Slashdot links to a keynote speech by Eben Moglen, a lawyer who works with the Free Software Foundation.

This is a great speech - possibly because of the content, but mostly because it's inspiring and wonderfully hyperbolic. Coming to a sensible opinion on anything is often greatly aided by having some hearty hyperbole to bounce off. (Francis Fukuyama is great for that.)

It has some lovely phrases - and some kind soul has transcribed the whole thing.

He gets straight to the over-egging: the 20th century was about steel - "and from steel it made the rest of what the twentieth century possessed for the exploration of the environment and the control of nature for human benefit."

Can you guess what the 21st Century is about? Why, of course...

The twenty-first century economy is not under-girded by steel. The twenty-first century economy is under-girded by software. Which is as crucial as the underlying element in economic development in the twenty-first century as the production of steel ingots was in the twentieth. We have moved to a societal structure in this country, are moving elsewhere in the developed world, will continue to move throughout the developing economies, towards economies whose primary underlying commodity of production is software. And the good news is that nobody owns it.

Well - yeah, they do. But they shouldn't, any more than Maths should be owned:

Imagine if you will for a moment a society in which mathematics has become property, and it’s owned by people. Now every time you want to do anything useful – build a house, make a boat, start a bridge, devise a market, move objects weighing certain numbers of kilos from one place to another – your first stop is at the mathematics store to buy enough math to complete the task which lies before you. You can only use as much arithmetic at a time as you can afford, and it is difficult to build a sufficient inventory of mathematics, given its price, to have any extra on hand.

You can predict, of course, that the mathematics sellers will get rich. And you can predict that every other activity in society, whether undertaken for economic benefit or for the common good, will pay taxes in the form of mathematics payments.

So owned software is as implausible and immoral as 'proprietary geometry'.

Then there's Moglen's post-industrial Utopian claim:

We are moving to a world in which in the twenty-first century the most important activities that produce occur not in factories, and not by individual initiative, but in communities held together by software. // It is the infra-structural importance of software which is first important in the move to the post-industrial economy. // Software is creating roadways that bring people who have been far from the center of human social life to the center of human social life. Software is making people adjacent to one another who have not been adjacent to one another.

Hmm. It's quite possible for roadways to be built solely for the purpose of milking a community dry, or pinning their eyelids open so's they all become one big watery Somme in the billion-dollar battle for eyeballs.

But I guess that's what he's arguing. Gosh, he makes software sound like the front line in the battle between good and evil. Geek egos must love it. I know I do. So he goes on to say how its the final, final stage of the great battle for social justice:

The greatest problem of human inequality is the extraordinary difficulty in prising wealth away from the rich to give it to the poor, without employing levels of coercion or violence which are themselves utterly corrosive to social progress. And repeatedly in the course of the history of our human societies, well-intentioned, enormously determined and courageous people willing to sacrifice their lives for an improvement in the equality of human life have had to face that problem. // Through hubris, through arrogance, through romanticism, through self-deception, parties seeking permanent human benefit and an increase in the equality of human beings have failed that test and watched as their movements of liberation spiraled downward from the poison of excess coercion.

We do not have to do that any more. The gate that has held the movements for equalization of human beings strictly in a dilemma between ineffectiveness and violence has now been opened. The reason is that we have shifted to a zero marginal cost world. As steel is replaced by software, more and more of the value in society becomes non-rivalrous: it can be held by many without costing anybody more than if it is held by a few.

So - let them eat code! Hmm. Coz rich and poor alike can have as much code as they want. Hmm. Damn - it sounded so fine when he was speaking...

And so we face, in the twenty-first century, a very basic moral question. If you could make as many loaves of bread as it took to feed the world, by baking one loaf and pressing a button, how could you justify charging more for bread than the poorest people could afford to pay? If the marginal cost of bread is zero, then the competitive market price should be zero too. But leaving aside any question of microeconomic theory, the moral question of what should be the price of what keeps someone else alive if it costs you nothing to provide it to them, has only one unique answer. There is no moral justification for charging more for bread that costs nothing than the starving can pay. Every death from too little bread under those circumstances is murder. We just don’t know who to charge for the crime.

We live there now.

But bread ain't code! What IS he going on about? More:

In the economy of steel, people who make steel become workers. They have little individuality. They are reckoned as workers in an industrial army. And as Marx and others like him pointed out in the middle of the nineteenth century, that is largely likely to lead to the model internally of political progress through a clash of armies. We don’t live there any more.

We find ourselves now in a very different place. You live there, I live there, my other clients live there. It’s a place where the primary infrastructure is produced by sharing. The primary technology of production is unowned. The effectiveness of that mode of production in the broader society is now established. // We have begun proving the fabric of a twenty-first century society which is egalitarian in its nature, and which is structured to produce for the common benefit more effectively than it can produced for private exclusive proprietary benefit. We are solving epochal problems.

Gosh. Distilled, I think he's saying 'free as in freedom software pisses all over all justifications for hierarchy, property and enclosure. Mozilla Firefox is a beacon of light for the world, the like of which has never been seen.'

Somehow, I can't imagine this being much comfort to the vast majority of the world's people - particularly the ones working 12 or more hours in Export Processing Zones to make the physical components of his new global utopia - something he mentions in passing only once.

There's a lot to agree with here - but software really, really isn't all that. Sometimes I think it might be, when imagining that computers might be able to show us to ourselves in a way not seen since we first saw our planet floating in space.

I'm probably arguing with myself - I have to agree with this:

There are other people with other views. We are not everybody. The other views assume that this technology too can be shaped to support hierarchy, that it can be shaped to support ownership, that it can be shaped not only to ignore the moral question I have put forward, but to make that question invisible to almost everybody. Forever. The folks on the other side are also very powerful. They look way more powerful than we. They are also quite clear-sighted. They also understand that there is an epochal openness here, and they have no more intention of giving up what they claim as theirs now than they ever have had. // [but] // the sides that have confronted one another over equality and social justice for generations are now more evenly matched than they have ever been before.

Really, its perhaps best to hope that the following isn't true:

Now we’re in a different spot. Not because our aims have changed. Not because the objectives of what we do have changed. But because the nature of the world in which we inhabit technologically has altered so as to make our ideas functional in new and non-coercive ways.

Coz if techno-utopianism is our only route to social justice, its a high, narrow, stormy little ridge we have to climb across on our hands and knees to get to . By far the most likely outcome - as with all previous civilisations - is collapse. If this one doesn't have the same life-cycle, it'll be because it's grown into the nature of things.

SUdden complete change of tack: these two worlds of property and sharing don't seem compatible. Might we have to decide if we want one or the other? Why? Because people need to eat (Moglen notes that the film and music industry argue this.) If we can create value for ourselves only by making things we drop on our foot, then software and maths is no good for putting food on the table. Well - it is insofar as it makes all the rest possible. But is there not an argument for saying:

We collectively agree that making music, writing, programming etc counts as making something, in the same way that making a house or a teapot does. Just because you can share it freely doesn't mean you should. If all this can be shared, then there's no incentive...

etc. I think, on one level, this is entirely true. (Though now I start to write about it, I'm quickly going to be paddling out of my depth!)

The two opposite poles of commercial and open values - each worker getting their bread from either the profit-maker, the tax-taker or some other arrangement - are tangled. On each side, its quite easy to sympathise. Do large drug companies really need intellectual property protection to keep themselves incentivised? Most people working in these utterly vast companies see nothing of that incentive - though I suppose one might argue it trickles down to the lab-monkeys via the chain of command, and ultimately via the share-holders. On the other hand, if people were allowed to vote on where their taxes got spent, could I reasonably hope they'd vote for me to remain ensconced in academia? Why are they paying for it, not me?

(Answer: because private universities equals privileged universities, and the only chance of getting more people into uni is via state action. Plus I'll earn more and eventually contribute more taxes. Eventually. So nyer. Anyway, that's besides the point!)

The only lesson I draw from this tangle is that competition, co-operation and incentives are empty concepts unless you can show me the form they have taken. Abu Graib counts as a very thorough incentivisation scheme for getting information from people - as does torture generally. Yet we liberal types frown upon it. Worker's co-ops can be damnably oppressive places, policed by their own peer pressure. Soviet factories had name and shame boards on them - the hard workers and the people who regularly turned up drunk for work.

There's some extreme examples in there, but my point is this: we negotiate, as a society, what we deem tolerable in our various communities. In many realms, we're free to choose just what we prefer. If you don't like x company, go get a job at y company. Or move to the public sector. Or start your own co-op, and make sure you don't oppress each other more than your old ASDA boss did. (Except now, everything's getting 'marketised', what does that mean...?)

We had a very successful incentive scheme in my last house. Someone dictatorially made a big list of jobs to do, which each earned a tick (or double points for particular tasks - extra incentive!) The scheme was a resounding success, in my opinion, resulting in a far tidier house.

The success of it, I think, was two-fold. First, it was mutual surveillance, not reward: on more than one occasion I was able to see just when I'd been doing sweet FA and do something about it. (So it relied on caring about such things - which most people do in that kind of context. Again: the place and context matters.)

Second, the fact of being able to negotiate it, and argue over points in it without it ever crossing that line into flared-nostril shared house blues. (Although I guess I can only speak for myself!) It wouldn't necessarily work with all people - or rather, would require a change in the ability and willingness to argue over seemingly trivial points in a good-natured way.

This is taking it to another extreme: the micro level of negotiated competition and mutual surveillance. But hey - gotta think about it. Somewhere down the line, it's all gotta be part of a PhD on whether Hayekian spontaneous order is all its cracked up to be.

Er... think I'll just stop abruptly there. Nyer.