, liveliness, community. Consensus isn't
important. What's important is how the generative power of our
thought makes life vivid and burns out the dead brush, dead
thoughts, dead institutions. - Michael Ventura
Technology trends start with
technologists - Marc AndreessenSimple, clear purpose and principles give rise to
complex and intelligent behavior. Complex rules and regulations
give rise to simple and stupid behavior. - Dee
HockBack when I made my living as a marketing iconoclast, I
filtered out potentially dull clients by sharing this rather
aggressive marketing logic: <il>

• markets are conversations; and
• conversation is fire. Therefore,
• marketing is arson.

Premise #1 later became the first thesis of
The Cluetrain
Manifesto, which ended up exemplifying #2 and #3.
Ironically, little that I did in marketing ever had the same
effect--and I did it, in one form or another, for 27 years. In
fact, the most effective advice I ever gave as a marketer was to
one of my last clients: Borland. "Support Linux," I said.That was in early '99. Not coincidentally, that was also when
I took my current job with Linux Journal, and
also started working on Cluetrain with Rick
Levine, Chris Locke and David Weinberger. Both moves marked my
return to full-time journalism, a career I had left in 1972. Now
I've been at it longer at the back end of my career than I was at
the front. I also seem to be having a bit more luck setting
fires.Which brings us to GeekPAC.The project was launched by Jeff Gerhardt, host of
The Linux Show,
where I'm a weekly regular. Jeff was inspired by an incendiary
suggestion I made in the
March
7, 2002 issue of SuitWatch, where I ranted about
high-profile lobbying efforts by Disney CEO
Michael
Eisner and MPAA chief
Jack Valenti, and
called for some bold action:Let's be clear about what's going on here. None of Eisner and
Valenti's rhetoric is native to the natural interplay between
Supply and Demand. In fact, the very nature of that interplay is
anathema to people like these, who are accustomed to a world in
which Supply tells Demand what it wants, what it will pay and how
it will get whatever Supply decides it will have.The Net threatens that system by putting it in the middle of
a real marketplace where Demand has just as much power as Supply,
and everybody involved is exactly one click from everybody
else.So the real war here is not between a few producers and its
billions of "consumers". It's between two completely different
visions of the Net itself. One sees it as a
medium--a plumbing system for pumping content
from producers to consumers, controlled top to bottom by suppliers.
The other sees it as a place where people and
companies meet to make culture, do business and share stuff that
makes life interesting. Here in the Linux, Free Software and Open
Source communities, we know which side we're on. And we're joined
there by businesses that share the same passions and values.The DMCA and the CARP recommendations are thick with the
language of shipping. They outlaw the Net as a marketplace by
describing its operations almost entirely in shipping terms. And we
do the same when we argue with these people on their own terms. We
have to stop doing that.Law professor and author
Lawrence
Lessig has taken the lead in defining the Net as a
"commons" and in framing copyright and patent law once again in the
place-based terms the founding fathers used back when markets were
still bazaars and customers were still customers--and not "target
groups" of "consumers" of goods pumped through supplier-controlled
distribution systems.I suggest we join Larry there. And I suggest he join us in a
Million-Customer March on Washington.I'm serious. Isn't it time we gave Congress a friendly lesson
in the democratic nature of real markets?Incendiary ideas never belong to the original arsonist--or to
anybody. As Michael Ventura says (in the top quote above),
consensus isn't important. What matters is "the generative power of
thought." For Jeff, my march-on-Washington idea generated a
completely different thought with exactly the same purpose. To get
his constituency--the geeks of the world--involved in the political
process, Jeff came up with the idea of forming a political action
committee (PAC), and a nonprofit organization to back it up. Then,
after asking me to join the effort, he moved forward like a runaway
freight train.The result is
GeekPAC and the
American Open Technology Forum.GeekPAC is so new it's still in the proverbial womb. So far,
all we can point to is the document at the other end of the link
above. Still no web site, no clubhouse, no legal papers-- though
we're moving forward on all of those fronts, mostly because more
geeks and sympathizers than we can count have come forward offering
help and money--many thousands of dollars, so far--mostly thanks to
a small but hot pile of news about the effort:

• Linux
  Advocates launch D.C. Lobbying Effort, by Grant Gross in
  NewsForge
• Linux
  Fans Take on Copy Control and
  Hollywood's
  New Enemy: Linux Fans, by Lisa Bowman in ZDNet/CNET.
• GeekPAC
  on Slashdot
• Mr.
  & Mrs. Geek go to Washington, by
  Paul
  Boutin in WiredNews
• Shooting
  Blanks: Growing digital rights movement needs to put some political
  heads on stakes--fast, by Hal Plotkin in SFGate (the web
  site of the San Francisco Chronicle and
  Examiner)
• Hal Plotkin: GeekPAC needs bloodlust, a thread
  started by
  Karsten
  Self at Kuro5hin

Proof of how new and open we are is that we're busy
recruiting Hal Plotkin, even as I type.Others founding members include
Arne
Flones, Kevin Hill and
Russ
Pavlicek, all regulars on
The Linux Show,
plus Eric S. Raymond (who
needs
no introduction) and
Paul Jones, who
directs Ibiblio.org (formerly Metalab and Sunsite) when he isn't
busy
teaching
at the University of North Carolina.All these people are, I believe, legitimate geeks. I'm not.
In fact, while Jeff was busy coining the name GeekPAC in Aurora IL,
I was sitting in the Linux Journal offices in
Seattle, where another editor discouraged me from using the term,
because I clearly belonged to a less technical species (the only
code I know is Morse, and HTML doesn't count).But the GeekPAC name has caught fire and for better or worse
it's now a brand. We're stuck with it. I also think the Jargon File
gives us some cover. It defines
geek
this way:A person who has chosen concentration rather than conformity;
one who pursues skill (especially technical skill) and imagination,
not mainstream social acceptance. Geeks usually have a strong case
of
neophilia.
Most geeks are adept with computers and treat
hacker
as a term of respect, but not all are hackers themselves--and some
who are in fact hackers normally call themselves geeks anyway,
because they (quite properly) regard `hacker as a label that should
be bestowed by others rather than self-assumed.Geeks built the Net. All due respect to IBM, Sun and Cisco,
the Net was not something any large business would have designed or
built. Big companies tend to like big control. They tend to be
"open" in the same manner as a trap, a corral or a box
canyon.Big companies also tend to be best at big, complex projects:
things that require lots of management. In
Small Pieces Loosely
Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web, David Weinberger gives
management due credit for great industrial achievements such as the
Hoover Dam, which he calls "a masterpiece of management as well as
engineering". But he says
we
have something very different with the Net (or the Web,
which most nongeeks tend to use as a synonym for the Net):The Web, however, is teaching us a different lesson about
management. Consider the Web as a construction project. It's the
most complex network ever created. It is by many orders of
magnitude the largest collection of human writings and works in
history. It is far more robust than networks far smaller. Yet it
was created without any managers. In fact, it only succeeded
because its designers made the conscious decision to build a
network that would require no central control. You don't need
anyone else's permission to join in, to post whatever you want, to
read whatever others have posted. The Web is profoundly unmanaged
and that is crucial to its success. It takes traditional command
and control structures and busts them up into many small pieces
that then loosely join themselves--and that, too, is crucial to its
success.As a result, the Web is a mess, as organized as an orgy. It
consists of voices proclaiming whatever they think is worth saying,
trying on stances, experimenting with extremes, being wrong in
public, making fun of what they hold sacred in their day jobs,
linking themselves into permanent coalitions and drive-by
arguments, savoring the rush you feel when you realize you don't
have to be the way you've been.The Web has driven through the plate glass window of
traditional management. Its existence is a slap in the face of the
managed world of modern American realism.Geeks architected the Net with what
David
P. Reed and others call an
end-to-end
design. The document you are reading now is one of those
ends. There are billions of others, all adding value to the whole.
They can can do that because the Net embodies three simple
virtues:

1. Nobody owns it
2. Everybody can use it
3. Anybody can improve it

In the first two respects, the Net is very much a force of
nature, like the Sun, the wind and the core of the Earth. In the
third respect it is profoundly human. Combine all three and you get
what Craig Burton describes as a constantly expanding hollow sphere
comprised of everything and everybody "on" it. Across its empty
middle, all the ends are one click away from each other, no matter
how big the sphere gets.Craig says this sphere is a new world--one made entirely by,
and for (as well as of), human beings. He also says we have only
begun to "terraform" that world by slowly improving its simple
global infrastructure, and by building all kinds of new stuff on
it. He also adds that this world utterly depends on the dumb
emptiness in the middle--in much the same way as life on Earth's
surface depends on the silent un-ownable mass below its crust.
There's no way any company or government agency can improve on
it.Lawrence Lessig, the
Stanford law professor and author of
Code and other Laws of
Cyberspace and
The Future of
Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in the Connected World, sees
this terraformed world as a
vast
commons. He also sees it threatened by a Death Star of
sorts. From the perspective of the Net's natives--the people who
built it and understand everything from its geology to its ecology
to the natural bazaars it supports (and which now take advantage of
the Net to conduct billions of dollars worth of business, every
day)-- this Death Star is the work of the Evil Trade Federation we
might call the Entertainment-Industrial Complex. Or just
Hollywood.As a creative
commons, the Net suppports countless new opportunities for
Hollywood. But three of Hollywood's leaders--Michael Eisner of
Disney, Hillary Rosen of the RIAA and Jack Valenti of the
MPAA--have chosen instead to regard the Net as a threat and its
citizens as thieves. They want to replace the Net's commons with a
plumbing system for "content" entirely managed and controlled from
the supply side. They are not interested in seeing billions of
passive and voiceless "consumers" turn into active and vocal
customers.And so we find ourselves in a kind of war--not just between
two interest groups, but between two fundamentally different ways
of understanding the Net itself. One sees it as a commons. The
other sees it as a distribution system. One wants to protect it and
let it grow. The other wants to manage and exploit it. One expects
innovation and market forces to solve the business problems that
naturally accompany growth. The other wants government to protect
established industries against exactly those kinds of problems--by
restricting the very operations of the Net itself, and the devices
that allow people to use the Net.Larry Lessig puts it this way in The Future of
Ideas:A time is marked not so much by ideas that are argued about
as by ideas that are taken for granted. The character of an era
hangs upon what needs no defense. Power runs with ideas that only
the crazy would draw into doubt. The "taken for granted" is the
test of sanity; "what everyone knows" is the line between us and
them.This means that sometimes a society gets stuck. Sometimes
these unquestioned ideas interfere, as the cost of questioning
becomes too great. In these times, the hardest task for social or
political activists is to find a way to get people to wonder again
about what we all believe is true. The challenge is to sow
doubt.And so it is with us. All around us are the consequences of
the most significant technological, and hence cultural, revolution
in generations. This revolution has produced the most powerful and
diverse spur to innovation of any in modern times. Yet a set of
ideas about a central aspect of this prosperity--property--confuses
us. This confusion is leading us to change the environment in ways
that will change the prosperity. Believing we know what makes
prosperity work, ignoring the nature of the actual prosperity all
around, we change the rules within which the Internet revolution
lives. These changes will end the revolution.One of those changes was the Digital Millennium Copyright
Act--the DMCA. Today a freight train of additional acronymic
ordnance is heading from Hollywood to Washington:
SSSCA/CBDTPA,
UCITA,
CARP...Not one of these efforts fails to abridge founding principles
of both the United States and the Net. So maybe now is a good time
to revisit the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution:Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of
religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging
the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people
peaceable to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress
of grievances.Politicians like to talk about "grass roots". With the Net
geeks built a grass roots organizing environment like the world has
never seen. It's a place where enlightenment spreads like wildfire.
This is to our advantage--for as long as we still have it.So pick up a torch and help us save this thing.Doc Searls is senior editor
of Linux Journal.

email: doc@ssc.com