Another Clash of the Generations

Recently, a student at Ryerson University in Toronto was charged with over a hundred counts of academic misconduct. His crime? Running a chemistry study group on Facebook.

Now, while I'm sure there is more to this story than what the article states, the case seems fairly clear: a professor considers online communities different from offline ones. This is despite the differences being negligible for the purpose it was intended for.

Though I graduated university last May ('07), I still live two blocks from campus. I'm plugged into the college community there, and it's definitely not the pure-offline world that a lot of the older professors seem to think it is. The majority of students at SDSU seem to have a Facebook account at the very least. Even some professors do, though they're almost entirely the younger ones.

This is not the first clash between old and new ways of thinking about human interaction, and I guarantee it won't be the last. However, we as young adults need to work with the older generations to demonstrate three things:

• Technology is not a replacement for traditional forms of communication, it's an enhancement of it.
• The Internet is not lawless, despite it being unregulated. There are rules of behavior online just as there are ones offline.
• Education is more and more becoming inseparable from the Internet, and things such as online study groups are inevitable evolutions of that paradigm.

Ranting, raving, and threatening is most definitely NOT the way to prove to the older generations that our way of thinking on this issue is correct. Instead, we need to approach this on their level - and with their tools. We are one society, not two separate ones.

Personally, I think Ryerson University's wording of their academic dishonesty policy could use some updating. "Any academic advantage" being made illegal would seem to me to disallow reading textbooks.

Free software, free world

The concept of a free world is near and dear to those advocates of FOSS. In recent years free software advocacy has grown in volume if not in momentum. Subscribers to this peculiar philosophy - that all software should be free, open source, and readily available to the public at large - seem to hold certain similarities to other philosophical positions.

Anarchism, for one. Libertarianism for another. But it goes deeper than those mere labels.

All software being freely available as a good and desirable trait of a society implies...nay, requires that believers subscribe to the idea that materialism and ownership are inherently negative concepts. In this they resemble some beliefs of a few Native American tribes. Non-market economies based on concepts of barter and dumb-barter, however, almost always have a concept of ownership behind them even if there is no currency or common value basis for items. In small societies, the materialistic bent of placing value on an item gives way to placing value on the exchange of the item, thereby replacing economic value with social value. In today's anonymous global village, social value is of far less importance, and thus materialism has risen as a natural consequence.

Interestingly, the FOSS advocacy movement seems to be pushing for a return to social value over material value. Linus Torvalds is considered influential and prestigious for his uncompromising dedication, generosity, and competence. Bill Gates, while similarly intelligent, is reviled for his tremendous wealth and reputed anti-FOSS tactics. A developer's prestige in the FOSS community is directly proportional to his or her contributions to the community.

Now, while this is all well and good and I applaud a return to social value over material value, there is one glaring flaw in the FOSS advocacy philosophy - free software doesn't pay the bills. Some companies get around this by offering services to support their free products, but service isn't particularly time-consuming, thus enabling fewer developers to support a single product and restricting the number of jobs available at a given company. This suggests that the entire software industry is either flawed in its concept or flawed in its execution and gives rise to questions regarding the legitimacy and efficiency of the current paradigm.

For FOSS to become a viable methodology, the software industry must shift from a production-centric environment to a service-centric one. This is not to say that development itself must go by the wayside; rather, services need to be placed higher in priority than development so as to foster an equivalent financial return for developers and still promote the free usage of software. Service industries account for 70% of the economic activity in the United States; certainly, by transforming the software industry into such will bring no great harm to the pocketbooks of developers as a whole...but its effects on the individual developer can't be directly determined.

Personally, I hope that the FOSS philosophy and its focus on social value is a sign of a general disillusionment with materialism in general. Certainly, it can't hurt to help others through ideas such as FOSS. To find out more, check out the Free Software Foundation's website. Their Resources section is particularly helpful.

T-Mobile must be boycotted.

Normally, I don't post more than once a week. However, after reading about T-Mobile's assault on Net Neutrality on Wired, I had to blog about it.

T-Mobile wants to tell you what websites you can visit. We should tell T-Mobile what it can do with its Terms of Service....and take our money elsewhere.

Liberty vs. Economy: How far can we go?

Freedom. Economics. The two are interconnected on a basic level. Neither can exist while the other languishes.

This is the basic philosophy of libertarianism or "classical liberalism," as some put it. Supporters of the Libertarian Party and its relations vary in their interpretation of this philosophy. Some - in fact, from what I have seen, a good many - wish for total absence of government in the field of the economy. That seems to me to be fallacy.

While the government should not have a strong hand in the economic affairs of its citizens, it should not have no hand at all. Inevitably the government will make mistakes, but that is the nature of human things - we make mistakes, and nothing can change that. The government's hand in the economy is necessary to protect against other human mistakes. While the wisdom of the majority is questionable at times, the process necessary to alter a machine on the scale of the federal government is slow. This allows for "testing periods" that might otherwise be rendered too short by an overzealous legislative process, as is the case in a direct democracy. The rule of the economy by large financial entities - such as corporations - can thus be tempered in its fickle nature by the relatively stable hand of the government.

By the same token, though, we must be watchful that the government does not take too large an interest in the affairs of business. It is far too easy for large tariffs, taxes, or bureaucratical procedures to stifle innovation or competition which might otherwise be beneficial to the health of our nation's economy.

When pressed for a vote on a particular example of this clash of liberty versus economy, one must always, without fail, closely examine as many of the major consequences as is feasible before making a determination. Voting on party lines or by rhetoric alone - be it libertarian, neoconservative, or liberal - is to invite disaster on an epic scale. Such, I fear, is the case with our current financial situation in the United States. I imagine that the collapse of the subprime market, the increase in the price of gasoline and its attendant effects, and the subsequent slowing of the American economy can be traced to poor decisions in the balancing act of liberty and economy.

Sometimes, the liberty of business needs to take a back seat to governmental interference in the machine - and sometimes, the reverse is true.

Partisanship is vile. What loss to this country...

Seriously. I see Republicans railing on Democrats and Democrats railing on Republicans. The fighting and partisanship is completely at odds with what our forefathers intended. Benjamin Franklin must be turning in his grave at the extreme partisanship that many Americans today profess.

I do not belong to a political party. Neither should you. This is not because I am Right and you are Wrong; rather, it is a simple matter of reason. Political parties inherently divide people into differing camps of rhetoric. This is self-evident. Also self-evident is that rhetoric snuffs out free thought and discussion.

For this reason, every time I see someone who proudly declares that they belong to one party or other, I will shake my head sadly at the sorrow state of our once great nation. Powerful we have become, but divisive and hostile. So sad, and so unnecessary.

Here are a few action items for you to help improve the political climate of our country:

• Print and distribute flyers promoting nonpartisan discussion of an issue important to you.
• Start a discussion club at your local coffee house.
• Unregister yourself as a member of the political party you presently belong to.
• Pick one hot issue and start a blog about it. Discuss all possible repercussions it could have.
• Invite your family and friends to switch parties for a single month and give themselves wholeheartedly to the opposing lines of thought. Don't vote during this experiment though!
• Read one of Benjamin Franklin's works. There are many, and your local library will have at least one.
• Start a newsletter for your town that promotes nonpartisan exploration of issues.
  

True open source - death of the individual or celebration of individualism?

Many, many people speak glowingly of the benefits of open source software. A growing movement also seeks to make a great many other things "open source" - from the file-sharing freedom fighters at FreeCulture.Org to the unusual licensing of the newest editions of Dungeons & Dragons. Libertarianism and the concept of freely available content appears to be on the rise. However, is this necessarily a good thing? What of individualism and ego, concepts central to Western culture?

Before the Internet and the World Wide Web enabled easy, free sharing of information and data, the individual had two primary levels of protection for his works. First was copyright law, which prior to 1976 and the introduction of Fair Use was a strong wall against unlicensed propogation of content. The other was the simple and undeniable fact that content could simply not be transmitted with any reasonable speed or transparency. The advent of Betamax and the subsequent legal turmoil ended up making unlicensed (and also, licensed) distribution of content much easier.

The recent case by Regal Cinemas against Jhannet Sejas highlights a similar paranoia by an industry juggernaut targeted against a consumer and potential distributor. Ignoring the legal implications of the Regal v. Sejas case (that the possibility of infringement is equal to infringement in the eyes of the law), these kinds of events demonstrate growing pains inherent in the development of an entirely new socioeconomic system. Instead of the traditional producer-distributor-consumer model prevalent throughout the past few hundred years, we are now presented with a direct producer-consumer model - or, in some cases, a consumer-consumer model, whereby the individuality of the producer is apparently cut out of the picture.

And that, my friends, is the crux of this post. Does the removal of the producer from the cycle and the distribution and modification by consumers of their works remove the individualism from the quotient?

For my part, I say no. In fact, it seems to me that rather than removing individualism, it promotes it - albeit in a slightly different form. After all, the concept of inventor-as-hero is a fallacy, with most inventions actually developing from several different points at several different rates. Ely Whitney, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and similar inventors - while important - were not absolutely critical to the development of the technologies they became famous for. They simply became standard bearers.

Similarly, the advent of open source society is not going to crush individualism. Rather, it will promote the free exchange of ideas and, thereby, accelerate the process at which these producer-heroes arise. Further, with the free flow of information, their fame will spread far more rapidly than did their cultural predecessors'. Linus Torvalds and Matt Mullenweg are prime examples of this.

So lead on, brave open source pioneers, and may your paths be paved with cookies. Yours is the cause of freedom and of the future.