term, which was originally imported from software production: the designation “open source” was invented to rebrand free software as business friendly, foregrounding efficiency and economic benefits (open as in open markets) over ethical concerns (the freedom of free software).16 In keeping with this transformation, openness is often invoked in a way that evades discussions of ownership and equity, highlighting individual agency over commercial might and ignoring underlying power imbalances.
In the 2012 “open issue” of Google’s online magazine Think Quarterly, phrases like “open access to information” and “open for business” appear side by side, purposely blurring participation and profit seeking. One article on the way “smart brands” are adapting to the digital world insists that as a consequence of the open Web, “consumers have more power than ever,” while also outlining the ways “the web gives marketers a 24/7 focus group of the world,” unleashing a flood of “indispensable” data that inform “strategic planning and project development.” Both groups are supposedly “empowered” by new technology, but the first gets to comment on products while the latter boosts their bottom line.
By insisting that openness is the key to success, whether you are a multinational corporation or a lone individual, today’s digital gurus gloss over the difference between humans and businesses, ignoring the latter’s structural advantages: true, “open” markets in some ways serve consumers’ buying interests, but the more open people’s lives are, the more easily they can be tracked and exploited by private interests.17 But as the technology writer Rob Horning has observed, “The connections between people are not uniformly reciprocal.” Some are positioned to make profitable use of what they glean from the network; others are more likely to be taken advantage of, giving up valuable information and reaping few benefits. “Networks,” Horning writes, “allow for co-optation as much as cooperation.”18
Under the rubric of open versus closed, the paramount concern is access and whether people can utilize a resource or platform without seeking permission first. This is how Google and Wikipedia wind up in the same camp, even though one is a multibillion-dollar advertising-funded business and the other is supported by a nonprofit foundation. Both are considered “open” because they are accessible, even though they operate in very different ways. Given that we share noncommercial projects on commercial platforms all the time online, the distinction between commercial and noncommercial has been muddled; meanwhile “private” and “public” no longer refer to types of ownership but ways of being, a setting on a social media stream. This suits new-media partisans, who insist that the “old debates” between market and the state, capital and government, are officially behind us. “If communism vs. capitalism was the struggle of the twentieth century,” law professor and open culture activist Lawrence Lessig writes, “then control vs. freedom will be the debate of the twenty-first century.”19
No doubt, there is much to be said for open systems, as many have shown elsewhere.20 The heart of the Internet is arguably the end-to-end principle (the idea that the network should be kept as flexible, unrestricted, and open to a variety of potential uses as possible). From this principle to the freely shared technical protocols and code that Tim Berners-Lee used to create the World Wide Web, we have open standards to thank for the astonishing growth of the online public sphere and the fact that anyone can participate without seeking permission first.21
Open standards, in general, foster a kind of productive chaos, encouraging innovation and invention, experimentation and engagement. But openness alone does not provide the blueprint for a more equitable social order, in part because the “freedom” promoted by the tech community almost always turns out to be of the Darwinian variety. Openness in this context is ultimately about promoting competition, not with protecting equality in any traditional sense; it has little to say about entrenched systems of economic privilege, labor rights, fairness, or income redistribution. Despite enthusiastic commentators and their hosannas to democratization, inequality is not exclusive to closed systems. Networks reflect and exacerbate imbalances of power as much as they improve them.
The tendency of open systems to amplify inequality—and new-media thinkers’ glib disregard for this fundamental characteristic—was on vivid display during a talk at a 2012 installment of the TEDGlobal conference convened under the heading “Radical Openness.” Don Tapscott, self-proclaimed “thought leader” and author of influential books including Growing Up Digital and Wikinomics, titled his presentation “Four Principles for the Open World”: collaboration, transparency, sharing, and empowerment.
Tapscott told the story of his neighbor Rob McEwen, a banker turned gold mine owner, the former chairman and CEO of Goldcorp Inc. When staff geologists couldn’t determine where the mineral deposits at one of his mines were located, McEwen turned to the Web, uploading data about the company’s property and offering a cash reward to anyone who helped them hit pay dirt. “He gets submissions from all around the world,” Tapscott explained. “They use techniques that he’s never heard of, and for his half a million dollars in prize money, Rob McEwen finds 3.4 billion dollars worth of gold. The market value of his company goes from 90 million to 10 billion dollars, and I can tell you, because he’s my neighbor, he’s a happy camper.”
This is Tapscott’s idea of openness in action: a banker-turned-CEO goes from rich to richer (of course, there was no mention of the workers in the mine and the wages they were paid for their effort, nor an acknowledgment of Goldcorp’s record of human rights violations).22 For Tapscott, McEwen’s payoff is a sign of a bold new era, an “age of promise fulfilled and of peril unrequited,” to use his grandiloquent phrase. “And imagine, just consider this idea, if you would,” he concluded. “What if we could connect ourselves in this world through a vast network of air and glass? Could we go beyond just sharing information and knowledge? Could we start to share our intelligence?” The possibility of sharing any of the windfall generated as a consequence of this collective wisdom went unmentioned.
A similar willful obliviousness to the problems of open systems undercuts the claims of new-media thinkers that openness has buried the “old debates.” While Lawrence Lessig convincingly makes the case that bloated intellectual property laws—the controlling nature of copyright—often stifle creative innovation from below, his enthusiasm for the free circulation of information blinds him to the increasing commodification of our expressive lives and the economic disparity built into the system he passionately upholds.
“You can tell a great deal about the character of a person by asking him to pick the great companies of an era,” Lessig declares in Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy, and whether they root for the “successful dinosaurs” or the “hungry upstarts.” Technology, he continued, has “radically shifted” the balance of power in favor of the latter. Proof? “The dropouts of the late 1990s (mainly from Stanford) beat the dropouts of the middle 1970s (from Harvard). Google and Yahoo! were nothing when Microsoft was said to dominate.” This, it seems, is what it means to have moved beyond the dichotomy of market and state into the realm of openness—that we must cheerlead the newly powerful from the sidelines for no better reason than that they are new.
Even if the players weren’t from Stanford and Harvard (two institutions where Lessig has held prominent appointments), the statement would still be unsettling. Who could possibly construe a contest between the dropouts of these elite and storied institutions as one between underdogs and an oppressor? And why should we cheer Amazon over local bookstores, Apple over independent record labels, or Netflix over art house cinemas, on the basis of their founding date or their means of delivery? The dinosaurs and upstarts have more in common than Lessig cares to admit.
As Woodrow Wilson famously said, “That a peasant may become king does not render the kingdom democratic.” Although new-media celebrants claim to crusade on behalf of the “yeoman creator,” they treat the kings of the digital domain with unwavering reverence, the beneficence of their rule evident in the freedom that their platforms and services
