I attended this year’s Free Software and Opensource Software Symposium at Seneca College this year. As it was last year, it was an engaging event to meet with some major actors in the open source field.  Something didn’t set well with me this time around that perhaps didn’t perturb me quite as much last year.

It is something very dangerous about the open source community - dangerous in the sense of eroding moral legitimacy of a social movement that is foremost about improving the lives of others. I’ve commented on it before and it’s a struggle I deal with every day of my academic and professional life.

How does what I do and what I think about actively improve the lives the people who need it the most?

This is not a question that was addressed in my experience with the conference. Granted I only saw at most a third of what was on offer - but my intuition tells me this wasn’t central to the discussions being had.

When I say the “people who need it the most” I’m speaking about as inclusively as one can. I typically think of Africa and parts of Asia when I hear and say it but I don’t impose this constraint formally - the impoverished, oppressed, threatened or unsecured the world over are included.

What I heard the most of at the conference, at least with respect to non-technical considerations, were questions of conversion or recruitment, particularly within groups of which we were already members. “How do we make people like us, even more like us?” Was the question couched in various forms of address - particularly in the Teaching Open Source panels which dominated my Day One.

For me, this is the wrong question and it’s the wrong question for a lot of reasons. Firstly, it’s not one we need to answer - it’s answering itself.  Open source is here to stay and its growing,  it’s not a fledgling nascent idea that needs to be protected - it’s heavily entrenched in the industrial system and the fate of some of the largest corporations are enmeshed with the fate of open technology.

Secondly, it’s the wrong question because it’s expensive in its implications. The resources required to convince institutions of anything are generally not with the effort - especially when there’s a great many other more feasible opportunities for growth.

Thirdly, it’s the wrong question because, in my opinion, it’s pedantic and self-indulgent. The open source community is arguably the greatest well-spring of navel gazing pontification available on the internet - the very existence of my blog and others like it contributes to it. We were discussing the defense of what is, in essence, a morally defensible luxury - access to source code is not a right or a requirement; it’s a liberty afforded to us by our production capacity.  So, for me, open source community members need to work doubly hard to justify their existence in the face of other movements - there’s a finite attention span, finite resource pool and finite quantity of political capital; I will not abide a world where access to some C++ is an impediment to  Women’s Shelters.

It may not appear that would be possible at first glance but it’s entirely justifiable and necessary to question the purpose of showing up at FSOSS - of spending my nights or afternoons coding Drupal or WordPress or Symfony instead of volunteering at a shelter or writing code for software used by Doctor’s Without Borders (which uses proprietary software).

Yet none of this came up - the greater social responsibility discussion was omitted or its conclusions assumed. When explaining this to people outside the OS community the merit of such a venture seems dubious - to outsiders it doesn’t appear as intelligent, engaged people coming together to discuss their community, which it is, it instead appears as a self-congratulatory shin-dig for overwealthy nerds.

Until the community engages the globe with the same seriousness and with the cultural-integration that say, the medical community has or the legal community has - it won’t and shouldn’t be taken seriously.

If I were to do a talk at FSOSS - it would be centered around providing examples and motivation for the people in attendance to engage with issues that actually matter. As a former tech person, I know how difficult it is to find a place to go with these issues - one feels like a fish out of water when they step outside the tech world and suddenly nobody knows or cares about what you spend most of your life doing.

David Crow talked about designing interfaces that matter, in effect. He spoke about Microsoft Surface and the paradigm shift amongst UX people in light of the new interaction capacity of devices. The spirit of his talk was right on the money and was incredibly important but I think it went over the heads of most in attendance. Just as we must design interfaces that matter to the people who use the software we must make software that matters to the most underserved users we can identify.

Only then can software developers look a civil-engineer or trauma-surgeon in the eye and say that what we do matters to people, and only then can the collective disdain for proprietary software vendors be legitimate.

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I think it can be laid to rest any mythology we made have had about the superiority of the Canadian political process to the Americans. We’re now just like the Americans in the degree to which only a scant majority are worthy of the democracy they’re given.

While I could be hostile that every single riding I care about had the person I wanted to win lose by a margin that could’ve been superceded by a fraction of NDP votes or, more pointedly, Green. Green party voters must want Conservative victories - that is the only rational explanation for their voting pattern. I hope you enjoy the degradation of the environment in exchange for voting “for” a perennially losing party.

My main hostility, of which there is ample amounts, is directed squarely at the 42% of you out there who didn’t show up at the polls. You are a disappointment to your parents and their parents before them, you are the shame and burden of this country and you are pathetic and ignorant.

You are weak and you are what prevents Canada from improving.

I hope you are happy - I know anyone who worked hard this election to try and make a positive difference isn’t.

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Thomas Barnett and David Weinberger have a lot more in common than being things David Eaves introduced me to.  They both attack the notion of categorization.

Categorization, to a cognitive scientist, is problematic. Roughly phrased it’s the notion that the world is separated into groups in our cognition - there are many schools of thought that explain how this happens ranging from the debunked yet recurrent Classical theory to a geometric or featural model to a prototype theory and others.

Weinberger being a philosopher is probably more aware of his opposition than Barnett being a politico-military strategist but their equally vehement that categories are a byproduct of human limitation - a shorthand for reality rather than something inherent to it.

Barnett criticizes soundly the notion of thinking about war within the context of war. He cites the problematic deployment of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. A situation he dubbed “Blackhawk Down: the series.” He explains that a huge source of the crippling mishandling of coalition forces is a cultural pathology that exists within the US Department of Defence.

Barnett believes and convincingly articulates that the Pentagon has calcified into a Cold-War machine - the military-industrial complex has gained such momentum that they cannot reorganize to fight the threats it faces and instead needs to fabricate threats to rationalize their current force structure, spending and doctrine. President Eisenhower’s shadow looms ever large.

Anyone familiar with the concept of cognitive dissonance isn’t at all surprised by the conundrum the DoD faces - it’s MUCH easier to change rationalizations than it is to change behaviour.

Where does Weinberger fit? David Weinberger believes that traditional conceptualizations of taxonomy (a particular structure of categorization) are futile in a world where everything is miscellaneous. More particularly he believes that organization schemes should be dynamically applied and emergent - information itself and its organization should dictate its structure not the other way around.

Weinberger uses the example of libraries - and the accidental holdovers from the paradigm of physical books; to explain why we hold on to contrivances which were helpful and are now pathological.

Barnett believes that the US Government and by extension Western military powers have contrived an artificial separation of military operations from other operations. Particularly he emphasizes that there is a profoundly mistaken emphasis on the utility of military power. Simple, easily observable fact backs up his assertion - the most powerful military force in the history of mankind is actively threatened by men in towels with 80 year old weaponrs technology.

Barnett articulates  a need for a global system administrator force. A so-called peace waging body that would come in “after action” - that is, after the world’s Leviathan sweeps aside all amassed/conventional military enemies. This force would deliver the DImE support needed to secure permanent peaceful development. That is the Diplomacy, Information Operations, military protection and enforcement and the Economic aid to establish infrastructure.

The kind of war Barnett is talking about without saying it is termed by some fourth-generational warfare (4GW). 4GW is a theoretical notion that war has entered a new strategic phase that has its roots in the post-Westphalian international warfare. Typical examples cited are the Vietnam War, Mao’s Revolution, the Sandinista’s of Nicaragua and of course Al Qaeda and the Salafist Jihadis.

This is the notion of “skipping” typical levels of warfare to move straight to strategic aims. Without regard to tactical or operational capability 4GW combatants will go straight for the strategic jugular.

Military historians like Jeremy Black would argue that fourth-generational warfare is guilty of profoundly selective analysis of history - and they would be right. However, they would also be missing the point. Fourth-generational warfare is not meant to be an analytical framework for historical analysis - it is designed to be a system for establishing an understanding for the wars we are fighting now; not necessarily squaring them with any historical notion of progress. This is the Weinbergian miscellany clashing with the Dewey classification scheme - to conventional histories analysis comes in levels not angles.

Hammes argued that fourth-generational warfare is the strategy of targeting enemy decision making processes. The full deployment of all network capacity to disrupting and maniuplating the decisions of the enemy leaders without engaging in a conventional industrial war - which will invariably lost if fought against the United States. 4GW combatants disrupt or destroy the enemy leadership’s will to fight.

Wlliam Lind, one of the first to articulate the concept of fourth-generational warfare has criticized Hammes for assuming too much rationality from decision makers - Lind attacks the straw-man of economics by criticizing the notion of politicians “reviewing the numbers” of a conflict. He argues that fourth-generational war isn’t won by targeting the “will” of the enemy leadership, he argues, “they win by pulling the states they are fighting apart at the moral level.”

Wittgenstein would roll his eyes at such a statement. This is a distinction without a difference - particularly Hammes is speaking about a desired effect of 4GW (the extraction of the enemy) whereas Lind regresses to a rather abstract causal argument around the morality of a conflict.

This is hugely problematic for historical reasons - but I won’t get into that. A bigger problem lies at the basis of his assumptions about what influences political decision makers to leave wars and of course the nature of the combatants in 4GW.

Whereas Hammes roots his argument in the pyschological realities of will - Lind runs into the blue yonder of philosophical abstraction. Which is made more problematic by his appeal to decision theory to support his argument that rationality has no place in strategic thinking - he abuses beyond recognition the concept of bounded rationality and satisficing to support his claim.

Lind profoundly misrepresents the notion of rationality is being solely the type specified by economists - articulated first by David Hume as instrumental rationality.  Instrumental rationality forms the underpinning of utility maximization and economics.

The issue is that a Humean notion of instrumental rationality is impossible in reality - we would be paralized by the problem of standing up since we’d have to explore all possible options before choosing one; elsewise we’d be irrational under Hume’s and consequently Lind’s conditions.

Thomas Hammes and other fourth-generational theorists are arguing for a mutliagency, multidisciplinary approach to tackling the problem of our current violent conflict. Network-centric warfare of the kind David Arquilla and Jon Ronfeldt articulated is becoming ever more real.

Barnett argues that only be understanding how military conflict integrates with a broader strategic vision of global integration can the US / NATO possibly hope to win the peace.

Weinberger articulates that only be embracing the dynamic arrangement of information based on problem solving and subjective need can we possibly begin to make sense of the world around us.

Thankfully for Barnett, Hammes and even Lind - we have a body of work that integrates these notions and provides a mechanism for dynamically shifting perspectives to observe the effects of military and non-military operations.

It’s called human security.

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