With free software and culture, we have the opportunity for huge advances via creative destruction in the next 50 years versus incremental improvements that are easier to control and profit from by existing… power brokers? You know what I mean: “The Man.” I couldn’t quite bring myself to write “entrenched interests,” but that might have worked also.

Societies themselves are shaped by their means of production and how that means is controlled. When the production means to go catch or hunt or gather something, then skilled able-bodied hunters, spears, and baskets are the means of production. Hunter-gatherer societies thus emphasize becoming good at one of these things, and tend to focus on the best hunters as the “model citizens” and choose good hunters and ex-hunters as chiefs. Wars focus on destroying or capturing an opponent’s means of production, and so in hunter-gatherer societies tend to involve killing one another’s able-bodied men. Of course, killing or capturing the women too, since women produce (by birth) the next generation of men.

Agriculture makes able-bodied people and land the primary means of production, so that you get feudal societies whose politics is bound up with land ownership and whose wars focus on seizing land violently. Then you get the first cases of palace coups and wars to take and occupy territory, as well as to deplete opposing nations of able-bodied men and capture their women.

Agricultural societies need enough specialized tools that crafts-and-trade-specialized societies arise in the world with them, and these tend to depend on trading fleets and trade routes as well as access to raw materials. Their wars are naval wars or land wars for control of overland trade routes, and for control of quarries or mines.

Industrial production via factories makes owning factories important, as well as mining and quarrying, and leads to private business rising in political power. The relationship of business to government becomes the major issue for society (and results in the variations of communism, capitalism, fascism played out in the 20th century, as well as dooming feudalism). Wars then focus on the capture and control of cities, and therefore factories and factory labor, or on damaging or destroying those, as well as infrastructure like roads and pipelines.

Ultimately though, better standards of living have correlated with greater technology, while better freedom and equality have correlated with decentralized ownership of more diverse means of production. Hunter-gatherers had more freedom (but a poorer standard of living) than people in many later societies. Industrial nations have more freedom still, because of the diversity of labor and widespread ownership of capital.

Now, increasingly, information technologies are powerful means of production, and they are increasingly cheap and ubiquitous. This shift to broad-based ownership and control of capital has importance that cannot be overstated. Even owning stock isn’t as significant, since it’s ownership of a tiny piece with little or no real control. Computer ownership (barring Treacherous Computing at least) is direct ownership and control of a powerful productive tool, increasingly available to any random individual. The effects this will have, though not immediate, will surely be profound. This will include political effects and deeper social effects, possibly transforming society in ways as great as the industrial revolution did before, or the agricultural before that. Already, there are signs that connectivity and computers make communism and fascism as obsolescent as industry did feudalism.

The major problem with the present industrialized nations, as I see it, has nothing to do with oil, energy policy, or tons of other “big issues” and everything to do with IP law and the rent-seeking of certain large cartels. Their success would institute a new feudalism, taking our computers away from us with TC and renting them back to us — as tenants with very few rights where once we were lords. It’s the biggest attempted landgrab in history, and it’s completely under the radar of traditional news and the bulk of the process of politics. If it succeeds, the West will have jumped the proverbial shark and pass the torch of civilization on, as has always happened when an empire has become outmoded and calcified and too beholden to some special interests. The same fate led to the British empire fading, and to the fall of the Roman empire long before that. In the latter case, a lengthy Dark Ages ensued because they failed to even pass the torch.

Presently, I think three things can happen. The West might recover from the land grab attempt. It might succumb but it’s likely parts of what we used to call the third world will pick up the torch and rapidly leapfrog us — there are indications of this from the recent rapid maturing of nations in the far east, in eastern Europe, in South America, and even in the middle east and Latin America. (Check out Brazil, Estonia, and even India and China.) All are poised to rapidly overtake the US in particular; China’s flagrant disregard for Western IP law and its rapid advancement of space travel is particularly worth keeping an eye on. They might be doing all that stuff in 2015 that sci-fi authors assumed the US would be: colonizing the moon, for example. (Anyone who thinks the Shenzhou program isn’t an Apollo analogue with the Moon a fairly near-term goal is dreaming — the design that has a crew module and a separate service module is very much geared toward eventual lunar missions, as is the capacity of booster being developed. They basically took the old Soviet moon program plans, threw out the unworkable N-1 booster, dusted off the rest, and set about implementing them with substantial improvements in many areas including liberal cribbing from Apollo.)

Even if those nations fail (China’s old guard freedom-suppressing might win out and doom it to the same fate as the US might meet, and the rest are in grave danger of not surviving infection by US IP law) the give-everyone-computers thing might enable someone else to rise up instead. That, I think, is especially important.

The big danger is that the US fails and its death throes wreck the world. The US and Russia or China torching off WWIII is the most likely such scenario, either over diminishing oil reserves or over more nebulous issues.

Thanks very much for the tip on my blog. It does seem busted.

It’s not really at our expense, I guess; more like us shooting ourselves in the foot. I’m still probably not expressing myself very well. I’m thinking that I’m happy to help people in poorer countries lift themselves up even if in the first world we’re intent on handing out shackles to everyone.

(BTW, Crosbie, I wasn’t able to post a comment to your new post last night. I was planning on trying again tonight after work. I could get the preview but couldn’t submit it. The browser would just spin its wheels for a while and then return a blank page.)

“even if it is at our expense.”

?

That seems to hark to the IP maximalist notion that it would be unfair for the 3rd world to enjoy the fruits of the west’s intellectual property without paying for it.

For those who have already achieved equity in publishing their work, no further expense can be considered, even beyond a nation’s borders.

The ‘public’ encompasses all mankind in its global village. There is no ‘US public’ vs ‘3rd world public’ - the latter does not enjoy benefit at the expense of the former.

When you publish free software you deliver it to all mankind, not just to your fellow countrymen to facilitate your own nation’s technological advantage.

So, there is no ‘at our expense’, and in case you were wondering, the truth value of your “even if” is thus ‘false’. :-)

Otherwise, yup, with you in all other respects of the article. It’s the old ‘give a man a fish’ vs ‘give a man a fish farm and a canning factory’ dichotomy.