This morning’s keynotes at OSCON weren’t nearly as good as last night’s. In particular, I’ve got a bone to pick with Christine Peterson. She talked about sensing systems, and coming government attempts to both mandate and regulate sensing - making sensing the sole provenance of the government, and using sensing to further escalate an authoritarian surveillance state. Reasonable enough so far. But her proposed solution to this was to ignore the government and completely privatize surveillance, under the justification that government is inherently predisposed towards centrism, inherently ignorant of the Benefits of Free, and inherently unchangeable. “DC is DC,” she seemed to be saying, “and the only way we’ll get anything done is to ignore them and privatize everything.”
Lessig provides an excellent explanation in Code 2.0 of why this is a horrible idea. Ignoring government and forging boldly forwards on your own doesn’t create an system that cannot be regulated by government. Instead, it cedes the government space to the authoritarians, allowing them to operate and expand its influence uncontested. We’re seeing the end result of that in politics now. Across pretty much all of the western world, the notion that “government is inherently harmful” or “government can do no good” or dozens of different variations on the theme have taken hold. As a result, those that would support a progressive agenda have largely abandoned government, and authoritarianism has grown unchecked.
Further, the history of privatization in the 20th century has been an unchecked series of disasters. Private entities are motivated wholly by profit, and thus incredibly susceptible to authoritarian influence. They make more money from it, after all. Public entities are, at least theoretically, answerable primarily to the public good which, in a democratic system, is determined in a distributed manner.
I believe that government can be made to understand the Benefits of Free and work in a distributed, free model. In fact, I believe it is inherent to a properly functioning democratic system. But we won’t have a properly functioning democratic system unless we believe that government can do good; that free and public are complementary, not opposed; and that “being political” is something desirable, rather than something repugnant.