Building the world we want to have

Pia Waugh has been a mainstay of the Australian free-software community for many years; among other things, she was one of the organizers of the 2007 linux.conf.au event. She is also known for her open government work. Ten years after running LCA, she returned to the conference as the opening keynote speaker. Nobody could possibly accuse her of thinking small as she outlined a somewhat utopian view of where the world is going and how the free-software community can help it to get there.

We are, she began, at a tipping point where we can reinvent our world. But we have to do it carefully, or we risk reinventing the past with a few shiny new things added. We need to make active choices about the future that we want to have.

Human society has evolved over hundreds of thousands of years, often helped by the "cooperative competitiveness" that causes us to try to outdo each other while working together. Early humans figured out their world and shared information through trade and travel; the latency tended to be high, but we collected a lot of information over time. Through continuous improvement, humanity was able to move far from its origins and occupy every continent on the planet.

More recently, we started building cities and, in the process, created differentiated social schemes. People had increasingly specialized roles, which gave them more time to do interesting things; the pace of advancement picked up as a result. We got to a point where we had a great surplus, leading to great power and, sometimes, great rulers.

Great power can also lead to great inequality; occasionally, people get sick of that inequality and revolt, replacing their rulers. The model has shifted somewhat with the independence movements seen around the world around 250 years ago. These movements, for the first time, codified the idea of inalienable individual rights; in a sense, she said, we all became kings. Power is now massively distributed, and we should not forget it. Part of power is in the wielding, but power is also dependent on belief that one actually has it.

People feel disempowered in our world but, in truth, we have the most individual power that people have ever had in our history. This has led people to believe that they can play an active role in defining their own future. Free software and open knowledge are products of that shift but, importantly, they are also amplifiers of it. We are on an exponential curve. That's not to say that there isn't still a great deal of inequality and related problems to deal with, of course.

There are a number of ways to look at human history to this point; Waugh suggested the Big History Project as one possibility. Another is to read the changelog, as seen on her slides; an excerpt appears below:

## [1.2.0] — 1760 CE "industrial revolution"
### Changed
— Agricultural libraries replaced by industrial libraries, still single core but heaps faster

The end result is that citizens have the power now. In a time of surplus, we can have distributed control of our society. All humans have the ability to publish, to communicate, and to monitor. Importantly, we also have the ability to enforce; anybody with a computer is now able to disrupt a company (or an economy) if they set their mind to it. We are more powerful than ever before, the rate of change is increasing and, she said, we made all this up and can do it again if we so choose.

Rethinking work and more

Everybody, she said, is creative in some way; every person she has ever met has something interesting inside them somewhere. Sometimes one has to dig a bit to find it, but it's there. Almost all of us switch it off when we go to work, though. People are scared in general about technology and jobs; that has been the case for a long time but, still, we have managed to thrive. But why are we still stuck on the 40-hour work week? Why do we see a person's value as being tied to the amount of money or stuff they have? Now that we are in a position to automate so much, it is time to question our approach to work.

As the curve of progress goes ever more steeply upward, there are a number of things we can look forward to. Three-dimensional printing is finally getting serious; we have moved beyond printing silly plastic toys to the prospect of printing organs for transplants. What if we could put raw materials into a device and get food out? Hunger would be solved. The possibilities are amazing, but the conversation around this technology is all about copyright. Why should we be protecting antiquated business models rather than caring about people? We have the potential to tackle scarcity, and should be doing so.

Then there is personal augmentation. People have always done it, using feathers, body paint, piercing, or tattoos. There is an obsession with "the norm" and discomfort with parting from it, but that is silly. There is no such thing as "normal"; the Internet has made that clear. Brains are plastic and can adapt to new things or foreign input. If you lose a leg, why be content with replacing it; why not have seven legs? Or wheels? Waugh suggested that the Paralympics should remove all limits and "let them go nuts" exploring what humans can do.

Closer to home, she recently had a baby; pregnancy was, for her, an awful experience. It would have been so much nicer to just outsource the whole thing, to grow the baby in a vat. This kind of conversation makes people nervous, but we are going to have to have those hard conversations. We need to embrace the changes that are coming.

Toward the world we want

We should be aiming for global citizenship. She asked the audience whether they felt that their ideas were reflected by their government; few hands were raised. A while back, French President Nicolas Sarkozy gave a speech about how amazing the Internet is. He then spent a lot of time talking about how the government, as the sole representative of the French people, must regulate the Internet. But governments are not our only representative; we are good at representing our own rights.

In the free-software and open-knowledge communities, we are the pioneers, building the operating system for our fellow humans. As we do so, we are obligated to work to make the world a better place. As geeks, we are good at routing around damage, but others are not so fortunate. We are going to have to be asking the hard questions; the coming artificial-intelligence wave is going to raise a lot of ethical issues, for example.

Our community is famous for scratching its own itches, but it is time to start thinking more about systemic change, she said. There is a place for symptomatic relief, but in the end, we want to get rid of the source of the itch. In a similar vein, initiatives like outreach programs are great for dealing with symptoms, but it's still addressing the symptoms. Few in the audience were willing to raise their hands and say that they were part of a truly diverse social group; that is a systemic problem.

There are a number of questions we should all be asking ourselves. Who are we building for, and who are we explicitly not building for? What is the default position in our society? If it is difficult for some people to participate fully, how can we blame them for staying apart? What does it mean to be human, and what do we value in our human society? What unconscious biases and assumptions are we carrying around? How are we helping non-geeks help themselves? And, most importantly, what kind of future do we want to see?

She repeated that we built "all this" and can build it again if need be; we are not limited to what we have now. Our fellow humans are only as free as the tools that they use. We have to expand that freedom, or our ideas will remain on the fringe. A lot of things have fundamentally changed, but a lot of our assumptions, about a closed society dominated by centralized power and scarcity, have not changed accordingly.

Waugh concluded by saying that she believes that our community is the best possible example of the cooperative competition that has brought humanity this far, and of the technical shift that is driving the next stage. We will continue to thrive and do amazing things, but we have to be careful not to bring old baggage along when we are reinventing the world. It is not enough to ensure our own freedom, we have to liberate others. We must, she said, work to build the change that we want to see.

[Your editor would like to thank linux.conf.au and the Linux Foundation for assisting with his travel to the event.]

Index entries for this article
Conference	linux.conf.au/2017

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