This is the first of a classic two part article on understanding the gift economy. We will post the second part next week. It is required reading for all serious students. Reposted from First Monday.

---

The Cathedral and the Bazaar

Eric S. Raymond

Linux is subversive. Who would have thought even five years ago that a world-class operating system could coalesce as if by magic out of part-time hacking by several thousand developers scattered all over the planet, connected only by the tenuous strands of the Internet?

Certainly not I. By the time Linux swam onto my radar screen in early 1993, I had already been involved in Unix and open-source development for ten years. I was one of the first GNU contributors in the mid-1980s. I had released a good deal of open-source software onto the net, developing or co-developing several programs (nethack, Emacs VC and GUD modes, xlife, and others) that are still in wide use today. I thought I knew how it was done.

Linux overturned much of what I thought I knew. I had been preaching the Unix gospel of small tools, rapid prototyping and evolutionary programming for years. But I also believed there was a certain critical complexity above which a more centralized, a priori approach was required. I believed that the most important software (operating systems and really large tools like Emacs) needed to be built like cathedrals, carefully crafted by individual wizards or small bands of mages working in splendid isolation, with no beta to be released before its time.

Linus Torvalds’s style of development – release early and often, delegate everything you can, be open to the point of promiscuity – came as a surprise. No quiet, reverent cathedral-building here – rather, the Linux community seemed to resemble a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches (aptly symbolized by the Linux archive sites, who’d take submissions from anyone) out of which a coherent and stable system could seemingly emerge only by a succession of miracles.

The fact that this bazaar style seemed to work, and work well, came as a distinct shock. As I learned my way around, I worked hard not just at individual projects, but also at trying to understand why the Linux world not only didn’t fly apart in confusion but seemed to go from strength to strength at a speed barely imaginable to cathedral-builders.

By mid-1996 I thought I was beginning to understand. Chance handed me a perfect way to test my theory, in the form of an open-source project which I could consciously try to run in the bazaar style. So I did – and it was a significant success.

In the rest of this article, I’ll tell the story of that project, and I’ll use it to propose some aphorisms about effective open-source development. Not all of these are things I first learned in the Linux world, but we’ll see how the Linux world gives them particular point. If I’m correct, they’ll help you understand exactly what it is that makes the Linux community such a fountain of good software – and help you become more productive yourself.

The Mail Must Get Through

Since 1993 I’d been running the technical side of a small free-access ISP called Chester County InterLink (CCIL) in West Chester, Pennsylvania (I co-founded CCIL and wrote our unique multiuser bulletin-board software – you can check it out by telnetting to locke.ccil.org. Today it supports almost three thousand users on nineteen lines). The job allowed me 24-hour-a-day access to the Internet through CCIL’s 56K line – in fact, it practically demanded it!

Accordingly, I had gotten quite used to instant Internet e-mail. For complicated reasons, it was hard to get SLIP to work between my home machine (snark.thyrsus.com) and CCIL. When I finally succeeded, I found having to periodically telnet over to locke to check my mail annoying. What I wanted was for my mail to be delivered on snark so that I would be notified when it arrived and could handle it using all my local tools.

Simple sendmail forwarding wouldn’t work, because my personal machine isn’t always on the Net and doesn’t have a static IP address. What I needed was a program that would reach out over my SLIP connection and pull across my mail to be delivered locally. I knew such things existed, and that most of them used a simple application protocol called POP (Post Office Protocol). And sure enough, there was already a POP3 server included with locke’s BSD/OS operating system.

I needed a POP3 client. So I went out on the net and found one. Actually, I found three or four. I used pop-perl for a while, but it was missing what seemed an obvious feature, the ability to hack the addresses on fetched mail so replies would work properly.

The problem was this: suppose someone named `joe’ on locke sent me mail. If I fetched the mail to snark and then tried to reply to it, my mailer would cheerfully try to ship it to a nonexistent ‘joe’ on snark. Hand-editing reply addresses to tack on ‘@ccil.org’ quickly got to be a serious pain.

This was clearly something the computer ought to be doing for me. But none of the existing POP clients knew how! And this brings us to the first lesson:

1. Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer’s personal itch.

Perhaps this should have been obvious (it’s long been proverbial that “Necessity is the mother of invention”) but too often software developers spend their days grinding away for pay at programs they neither need nor love. But not in the Linux world – which may explain why the average quality of software originated in the Linux community is so high.

So, did I immediately launch into a furious whirl of coding up a brand-new POP3 client to compete with the existing ones? Not on your life! I looked carefully at the POP utilities I had in hand, asking myself “which one is closest to what I want?”. Because

2. Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse).

While I don’t claim to be a great programmer, I try to imitate one. An important trait of the great ones is constructive laziness. They know that you get an A not for effort but for results, and that it’s almost always easier to start from a good partial solution than from nothing at all.

Linus Torvalds, for example, didn’t actually try to write Linux from scratch. Instead, he started by reusing code and ideas from Minix, a tiny Unix-like OS for 386 machines. Eventually all the Minix code went away or was completely rewritten – but while it was there, it provided scaffolding for the infant that would eventually become Linux.

In the same spirit, I went looking for an existing POP utility that was reasonably well coded, to use as a development base.

The source-sharing tradition of the Unix world has always been friendly to code reuse (this is why the GNU project chose Unix as a base OS, in spite of serious reservations about the OS itself). The Linux world has taken this tradition nearly to its technological limit; it has terabytes of open sources generally available. So spending time looking for some else’s almost-good-enough is more likely to give you good results in the Linux world than anywhere else.

And it did for me. With those I’d found earlier, my second search made up a total of nine candidates – fetchpop, PopTart, get-mail, gwpop, pimp, pop-perl, popc, popmail and upop. The one I first settled on was ‘fetchpop’ by Seung-Hong Oh. I put my header-rewrite feature in it, and made various other improvements which the author accepted into his 1.9 release.

A few weeks later, though, I stumbled across the code for ‘popclient’ by Carl Harris, and found I had a problem. Though fetchpop had some good original ideas in it (such as its daemon mode), it could only handle POP3 and was rather amateurishly coded (Seung-Hong was a bright but inexperienced programmer, and both traits showed). Carl’s code was better, quite professional and solid, but his program lacked several important and rather tricky-to-implement fetchpop features (including those I’d coded myself).

Stay or switch? If I switched, I’d be throwing away the coding I’d already done in exchange for a better development base.

A practical motive to switch was the presence of multiple-protocol support. POP3 is the most commonly used of the post-office server protocols, but not the only one. Fetchpop and the other competition didn’t do POP2, RPOP, or APOP, and I was already having vague thoughts of perhaps adding IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol, the most recently designed and most powerful post-office protocol) just for fun.

But I had a more theoretical reason to think switching might be as good an idea as well, something I learned long before Linux.

3. “Plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow.” (Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month, Chapter 11)

Or, to put it another way, you often don’t really understand the problem until after the first time you implement a solution. The second time, maybe you know enough to do it right. So if you want to get it right, be ready to start over at least once.

Well (I told myself) the changes to fetchpop had been my first try. So I switched.

After I sent my first set of popclient patches to Carl Harris on 25 June 1996, I found out that he had basically lost interest in popclient some time before. The code was a bit dusty, with minor bugs hanging out. I had many changes to make, and we quickly agreed that the logical thing for me to do was take over the program.

Without my actually noticing, the project had escalated. No longer was I just contemplating minor patches to an existing POP client. I took on maintaining an entire one, and there were ideas bubbling in my head that I knew would probably lead to major changes.

In a software culture that encourages code-sharing, this is a natural way for a project to evolve. I was acting out this:

4. If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you.

But Carl Harris’s attitude was even more important. He understood that

5. When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor.

Without ever having to discuss it, Carl and I knew we had a common goal of having the best solution out there. The only question for either of us was whether I could establish that I was a safe pair of hands. Once I did that, he acted with grace and dispatch. I hope I will act as well when it comes my turn.

The Importance of Having Users

And so I inherited popclient. Just as importantly, I inherited popclient’s user base. Users are wonderful things to have, and not just because they demonstrate that you’re serving a need, that you’ve done something right. Properly cultivated, they can become co-developers.

Another strength of the Unix tradition, one that Linux pushes to a happy extreme, is that a lot of users are hackers too. Because source code is available, they can be effective hackers. This can be tremendously useful for shortening debugging time. Given a bit of encouragement, your users will diagnose problems, suggest fixes, and help improve the code far more quickly than you could unaided.

6. Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.

The power of this effect is easy to underestimate. In fact, pretty well all of us in the open-source world drastically underestimated how well it would scale up with number of users and against system complexity, until Linus Torvalds showed us differently.

In fact, I think Linus’ cleverest and most consequential hack was not the construction of the Linux kernel itself, but rather his invention of the Linux development model. When I expressed this opinion in his presence once, he smiled and quietly repeated something he has often said: “I’m basically a very lazy person who likes to get credit for things other people actually do.” Lazy like a fox. Or, as Robert Heinlein might have said, too lazy to fail.

In retrospect, one precedent for the methods and success of Linux can be seen in the development of the GNU Emacs Lisp library and Lisp code archives. In contrast to the cathedral-building style of the Emacs C core and most other FSF tools, the evolution of the Lisp code pool was fluid and very user-driven. Ideas and prototype modes were often rewritten three or four times before reaching a stable final form. And loosely-coupled collaborations enabled by the Internet, a la Linux, were frequent.

Indeed, my own most successful single hack previous to fetchmail was probably Emacs VC mode, a Linux-like collaboration by e-mail with three other people, only one of whom (Richard Stallman, the author of Emacs and founder of the Free Software Foundation or FSF) I have met to this day. It was a front-end for SCCS, RCS and later CVS from within Emacs that offered “one-touch” version control operations. It evolved from a tiny, crude sccs.el mode somebody else had written. And the development of VC succeeded because, unlike Emacs itself, Emacs Lisp code could go through release/test/improve generations very quickly.

One unexpected side-effect of FSF’s policy of trying to legally bind code into the GPL is that it becomes procedurally harder for FSF to use the bazaar mode, since they believe they must get a copyright assignment for every individual contribution of more than twenty lines in order to immunize GPLed code from challenge under copyright law. People who copyright using the BSD and MIT X Consortium licenses don’t have this problem; they’re not trying to reserve rights that anyone might have an incentive to challenge.

Release Early, Release Often

Early and frequent releases are a critical part of the Linux development model. Most developers (including me) used to believe this was bad policy for larger than trivial projects, because early versions are almost by definition buggy versions and you don’t want to wear out the patience of your users.

This belief reinforced the general commitment to a cathedral-building style of development. If the overriding objective was for users to see as few bugs as possible, why then you’d only release one every six months (or less often), and work like a dog on debugging between releases. The Emacs C core was developed this way. The Lisp library, in effect, was not – because there were active Lisp archives outside the FSF’s control, where you could go to find new and development code versions independently of Emacs’s release cycle.

The most important of these, the Ohio State elisp archive, anticipated the spirit and many of the features of today’s big Linux archives. But few of us really thought very hard about what we were doing, or about what the very existence of that archive suggested about problems in FSF’s cathedral-building development model. I made one serious attempt around 1992 to get a lot of the Ohio code formally merged into the official Emacs Lisp library. I ran into political trouble and was largely unsuccessful.

But by a year later, as Linux became widely visible, it was clear that something different and much healthier was going on there. Linus’ open development policy was the very opposite of cathedral-building. The sunsite and tsx-11 archives were burgeoning, multiple distributions were being floated. And all of this was driven by an unheard-of frequency of core system releases.

Linus was treating his users as co-developers in the most effective possible way:

7. Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.

Linus’ innovation wasn’t so much in doing this (something like it had been Unix-world tradition for a long time), but in scaling it up to a level of intensity that matched the complexity of what he was developing. In those early times (around 1991) it wasn’t unknown for him to release a new kernel more than once a day! Because he cultivated his base of co-developers and leveraged the Internet for collaboration harder than anyone else, this worked.

But how did it work? And was it something I could duplicate, or did it rely on some unique genius of Linus Torvalds?

I didn’t think so. Granted, Linus is a damn fine hacker (how many of us could engineer an entire production-quality operating system kernel?). But Linux didn’t represent any awesome conceptual leap forward. Linus is not (or at least, not yet) an innovative genius of design in the way that, say, Richard Stallman or James Gosling (of NeWS and Java) are. Rather, Linus seems to me to be a genius of engineering, with a sixth sense for avoiding bugs and development dead-ends and a true knack for finding the minimum-effort path from point A to point B. Indeed, the whole design of Linux breathes this quality and mirrors Linus’ essentially conservative and simplifying design approach.

So, if rapid releases and leveraging the Internet medium to the hilt were not accidents but integral parts of Linus’ engineering-genius insight into the minimum-effort path, what was he maximizing? What was he cranking out of the machinery?

Put that way, the question answers itself. Linus was keeping his hacker/users constantly stimulated and rewarded – stimulated by the prospect of having an ego-satisfying piece of the action, rewarded by the sight of constant (even daily) improvement in their work.

Linus was directly aiming to maximize the number of person-hours thrown at debugging and development, even at the possible cost of instability in the code and user-base burnout if any serious bug proved intractable. Linus was behaving as though he believed something like this:

8. Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone.

Or, less formally, “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” I dub this: “Linus’ Law”.

My original formulation was that every problem “will be transparent to somebody”. Linus demurred that the person who understands and fixes the problem is not necessarily or even usually the person who first characterizes it. “Somebody finds the problem”, he says, “and somebody else understands it. And I’ll go on record as saying that finding it is the bigger challenge.” But the point is that both things tend to happen quickly.

Here, I think, is the core difference underlying the cathedral-builder and bazaar styles. In the cathedral-builder view of programming, bugs and development problems are tricky, insidious, deep phenomena. It takes months of scrutiny by a dedicated few to develop confidence that you’ve winkled them all out. Thus the long release intervals, and the inevitable disappointment when long-awaited releases are not perfect.

In the bazaar view, on the other hand, you assume that bugs are generally shallow phenomena – or, at least, that they turn shallow pretty quick when exposed to a thousand eager co-developers pounding on every single new release. Accordingly you release often in order to get more corrections, and as a beneficial side effect you have less to lose if an occasional botch gets out the door.

And that’s it. That’s enough. If “Linus’ Law” is false, then any system as complex as the Linux kernel, being hacked over by as many hands as the Linux kernel, should at some point have collapsed under the weight of unforseen bad interactions and undiscovered “deep” bugs. If it’s true, on the other hand, it is sufficient to explain Linux’s relative lack of bugginess.

And maybe it shouldn’t have been such a surprise, at that. Sociologists years ago discovered that the averaged opinion of a mass of equally expert (or equally ignorant) observers is quite a bit more reliable a predictor than that of a single randomly-chosen one of the observers. They called this the “Delphi effect”. It appears that what Linus has shown is that this applies even to debugging an operating system – that the Delphi effect can tame development complexity even at the complexity level of an OS kernel.

I am indebted to Jeff Dutky <dutky@wam.umd.edu> for pointing out that Linus’ Law can be rephrased as “Debugging is parallelizable”. Jeff observes that although debugging requires debuggers to communicate with some coordinating developer, it doesn’t require significant coordination between debuggers. Thus it doesn’t fall prey to the same quadratic complexity and management costs that make adding developers problematic.

In practice, the theoretical loss of efficiency due to duplication of work by debuggers almost never seems to be an issue in the Linux world. One effect of a “release early and often policy” is to minimize such duplication by propagating fed-back fixes quickly.

Brooks even made an off-hand observation related to Jeff’s: “The total cost of maintaining a widely used program is typically 40 percent or more of the cost of developing it. Surprisingly this cost is strongly affected by the number of users. More users find more bugs“. (my emphasis).

More users find more bugs because adding more users adds more different ways of stressing the program. This effect is amplified when the users are co-developers. Each one approaches the task of bug characterization with a slightly different perceptual set and analytical toolkit, a different angle on the problem. The “Delphi effect” seems to work precisely because of this variation. In the specific context of debugging, the variation also tends to reduce duplication of effort.

So adding more beta-testers may not reduce the complexity of the current “deepest” bug from the developer’s point of view, but it increases the probability that someone’s toolkit will be matched to the problem in such a way that the bug is shallow to that person.

Linus coppers his bets, too. In case there are serious bugs, Linux kernel version are numbered in such a way that potential users can make a choice either to run the last version designated “stable” or to ride the cutting edge and risk bugs in order to get new features. This tactic is not yet formally imitated by most Linux hackers, but perhaps it should be; the fact that either choice is available makes both more attractive.

When Is A Rose Not A Rose?

Having studied Linus’ behavior and formed a theory about why it was successful, I made a conscious decision to test this theory on my new (admittedly much less complex and ambitious) project.

But the first thing I did was reorganize and simplify popclient a lot. Carl Harris’s implementation was very sound, but exhibited a kind of unnecessary complexity common to many C programmers. He treated the code as central and the data structures as support for the code. As a result, the code was beautiful but the data structure design ad-hoc and rather ugly (at least by the high standards of this old LISP hacker).

I had another purpose for rewriting besides improving the code and the data structure design, however. That was to evolve it into something I understood completely. It’s no fun to be responsible for fixing bugs in a program you don’t understand.

For the first month or so, then, I was simply following out the implications of Carl’s basic design. The first serious change I made was to add IMAP support. I did this by reorganizing the protocol machines into a generic driver and three method tables (for POP2, POP3, and IMAP). This and the previous changes illustrate a general principle that’s good for programmers to keep in mind, especially in languages like C that don’t naturally do dynamic typing:

9. Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around.

Brooks, Chapter 9: “Show me your [code] and conceal your [data structures], and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your [data structures], and I won't usually need your [code]; it'll be obvious."

Actually, he said "flowcharts" and "tables". But allowing for thirty years of terminological/cultural shift, it's almost the same point.

At this point (early September 1996, about six weeks from zero) I started thinking that a name change might be in order - after all, it wasn't just a POP client any more. But I hesitated, because there was as yet nothing genuinely new in the design. My version of popclient had yet to develop an identity of its own.

That changed, radically, when fetchmail learned how to forward fetched mail to the SMTP port. I'll get to that in a moment. But first: I said above that I'd decided to use this project to test my theory about what Linus Torvalds had done right. How (you may well ask) did I do that? In these ways:

1. I released early and often (almost never less often than every ten days; during periods of intense development, once a day).
2. I grew my beta list by adding to it everyone who contacted me about fetchmail.
3. I sent chatty announcements to the beta list whenever I released, encouraging people to participate.
4. And I listened to my beta testers, polling them about design decisions and stroking them whenever they sent in patches and feedback.

The payoff from these simple measures was immediate. From the beginning of the project, I got bug reports of a quality most developers would kill for, often with good fixes attached. I got thoughtful criticism, I got fan mail, I got intelligent feature suggestions. Which leads to:

10. If you treat your beta-testers as if they're your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource.

One interesting measure of fetchmail's success is the sheer size of the project beta list, fetchmail-friends. At time of writing it has 249 members and is adding two or three a week.

Actually, as I revise in late May 1997 the list is beginning to lose members from its high of close to 300 for an interesting reason. Several people have asked me to unsubscribe them because fetchmail is working so well for them that they no longer need to see the list traffic! Perhaps this is part of the normal life-cycle of a mature bazaar-style project.

Popclient becomes Fetchmail

The real turning point in the project was when Harry Hochheiser sent me his scratch code for forwarding mail to the client machine's SMTP port. I realized almost immediately that a reliable implementation of this feature would make all the other delivery modes next to obsolete.

For many weeks I had been tweaking fetchmail rather incrementally while feeling like the interface design was serviceable but grubby - inelegant and with too many exiguous options hanging out all over. The options to dump fetched mail to a mailbox file or standard output particularly bothered me, but I couldn't figure out why.

What I saw when I thought about SMTP forwarding was that popclient had been trying to do too many things. It had been designed to be both a mail transport agent (MTA) and a local delivery agent (MDA). With SMTP forwarding, it could get out of the MDA business and be a pure MTA, handing off mail to other programs for local delivery just as sendmail does.

Why mess with all the complexity of configuring a mail delivery agent or setting up lock-and-append on a mailbox when port 25 is almost guaranteed to be there on any platform with TCP/IP support in the first place? Especially when this means retrieved mail is guaranteed to look like normal sender-initiated SMTP mail, which is really what we want anyway.

There are several lessons here. First, this SMTP-forwarding idea was the biggest single payoff I got from consciously trying to emulate Linus' methods. A user gave me this terrific idea - all I had to do was understand the implications.

11. The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better.

Interestingly enough, you will quickly find that if you are completely and self-deprecatingly truthful about how much you owe other people, the world at large will treat you like you did every bit of the invention yourself and are just being becomingly modest about your innate genius. We can all see how well this worked for Linus!

(When I gave this paper at the Perl conference in August 1997, Larry Wall was in the front row. As I got to the last line above he called out, religious-revival style, "Tell, it, tell it, brother!". The whole audience laughed, because they knew it had worked for the inventor of Perl too.)

After a very few weeks of running the project in the same spirit, I began to get similar praise not just from my users but from other people to whom the word leaked out. I stashed away some of that e-mail; I'll look at it again sometime if I ever start wondering whether my life has been worthwhile .

But there are two more fundamental, non-political lessons here that are general to all kinds of design.

12. Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong.

I had been trying to solve the wrong problem by continuing to develop popclient as a combined MTA/MDA with all kinds of funky local delivery modes. Fetchmail's design needed to be rethought from the ground up as a pure MTA, a part of the normal SMTP-speaking Internet mail path.

When you hit a wall in development - when you find yourself hard put to think past the next patch - it's often time to ask not whether you've got the right answer, but whether you're asking the right question. Perhaps the problem needs to be reframed.

Well, I had reframed my problem. Clearly, the right thing to do was (1) hack SMTP forwarding support into the generic driver, (2) make it the default mode, and (3) eventually throw out all the other delivery modes, especially the deliver-to-file and deliver-to-standard-output options.

I hesitated over step 3 for some time, fearing to upset long-time popclient users dependent on the alternate delivery mechanisms. In theory, they could immediately switch to .forward files or their non-sendmail equivalents to get the same effects. In practice the transition might have been messy.

But when I did it, the benefits proved huge. The cruftiest parts of the driver code vanished. Configuration got radically simpler - no more grovelling around for the system MDA and user's mailbox, no more worries about whether the underlying OS supports file locking.

Also, the only way to lose mail vanished. If you specified delivery to a file and the disk got full, your mail got lost. This can't happen with SMTP forwarding because your SMTP listener won't return OK unless the message can be delivered or at least spooled for later delivery.

Also, performance improved (though not so you'd notice it in a single run). Another not insignificant benefit of this change was that the manual page got a lot simpler.

Later, I had to bring delivery via a user-specified local MDA back in order to allow handling of some obscure situations involving dynamic SLIP. But I found a much simpler way to do it.

The moral? Don't hesitate to throw away superannuated features when you can do it without loss of effectiveness. Antoine de Saint-Exupery (who was an aviator and aircraft designer when he wasn't being the author of classic children's books) said:

13. "Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away."

When your code is getting both better and simpler, that is when you know it's right. And in the process, the fetchmail design acquired an identity of its own, different from the ancestral popclient.

It was time for the name change. The new design looked much more like a dual of sendmail than the old popclient had; both are MTAs, but where sendmail pushes then delivers, the new popclient pulls then delivers. So, two months off the blocks, I renamed it fetchmail.

Fetchmail Grows Up

There I was with a neat and innovative design, code that I knew worked well because I used it every day, and a burgeoning beta list. It gradually dawned on me that I was no longer engaged in a trivial personal hack that might happen to be useful to few other people. I had my hands on a program every hacker with a Unix box and a SLIP/PPP mail connection really needs.

With the SMTP forwarding feature, it pulled far enough in front of the competition to potentially become a "category killer", one of those classic programs that fills its niche so competently that the alternatives are not just discarded but almost forgotten.

I think you can't really aim or plan for a result like this. You have to get pulled into it by design ideas so powerful that afterward the results just seem inevitable, natural, even foreordained. The only way to try for ideas like that is by having lots of ideas - or by having the engineering judgment to take other peoples' good ideas beyond where the originators thought they could go.

Andrew Tanenbaum had the original idea to build a simple native Unix for the 386, for use as a teaching tool. Linus Torvalds pushed the Minix concept further than Andrew probably thought it could go - and it grew into something wonderful. In the same way (though on a smaller scale), I took some ideas by Carl Harris and Harry Hochheiser and pushed them hard. We were not 'original' in the romantic way people think is genius. But then, most science and engineering and software development isn't done by original genius, hacker mythology to the contrary.

The results were pretty heady stuff all the same - in fact, just the kind of success every hacker lives for! And they meant I would have to set my standards even higher. To make fetchmail as good as I now saw it could be, I'd have to write not just for my own needs, but also include and support features necessary to others but outside my orbit. And do that while keeping the program simple and robust.

The first and overwhelmingly most important feature I wrote after realizing this was multidrop support - the ability to fetch mail from mailboxes that had accumulated all mail for a group of users, and then route each piece of mail to its individual recipients.

I decided to add the multidrop support partly because some users were clamoring for it, but mostly because I thought it would shake bugs out of the single-drop code by forcing me to deal with addressing in full generality. And so it proved. Getting RFC 822 parsing right took me a remarkably long time, not because any individual piece of it is hard but because it involved a pile of interdependent and fussy details.

But multidrop addressing turned out to be an excellent design decision as well. Here's how I knew:

14. Any tool should be useful in the expected way, but a truly great tool lends itself to uses you never expected.

The unexpected use for multi-drop fetchmail is to run mailing lists with the list kept, and alias expansion done, on the client side of the SLIP/PPP connection. This means someone running a personal machine through an ISP account can manage a mailing list without continuing access to the ISP's alias files.

Another important change demanded by my beta testers was support for 8-bit MIME operation. This was pretty easy to do, because I had been careful to keep the code 8-bit clean. Not because I anticipated the demand for this feature, but rather in obedience to another rule:

15. When writing gateway software of any kind, take pains to disturb the data stream as little as possible - and *never* throw away information unless the recipient forces you to!

Had I not obeyed this rule, 8-bit MIME support would have been difficult and buggy. As it was, all I had to do is read RFC 1652 and add a trivial bit of header-generation logic.

Some European users bugged me into adding an option to limit the number of messages retrieved per session (so they can control costs from their expensive phone networks). I resisted this for a long time, and I'm still not entirely happy about it. But if you're writing for the world, you have to listen to your customers - this doesn't change just because they're not paying you in money.

A Few More Lessons From Fetchmail

Before we go back to general software-engineering issues, there are a couple more specific lessons from the fetchmail experience to ponder.

The rc file syntax includes optional 'noise' keywords that are entirely ignored by the parser. The English-like syntax they allow is considerably more readable than the traditional terse keyword-value pairs you get when you strip them all out.

These started out as a late-night experiment when I noticed how much the rc file declarations were beginning to resemble an imperative minilanguage. (This is also why I changed the original popclient `server' keyword to 'poll').

It seemed to me that trying to make that imperative minilanguage more like English might make it easier to use. Now, although I'm a convinced partisan of the "make it a language" school of design as exemplified by Emacs and HTML and many database engines, I am not normally a big fan of "English-like" syntaxes.

Traditionally programmers have tended to favor control syntaxes that are very precise and compact and have no redundancy at all. This is a cultural legacy from when computing resources were expensive, so parsing stages had to be as cheap and simple as possible. English, with about 50% redundancy, looked like a very inappropriate model then.

This is not my reason for normally avoiding English-like syntaxes; I mention it here only to demolish it. With cheap cycles and core, terseness should not be an end in itself. Nowadays it's more important for a language to be convenient for humans than to be cheap for the computer.

There are, however, good reasons to be wary. One is the complexity cost of the parsing stage - you don't want to raise that to the point where it's a significant source of bugs and user confusion in itself. Another is that trying to make a language syntax English-like often demands that the "English" it speaks be bent seriously out of shape, so much so that the superficial resemblance to natural language is as confusing as a traditional syntax would have been. (You see this in a lot of so-called "fourth generation" and commercial database-query languages.)

The fetchmail control syntax seems to avoid these problems because the language domain is extremely restricted. It's nowhere near a general-purpose language; the things it says simply are not very complicated, so there's little potential for confusion in moving mentally between a tiny subset of English and the actual control language. I think there may be a wider lesson here:

16. When your language is nowhere near Turing-complete, syntactic sugar can be your friend.

Another lesson is about security by obscurity. Some fetchmail users asked me to change the software to store passwords encrypted in the rc file, so snoopers wouldn't be able to casually see them.

I didn't do it, because this doesn't actually add protection. Anyone who's acquired permissions to read your rc file will be able to run fetchmail as you anyway - and if it's your password they're after, they'd be able to rip the necessary decoder out of the fetchmail code itself to get it.

All .fetchmailrc password encryption would have done is give a false sense of security to people who don't think very hard. The general rule here is:

17. A security system is only as secure as its secret. Beware of pseudo-secrets.

Necessary Preconditions for the Bazaar Style

Early reviewers and test audiences for this paper consistently raised questions about the preconditions for successful bazaar-style development, including both the qualifications of the project leader and the state of code at the time one goes public and starts to try to build a co-developer community.

It's fairly clear that one cannot code from the ground up in bazaar style. One can test, debug and improve in bazaar style, but it would be very hard to originate a project in bazaar mode. Linus didn't try it. I didn't either. Your nascent developer community needs to have something runnable and testable to play with.

When you start community-building, what you need to be able to present is a plausible promise. Your program doesn't have to work particularly well. It can be crude, buggy, incomplete, and poorly documented. What it must not fail to do is convince potential co-developers that it can be evolved into something really neat in the foreseeable future.

Linux and fetchmail both went public with strong, attractive basic designs. Many people thinking about the bazaar model as I have presented it have correctly considered this critical, then jumped from it to the conclusion that a high degree of design intuition and cleverness in the project leader is indispensable.

But Linus got his design from Unix. I got mine initially from the ancestral popclient (though it would later change a great deal, much more proportionately speaking than has Linux). So does the leader/coordinator for a bazaar-style effort really have to have exceptional design talent, or can he get by on leveraging the design talent of others?

I think it is not critical that the coordinator be able to originate designs of exceptional brilliance, but it is absolutely critical that the coordinator be able to recognize good design ideas from others.

Both the Linux and fetchmail projects show evidence of this. Linus, while not (as previously discussed) a spectacularly original designer, has displayed a powerful knack for recognizing good design and integrating it into the Linux kernel. And I have already described how the single most powerful design idea in fetchmail (SMTP forwarding) came from somebody else.

Early audiences of this paper complimented me by suggesting that I am prone to undervalue design originality in bazaar projects because I have a lot of it myself, and therefore take it for granted. There may be some truth to this; design (as opposed to coding or debugging) is certainly my strongest skill.

But the problem with being clever and original in software design is that it gets to be a habit - you start reflexively making things cute and complicated when you should be keeping them robust and simple. I have had projects crash on me because I made this mistake, but I managed not to with fetchmail.

So I believe the fetchmail project succeeded partly because I restrained my tendency to be clever; this argues (at least) against design originality being essential for successful bazaar projects. And consider Linux. Suppose Linus Torvalds had been trying to pull off fundamental innovations in operating system design during the development; does it seem at all likely that the resulting kernel would be as stable and successful as what we have?

A certain base level of design and coding skill is required, of course, but I expect almost anybody seriously thinking of launching a bazaar effort will already be above that minimum. The open-source community's internal market in reputation exerts subtle pressure on people not to launch development efforts they're not competent to follow through on. So far this seems to have worked pretty well.

There is another kind of skill not normally associated with software development which I think is as important as design cleverness to bazaar projects - and it may be more important. A bazaar project coordinator or leader must have good people and communications skills.

This should be obvious. In order to build a development community, you need to attract people, interest them in what you're doing, and keep them happy about the amount of work they're doing. Technical sizzle will go a long way towards accomplishing this, but it's far from the whole story. The personality you project matters, too.

It is not a coincidence that Linus is a nice guy who makes people like him and want to help him. It's not a coincidence that I'm an energetic extrovert who enjoys working a crowd and has some of the delivery and instincts of a stand-up comic. To make the bazaar model work, it helps enormously if you have at least a little skill at charming people.

The Social Context of Open-Source Software

It is truly written: the best hacks start out as personal solutions to the author's everyday problems, and spread because the problem turns out to be typical for a large class of users. This takes us back to the matter of rule 1, restated in a perhaps more useful way:

18. To solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that is interesting to you.

So it was with Carl Harris and the ancestral popclient, and so with me and fetchmail. But this has been understood for a long time. The interesting point, the point that the histories of Linux and fetchmail seem to demand we focus on, is the next stage - the evolution of software in the presence of a large and active community of users and co-developers.

In The Mythical Man-Month, Fred Brooks observed that programmer time is not fungible; adding developers to a late software project makes it later. He argued that the complexity and communication costs of a project rise with the square of the number of developers, while work done only rises linearly. This claim has since become known as "Brooks's Law" and is widely regarded as a truism. But if Brooks's Law were the whole picture, Linux would be impossible.

A few years later Gerald Weinberg's classic The Psychology Of Computer Programming supplied what, in hindsight, we can see as a vital correction to Brooks. In his discussion of "egoless programming", Weinberg observed that in shops where developers are not territorial about their code, and encourage other people to look for bugs and potential improvements in it, improvement happens dramatically faster than elsewhere.

Weinberg's choice of terminology has perhaps prevented his analysis from gaining the acceptance it deserved - one has to smile at the thought of describing Internet hackers as "egoless". But I think his argument looks more compelling today than ever.

The history of Unix should have prepared us for what we're learning from Linux (and what I've verified experimentally on a smaller scale by deliberately copying Linus' methods). That is, that while coding remains an essentially solitary activity, the really great hacks come from harnessing the attention and brainpower of entire communities. The developer who uses only his or her own brain in a closed project is going to fall behind the developer who knows how to create an open, evolutionary context in which bug-spotting and improvements get done by hundreds of people.

But the traditional Unix world was prevented from pushing this approach to the ultimate by several factors. One was the legal contraints of various licenses, trade secrets, and commercial interests. Another (in hindsight) was that the Internet wasn't yet good enough.

Before cheap Internet, there were some geographically compact communities where the culture encouraged Weinberg's "egoless" programming, and a developer could easily attract a lot of skilled kibitzers and co-developers. Bell Labs, the MIT AI Lab, UC Berkeley - these became the home of innovations that are legendary and still potent.

Linux was the first project to make a conscious and successful effort to use the entire world as its talent pool. I don't think it's a coincidence that the gestation period of Linux coincided with the birth of the World Wide Web, and that Linux left its infancy during the same period in 1993-1994 that saw the takeoff of the ISP industry and the explosion of mainstream interest in the Internet. Linus was the first person who learned how to play by the new rules that pervasive Internet made possible.

While cheap Internet was a necessary condition for the Linux model to evolve, I think it was not by itself a sufficient condition. Another vital factor was the development of a leadership style and set of cooperative customs that could allow developers to attract co-developers and get maximum leverage out of the medium.

But what is this leadership style and what are these customs? They cannot be based on power relationships - and even if they could be, leadership by coercion would not produce the results we see. Weinberg quotes the autobiography of the 19th-century Russian anarchist Pyotr Alexeyvich Kropotkin's "Memoirs of a Revolutionist" to good effect on this subject:

"Having been brought up in a serf-owner's family, I entered active life, like all young men of my time, with a great deal of confidence in the necessity of commanding, ordering, scolding, punishing and the like. But when, at an early stage, I had to manage serious enterprises and to deal with [free] men, and when each mistake would lead at once to heavy consequences, I began to appreciate the difference between acting on the principle of command and discipline and acting on the principle of common understanding. The former works admirably in a military parade, but it is worth nothing where real life is concerned, and the aim can be achieved only through the severe effort of many converging wills."

The "severe effort of many converging wills" is precisely what a project like Linux requires - and the "principle of command" is effectively impossible to apply among volunteers in the anarchist's paradise we call the Internet. To operate and compete effectively, hackers who want to lead collaborative projects have to learn how to recruit and energize effective communities of interest in the mode vaguely suggested by Kropotkin's "principle of understanding". They must learn to use Linus' Law.

Earlier I referred to the "Delphi effect" as a possible explanation for Linus' Law. But more powerful analogies to adaptive systems in biology and economics also irresistably suggest themselves. The Linux world behaves in many respects like a free market or an ecology, a collection of selfish agents attempting to maximize utility which in the process produces a self-correcting spontaneous order more elaborate and efficient than any amount of central planning could have achieved. Here, then, is the place to seek the "principle of understanding".

The "utility function" Linux hackers are maximizing is not classically economic, but is the intangible of their own ego satisfaction and reputation among other hackers. (One may call their motivation "altruistic", but this ignores the fact that altruism is itself a form of ego satisfaction for the altruist). Voluntary cultures that work this way are not actually uncommon; one other in which I have long participated is science fiction fandom, which unlike hackerdom explicitly recognizes "egoboo" (the enhancement of one's reputation among other fans) as the basic drive behind volunteer activity.

Linus, by successfully positioning himself as the gatekeeper of a project in which the development is mostly done by others, and nurturing interest in the project until it became self-sustaining, has shown an acute grasp of Kropotkin's "principle of shared understanding". This quasi-economic view of the Linux world enables us to see how that understanding is applied.

We may view Linus' method as a way to create an efficient market in "egoboo" - to connect the selfishness of individual hackers as firmly as possible to difficult ends that can only be achieved by sustained cooperation. With the fetchmail project I have shown (albeit on a smaller scale) that his methods can be duplicated with good results. Perhaps I have even done it a bit more consciously and systematically than he.

Many people (especially those who politically distrust free markets) would expect a culture of self-directed egoists to be fragmented, territorial, wasteful, secretive, and hostile. But this expectation is clearly falsified by (to give just one example) the stunning variety, quality and depth of Linux documentation. It is a hallowed given that programmers hate documenting; how is it, then, that Linux hackers generate so much of it? Evidently Linux's free market in egoboo works better to produce virtuous, other-directed behavior than the massively-funded documentation shops of commercial software producers.

Both the fetchmail and Linux kernel projects show that by properly rewarding the egos of many other hackers, a strong developer/coordinator can use the Internet to capture the benefits of having lots of co-developers without having a project collapse into a chaotic mess. So to Brooks's Law I counter-propose the following:

19: Provided the development coordinator has a medium at least as good as the Internet, and knows how to lead without coercion, many heads are inevitably better than one.

I think the future of open-source software will increasingly belong to people who know how to play Linus' game, people who leave behind the cathedral and embrace the bazaar. This is not to say that individual vision and brilliance will no longer matter; rather, I think that the cutting edge of open-source software will belong to people who start from individual vision and brilliance, then amplify it through the effective construction of voluntary communities of interest.

And perhaps not only the future of open-source software. No commercial developer can match the pool of talent the Linux community can bring to bear on a problem. Very few could afford even to hire the more than two hundred people who have contributed to fetchmail!

Perhaps in the end the open-source culture will triumph not because cooperation is morally right or software "hoarding" is morally wrong (assuming you believe the latter, which neither Linus nor I do), but simply because the commercial world cannot win an evolutionary arms race with open-source communities that can put orders of magnitude more skilled time into a problem.

Acknowledgements

This paper was improved by conversations with a large number of people who helped debug it. Particular thanks to Jeff Dutky <dutky@wam.umd.edu>, who suggested the "debugging is parallelizable" formulation, and helped developed the analysis that proceeds from it. Also to Nancy Lebovitz <nancyl@universe.digex.net> for her suggestion that I emulate Weinberg by quoting Kropotkin. Perceptive criticisms also came from Joan Eslinger <wombat@kilimanjaro.engr.sgi.com> and Marty Franz <marty@net-link.net> of the General Technics list. Paul Eggert <eggert@twinsun.com> noticed the conflict between GPL and the bazaar model. I'm grateful to the members of PLUG, the Philadelphia Linux User's group, for providing the first test audience for the first public version of this paper. Finally, Linus Torvalds's comments were helpful and his early endorsement very encouraging.

For Further Reading

I quoted several bits from Frederick P. Brooks's classic The Mythical Man-Month because, in many respects, his insights have yet to be improved upon. I heartily recommend the 25th Anniversary addition from Addison-Wesley (ISBN 0-201-83595-9), which adds his 1986 "No Silver Bullet" paper.

The new edition is wrapped up by an invaluable 20-years-later retrospective in which Brooks forthrightly admits to the few judgements in the original text which have not stood the test of time. I first read the retrospective after this paper was substantially complete, and was surprised to discover that Brooks attributes bazaar-like practices to Microsoft!

Gerald P. Weinberg's The Psychology Of Computer Programming (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1971) introduced the rather unfortunately-labeled concept of "egoless programming". While he was nowhere near the first person to realize the futility of the "principle of command", he was probably the first to recognize and argue the point in particular connection with software development.

Richard P. Gabriel, contemplating the Unix culture of the pre-Linux era, reluctantly argued for the superiority of a primitive bazaar-like model in his 1989 paper Lisp: Good News, Bad News, and How To Win Big. Though dated in some respects, this essay is still rightly celebrated among Lisp fans (including me). A correspondent reminded me that the section titled "Worse Is Better" reads almost as an anticipation of Linux. The paper is accessible on the World Wide Web at http://alp ha-bits.ai.mit.edu/articles/good-news/good-news.html.

De Marco and Lister's Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams (New York: Dorset House, 1987; ISBN 0-932633-05-6) is an underappreciated gem which I was delighted to see Fred Brooks cite in his retrospective. While little of what the authors have to say is directly applicable to the Linux or free-software communities, the authors' insight into the conditions necessary for creative work is acute and worthwhile for anyone attempting to import some of the bazaar model's virtues into a more commercial context.

Finally, I must admit that I very nearly called this paper "The Cathedral and the Agora", the latter term being the Greek for an open market or public meeting place. The seminal "agoric systems" papers by Mark Miller and Eric Drexler, by describing the emergent properties of market-like computational ecologies, helped prepare me to think clearly about analogous phenomena in the free-software culture when Linux rubbed my nose in them five years later. These papers are available on the Web at http://www.agorics.com/agorpapers. html.

Epilog: Netscape Embraces the Bazaar!

It's a strange feeling to realize you're helping make history ... .

On January 22 1998, approximately seven months after I first published this paper, Netscape Communications, Inc. announced plans to give away the source for Netscape Communicator. I had had no clue this was going to happen before the day of the announcement.

Eric Hahn, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Netscape, wrote me shortly afterwards as follows: "On behalf of everyone at Netscape, I want to thank you for helping us get to this point in the first place. Your thinking and writings were fundamental inspirations to our decision."

The following week I flew out to Silicon Valley at Netscape's invitation for a day-long strategy conference (on Feb 4 1998) with some of their top executives and technical people. We designed Netscape's source-release strategy and license together, and laid some more plans that we hope will eventually have far-reaching and positive impacts on the open-source community. As I write, it is a bit too soon to be more specific; but details should be forthcoming within weeks.

Netscape is about to provide us with a large-scale, real-world test of the bazaar model in the commercial world. The open-source culture now faces a danger; if Netscape's execution doesn't work, the open-source concept may be so discredited that the commercial world won't touch it again for another decade.

On the other hand, this is also a spectacular opportunity. Initial reaction to the move on Wall Street and elsewhere has been cautiously positive. We're being given a chance to prove ourselves, too. If Netscape regains substantial market share through this move, it just may set off a long-overdue revolution in the computer industry.

The next year should be a very instructive and interesting time.

Version and Change History

$Id: cathedral-bazaar.sgml,v 1.33 1998/02/16 18:22:42 esr Exp $

I gave 1.16 at the Linux Kongress, May 21 1997.

I added the bibliography July 7 1997 in 1.20.

I added the Perl Conference anecdote November 18 1997 in 1.27.

I changed "free software" to "open source" February 9 1998 in 1.29.

I added "Epilog: Netscape Embraces the Bazaar!" on February 10 1998 in 1.31

Other revision levels incorporate minor editorial and markup fixes.

About the Author

Eric S. Raymond is Co-Founder and Technical Director of Chester County InterLink which provides free Internet access to the residents of Chester County, Pennsylvania. His home page is located at http://www.catb.org/~esr/

E-mail: esr@thyrsus.com

---

Read more about Gift Economy,  GIFTegrity, Read the Scientific Basis for the GIFTegrity, and the Specifications for a GIFTegrity.

 

Reposted from First Monday.

---

The Hi-Tech Gift Economy

Richard Barbrook

During the Sixties, the New Left created a new form of radical politics: anarcho-communism. Above all, the Situationists and similar groups believed that the tribal gift economy proved that individuals could successfully live together without needing either the state or the market. From May 1968 to the late Nineties, this utopian vision of anarcho-communism has inspired community media and DIY culture activists. Within the universities, the gift economy already was the primary method of socialising labour. From its earliest days, the technical structure and social mores of the Net has ignored intellectual property. Although the system has expanded far beyond the university, the self-interest of Net users perpetuates this hi-tech gift economy. As an everyday activity, users circulate free information as e-mail, on listservs, in newsgroups, within on-line conferences and through Web sites. As shown by the Apache and Linux programs, the hi-tech gift economy is even at the forefront of software development. Contrary to the purist vision of the New Left, anarcho-communism on the Net can only exist in a compromised form. Money-commodity and gift relations are not just in conflict with each other, but also co-exist in symbiosis. The ‘New Economy’ of cyberspace is an advanced form of social democracy.

The Legacy of the New Left

“… when … [Ben Slivka] suggested that Microsoft consider giving away its browser, ‡ la Netscape, Gates exploded and called him a ‘communist’ …” [1].

The Net is haunted by the disappointed hopes of the Sixties. Because this new technology symbolises another period of rapid change, many contemporary commentators look back to the stalled revolution of thirty years ago to explain what is happening now. Most famously, the editors of Wired continually pay homage to the New Left values of individual freedom and cultural dissent in their coverage of the Net. However, in their Californian ideology, these ideals of their youth are now going to be realised through technological determinism and free markets. The politics of ecstasy have been replaced by the economics of greed [2].

Ironically, the New Left emerged in response to the ’sell-out’ of an earlier generation. By the end of the Fifties, the heroes of the anti-fascist struggle had become the guardians of Cold War orthodoxies. Even within the arts, avant-garde experimentation had been transformed into fashionable styles of consumer society. The adoption of innovative styles and new techniques was no longer subversive. Frustrated with the recuperation of their parents’ generation, young people started looking for new methods of cultural and social activism. Above all, the Situationists proclaimed that the epoch of the political vanguard and the artistic avant-garde had passed. Instead of following the intellectual elite, everyone should instead determine their own destinies.

“The situation is…made to be lived by its constructors. The role played by a passive…’public’ must constantly diminish, while that played by those who cannot be called actors but rather… ‘livers’ must steadily increase.’ [3]

These New Left activists wanted to create opportunities for everyone to express their own hopes, dreams and desires. The Hegelian ‘grand narrative’ would culminate in the supersession of all mediations separating people from each other. Yet, despite their Hegelian modernism, the Situationists believed that the utopian future had been prefigured in the tribal past. For example, tribes in Polynesia organised themselves around the potlatch: the circulation of gifts. Within these societies, this gift economy bound people together into tribes and encouraged cooperation between different tribes. In contrast with the atomisation and alienation of bourgeois society, potlatches required intimate contacts and emotional authenticity [4]. According to the Situationists, the tribal gift economy demonstrated that individuals could successfully live together without needing either the state or the market. After the New Left revolution, people would recreate this idyllic condition: anarcho-communism [5].

However, the Situationists could not escape from the elitist tradition of the avant-garde. Despite their invocation of Hegel and Marx, the Situationists remained haunted by Nietzsche and Lenin. As in earlier generations, the rhetoric of mass participation simultaneously justified the leadership of the intellectual elite. Anarcho-communism was therefore transformed into the ‘mark of distinction’ for the New Left vanguard. As a consequence, the giving of gifts was seen as the absolute antithesis of market competition. There could be no compromise between tribal authenticity and bourgeois alienation. After the social revolution, the potlatch would completely supplant the commodity [6].

In the two decades following the May 1968 revolution, this purist vision of anarcho-communism inspired community media activists. For instance, the radical ‘free radio’ stations created by New Left militants in France and Italy refused all funding from state and commercial sources. Instead, these projects tried to survive through donations of time and money from their supporters. Emancipatory media supposedly could only be produced within the gift economy [7]. During the late-Seventies, pro-situ attitudes were further popularised by the punk movement. Although rapidly commercialised, this sub-culture did encourage its members to form their own bands, make their own fashions and publish their own fanzines. This participatory ethic still shapes innovatory music and radical politics today. From raves to environmental protests, the spirit of May ‘68 lives on within the DIY culture of the Nineties. The gift is supposedly about to replace the commodity [8].

The Net as Really Existing Anarcho-Communism

Despite originally being invented for the U. S. military, the Net was constructed around the gift economy. The Pentagon initially did try to restrict the unofficial uses of its computer network. However, it soon became obvious that the Net could only be successfully developed by letting its users build the system for themselves. Within the scientific community, the gift economy has long been the primary method of socialising labour. Funded by the state or by donations, scientists don’t have to turn their intellectual work directly into marketable commodities. Instead, research results are publicised by ‘giving a paper’ at specialist conferences and by ‘contributing an article’ to professional journals. The collaboration of many different academics is made possible through the free distribution of information [9].

Within small tribal societies, the circulation of gifts established close personal bonds between people. In contrast, the academic gift economy is used by intellectuals who are spread across the world. Despite the anonymity of the modern version of the gift economy, academics acquire intellectual respect from each other through citations in articles and other forms of public acknowledgement. Scientists therefore can only obtain personal recognition for their individual efforts by openly collaborating with each other through the academic gift economy. Although research is being increasingly commercialised, the giving away of findings remains the most efficient method of solving common problems within a particular scientific discipline [10].

From its earliest days, the free exchange of information has therefore been firmly embedded within the technologies and social mores of cyberspace [11]. When New Left militants proclaimed that ‘information wants to be free’ back in the Sixties, they were preaching to computer scientists who were already living within the academic gift economy. Above all, the founders of the Net never bothered to protect intellectual property within computer-mediated communications. On the contrary, they were developing these new technologies to advance their careers inside the academic gift economy. Far from wanting to enforce copyright, the pioneers of the Net tried to eliminate all barriers to the distribution of scientific research. Technically, every act within cyberspace involves copying material from one computer to another. Once the first copy of a piece of information is placed on the Net, the cost of making each extra copy is almost zero. The architecture of the system presupposes that multiple copies of documents can easily be cached around the network. As Tim Berners-Lee – the inventor of the Web – points out:

“Concepts of intellectual property, central to our culture, are not expressed in a way which maps onto the abstract information space. In an information space, we can consider the authorship of materials, and their perception; but … there is a need for the underlying infrastructure to be able to make copies simply for reasons of [technical] efficiency and reliability. The concept of ‘copyright’ as expressed in terms of copies made makes little sense.” [12]

Within the commercial creative industries, advances in digital reproduction are feared for making the ‘piracy’ of copyright material ever easier. For the owners of intellectual property, the Net can only make the situation worse. In contrast, the academic gift economy welcomes technologies which improve the availability of data. Users should always be able to obtain and manipulate information with the minimum of impediments. The design of the Net therefore assumes that intellectual property is technically and socially obsolete [13].

In France, the nationalised telephone monopoly has accustomed people to paying for the on-line services provided by Minitel. In contrast, the Net remains predominantly a gift economy even though the system has expanded far beyond the university. From scientists through hobbyists to the general public, the charmed circle of users was slowly built up through the adhesion of many localised networks to an agreed set of protocols. Crucially, the common standards of the Net include social conventions as well as technical rules. The giving and receiving of information without payment is almost never questioned. Although the circulation of gifts doesn’t necessarily create emotional obligations between individuals, people are still willing to donate their information to everyone else on the Net. Even selfish reasons encourage people to become anarcho-communists within cyberspace. By adding their own presence, every user contributes to the collective knowledge accessible to those already on-line. In return, each individual has potential access to all the information made available by others within the Net. Everyone takes far more out of the Net than they can ever give away as an individual.

“… the Net is far from altruistic, or it wouldn’t work… Because it takes as much effort to distribute one copy of an original creation as a million … you never lose from letting your product free…as long as you are compensated in return … What a miracle, then, that you receive not one thing in value in exchange – indeed there is no explicit act of exchange at all – but millions of unique goods made by others!” [14]

Despite the commercialisation of cyberspace, the self-interest of Net users ensures that the hi-tech gift economy continues to flourish. For instance, musicians are using the Net for the digital distribution of their recordings to each other. By giving away their own work to this network community, individuals get free access to a far larger amount of music in return. Not surprisingly, the music business is worried about the increased opportunities for the ‘piracy’ of copyrighted recordings over the Net. Sampling, DJ-ing and mixing are already blurring property rights within dance music. However, the greatest threat to the commercial music corporations comes from the flexibility and spontaneity of the hi-tech gift economy. After it is completed, a new track can quickly be made freely available to a global audience. If someone likes the tune, they can download it for personal listening, use it as a sample or make their own remix. Out of the free circulation of information, musicians can form friendships, work together and inspire each other.

“It’s all about doing it for yourself. Better than punk.” [15]

Within the developed world, most politicians and corporate leaders believe that the future of capitalism lies in the commodification of information. Over the last few decades, intellectual property rights have been steadily tightened through new national laws and international agreements. Even human genetic material can now be patented [16]. Yet, at the ‘cutting edge’ of the emerging information society, money-commodity relations play a secondary role to those created by a really existing form of anarcho-communism. For most of its users, the Net is somewhere to work, play, love, learn and discuss with other people. Unrestricted by physical distance, they collaborate with each other without the direct mediation of money or politics. Unconcerned about copyright, they give and receive information without thought of payment. In the absence of states or markets to mediate social bonds, network communities are instead formed through the mutual obligations created by gifts of time and ideas.

“This informal, unwritten social contract is supported by a blend of strong-tie and weak-tie relationships among people who have a mixture of motives and ephemeral affiliations. It requires one to give something, and enables one to receive something. … I find that the help I receive far outweighs the energy I expend helping others; a marriage of altruism and self-interest.” [17]

On the Net, enforcing copyright payments represents the imposition of scarcity on a technical system designed to maximise the dissemination of information. The protection of intellectual property stops all users having access to every source of knowledge. Commercial secrecy prevents people from helping each other to solve common problems. The inflexibility of information commodities inhibits the efficient manipulation of digital data. In contrast, the technical and social structure of the Net has been developed to encourage open cooperation among its participants. As an everyday activity, users are building the system together. Engaged in ‘interactive creativity’, they send e-mail, take part in listservs, contribute to newsgroups, participate within on-line conferences and produce Web sites [18]. Lacking copyright protection, information can be freely adapted to suit the users’ needs. Within the hi-tech gift economy, people successfully work together through “… an open social process involving evaluation, comparison and collaboration.” [19]

The hi-tech gift economy is even at the forefront of software development. For instance, Bill Gates admits that Microsoft’s biggest competitor in the provision of Web servers comes from the Apache program [20]. Instead of being marketed by a commercial company, this program is shareware [21]. Like similar projects, this virtual machine is being continually developed by its techie users. Because its source code is not protected by copyright, the program can be modified, amended and improved by anyone with the appropriate programmingskills. When someone does make a contribution to a shareware project, the gift of their labour is rewarded by recognition within the community of user-developers.

The inflexibility of commodified software programs is compounded by their greater unreliability. Even Microsoft can’t mobilise the amount of labour given to some successful shareware programs by their devotees. Without enough techies looking at a program, all its bugs can never be found [22]. The greater social and technical efficiency of anarcho-communism is therefore inhibiting the commercial take-over of the Net. Shareware programs are now beginning to threaten the core product of the Microsoft empire: the Windows operating system. Starting from the original software program by Linus Torvalds, a community of user-developers are together building their own non-proprietary operating system: Linux. For the first time, Windows has a serious competitor. Anarcho-communism is now the only alternative to the dominance of monopoly capitalism.

“Linux is subversive. Who could have thought even five years ago that a world-class operating system could coalesce as if by magic out of part-time hacking by several thousand developers scattered all over the planet, connected only by the tenuous strands of the Internet?” [23]

The ‘New Economy’ is a Mixed Economy

Following the implosion of the Soviet Union, almost nobody still believes in the inevitable victory of communism. On the contrary, large numbers of people accept that the Hegelian ‘end of history’ has culminated in American neo-liberal capitalism [24]. Yet, at exactly this moment in time, a really existing form of anarcho-communism is being constructed within the Net, especially by people living in the U. S. When they go on-line, almost everyone spends most of their time participating within the gift economy rather than engaging in market competition. Because users receive much more information than they can ever give away, there is no popular clamour for imposing the equal exchange of the marketplace on the Net. Once again, the ‘end of history’ for capitalism appears to be communism.

For the hi-tech gift economy was not an immanent possibility in every age. On the contrary, the market and the state could only be surpassed in this specific sector at this particular historical moment. Crucially, people need sophisticated media, computing and telecommunications technologies to participate within the hi-tech gift economy. A manually-operated press produced copies which were relatively expensive, limited in numbers and impossible to alter without recopying. After generations of technological improvements, the same quantity of text on the Net costs almost nothing to circulate, can be copied as needed and can be remixed at will. In addition, individuals need both time and money to participate within the hi-tech gift economy. While a large number of the world’s population still lives in poverty, people within the industrialised countries have steadily reduced their hours of employment and increased their wealth over a long period of social struggles and economic reorganisations. By working for money during some of the week, people can now enjoy the delights of giving gifts at other times. Only at this particular historical moment have the technical and social conditions of the metropolitan countries developed sufficiently for the emergence of digital anarcho-communism [25].

“Capital thus works towards its own dissolution as the form dominating production.” [26]

The New Left anticipated the emergence of the hi-tech gift economy. People could collaborate with each other without needing either markets or states. However, the New Left had a purist vision of DIY culture: the gift was the absolute antithesis of the commodity. Yet, anarcho-communism only exists in a compromised form on the Net. Contrary to the ethical-aesthetic vision of the New Left, money-commodity and gift relations are not just in conflict with each other, but also co-exist in symbiosis. On the one hand, each method of working does threaten to supplant the other. The hi-tech gift economy heralds the end of private property in ‘cutting edge’ areas of the economy. The digital capitalists want to privatise the shareware programs and enclose the social spaces built through voluntary effort. The potlatch and the commodity remain irreconcilable.

Yet, on the other hand, the gift economy and the commercial sector can only expand through mutual collaboration within cyberspace. The free circulation of information between users relies upon the capitalist production of computers, software and telecommunications. The profits of commercial Net companies depend upon increasing numbers of people participating within the hi-tech gift economy. For instance, Netscape has tried to realise the opportunities opened up by such interdependence from its foundation. Under threat from the Microsoft monopoly, the company has to ally itself with the hacker community to avoid being overwhelmed. It started by distributing its Web browser as a gift. Today the source code of this program is freely available and the development of products for Linux has become a top priority. The commercial survival of Netscape depends upon successfully collaborating with hackers from the hi-tech gift economy. Anarcho-communism is now sponsored by corporate capital [27].

“”Hi there Mr CEO [Chief Executive Officer] – tell me, do you have any strategic problem right now that is bigger than whether Microsoft is going to either crush you or own your soul in a few years? No? You don’t? OK, well, listen carefully then. You cannot survive against Bill Gates [by] playing Bill Gates’ game. To thrive, or even survive, you’re going to have to change the rules …”" [28]

The purity of the digital DIY culture is also compromised by the political system. The state isn’t just the potential censor and regulator of the Net. At the same time, the public sector provides essential support for the hi-tech gift economy. In the past, the founders of the Net never bothered to incorporate intellectual property within the system because their wages were funded from taxation. In the future, governments will have to impose universal service provisions upon commercial telecommunications companies if all sections of society are to have the opportunity to circulate free information. Furthermore, when access is available, many people use the Net for political purposes, including lobbying their political representatives. Within the digital mixed economy, anarcho-communism is also symbiotic with the state.

This miscegenation occurs almost everywhere within cyberspace. For instance, an on-line conference site can be constructed as a labour of love, but still be partially funded by advertising and public money. Crucially, this hybridisation of working methods is not confined within particular projects. When they’re on-line, people constantly pass from one form of social activity to another. For instance, in one session, a Net user could first purchase some clothes from an e-commerce catalogue, then look for information about education services from the local council’s site and then contribute some thoughts to an on-going discussion on a listserver for fiction-writers. Without even consciously having to think about it, this person would have successively been a consumer in a market, a citizen of a state and an anarcho-communist within a gift economy. Far from realising theory in its full purity, working methods on the Net are inevitably compromised. The ‘New Economy’ is an advanced form of social democracy [29].

At the end of the twentieth century, anarcho-communism is no longer confined to avant-garde intellectuals. What was once revolutionary has now become banal. As Net access grows, more and more ordinary people are circulating free information across the Net. Crucially, their potlatches are not attempts to regain a lost emotional authenticity. Far from having any belief in the revolutionary ideals of May ‘68, the overwhelming majority of people participate within the hi-tech gift economy for entirely pragmatic reasons. Sometimes they buy commodities on-line and access state-funded services. However, they usually prefer to circulate gifts amongst each other. Net users will always obtain much more than will ever be contributed in return. By giving away something which is well-made, they will gain recognition from those who download their work. For most people, the gift economy is simply the best method of collaborating together in cyberspace. Within the mixed economy of the Net, anarcho-communism has become an everyday reality.

“We must rediscover the pleasure of giving: giving because you have so much. What beautiful and priceless potlatches the affluent society will see – whether it likes it or not! – when the exuberance of the younger generation discovers the pure gift.” [30]

This article is a remixed extract from The Holy Fools: a critique of the avant-garde in the age of the Net which will be published by Verso Books early in 1999.  Copyright © 1998 First Monday

About the Author

Dr. Richard Barbrook was educated at Cambridge, Essex and Kent universities. During the early Eighties, he was involved in pirate and community radio broadcasting. He helped to set up Spectrum Radio, a multilingual station operating in London, and published extensively on radio issues. In the late Eighties and early Nineties, Richard worked for a research institute at the University of Westminster on media regulation within the EU. This research was later published in Media Freedom: the contradictions of communications in the age of modernity (London: Pluto Press, 1995). For the last few years, Richard has been coordinator of the Hypermedia Research Centre at the University of Westminster and was the first course leader of its MA in Hypermedia Studies. In collaboration with Andy Cameron, he wrote “The Californian Ideology” which was a pioneering critique of the neo-liberal politics of Wired. At present, Richard is completing The Holy Fools: a critique of the avant-garde in the age of the Net for Verso Books. A selection of his writings is available on the Hypermedia Research Centre’s Web site.

E-mail: richard@hrc.wmin.ac.uk
http://www.hrc.wmin.ac.uk/

Notes

1. James Wallace, Overdrive, p. 266.

2. For a critique of the neo-liberal politics of Wired, see Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, “The Californian Ideology.”

3. Guy Debord, “Report on the Construction of Situations and on the International Situationist Tendency’s Conditions of Organisation and Action,” p. 25.

4. The Situationists discovered the tribal gift economy in Marcel Mauss, The Gift.

5. For the historical antecedents of New Left anarcho-communism, see Richard Gombin, Les Origins du Gauchisme, pp. 99-151. For its later influence on the new social movements, see George Katsiaficas, The Imagination of the New Left, pp. 204-212.

6. For instance, in their famous analysis of the 1965 Los Angeles Watts riots, the Situationists praised looting as the revolutionary supersession of money-commodity relations: “… instead of being eternally pursued in the rat race of alienated labour and increasing but unmet social needs, real desires begin to be expressed in festival, in playful self-assertion, in the potlatch of destruction.” Situationist International, “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy,” p. 155.

7. See John Downing, Radical Media.

8. DIY stands for ‘do-it-yourself’. This slogan is used to emphasise the need for people to tackle social problems through collective direct action rather than to wait for someone else to solve them. See Elaine Brass, Sophie Poklewski Koziell and Denise Searle, Gathering Force.

9. See Warren O. Hagstrom, “Gift Giving as an Organisational Principle in Science,” p. 29.

10. This is why the increasing role of private funding can hamper as well as help academic research. See David Noble, “Digital Diploma Mills.”

11. See Mark Geise, “From ARPAnet to the Internet,” pp. 126-132.

12. Tim Berners-Lee, “The World Wide Web: Past, Present and Future,” p. 11.

13. See Neil Kleinman, “Don’t Fence Me In: Copyright, Property and Technology.”

14. Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, “Cooking Pot Markets,” p 10.

15. Steve Elliot of Slug Oven quoted in Karlin Lillington, “No! It’s Not OK, Computer,” page 3. Also see Andrew Leonard, “Mutiny on the Net.”

16. For instance, one of the major components of the 1993 Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was increased protection for patents and copyrights, especially with agriculture and medicine, see John Frow, “Information as Gift and Commodity.”

17. Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community, pp. 57-58.

18. Tim Berners-Lee, “Realising the Full Potential of the Web,” p. 5.

19. Bernard Lang, “Free Software For All,” p. 3.

20. Keith W. Porterfield, “Information Wants to be Valuable,” p. 2.

21. Shareware is also often known as freeware or open source software. All these names emphasise that the program is a gift to anyone on the Net, especially those who have the skills to improve its code. See the use of these terms in Douglas Rushkoff, “Free Lessons in Innovation”; Free Software Foundation, “What is Free Software?”; and Eric S. Raymond, “Homesteading the Noosphere.”

22. See Andrew Leonard, “Let My Software Go!.”

23. Eric S. Raymond, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” p. 1.

24. See Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History and the Last Man.”

25. “Gift cultures are adaptations not to scarcity but to abundance. They arise in populations that do not have significant material-scarcity problems with survival goods.” Eric S. Raymond, “Homesteading the Noosphere,” p. 9.

26. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, p. 700.

27. See Netscape Communications Corporation, “Netscape Announces Plans to Make Next-Generation Communicator Source Code Available Free on the Net.”

28. Eric Raymond describing his pitch on behalf of shareware to commercial software companies in Andrew Leonard, “Let My Software Go!,” p. 8. Bill Gates doesn’t just believe that free software is ‘communism’, but even allowing other companies to have access to Microsoft products before their release date! See James Wallace, Overdrive, p. 57.

29. Wired uses ‘The New Economy’ as a synonym for its neo-liberal fantasies about the Net. See Kevin Kelly, “New Rules for the New Economy.”

30. Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life, p. 70.

References

Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, 1996. “The Californian Ideology,” Science as Culture, number 26, volume 6 part 1, pp. 44-72, and at http://ma.hrc.wmin.ac.uk/ma.the ory.4.2.db

Tim Berners-Lee, 1996. “The World Wide Web: Past, Present and Future,” http://www.w3.org/Peop le/Berners-Lee/1996/ppf.html

Tim Berners-Lee, 1997. “Realising the Full Potential of the Web,” http://www.w3.org/1998/02/Potent ial.html

Elaine Brass and Sophie Poklewski Koziell with Denise Searle (editor), 1997. Gathering Force: DIY culture – radical action for those tired of waiting, London: Big Issue.

Guy Debord, 1981. “Report on the Construction of Situations and on the International Situationist Tendency’s Conditions of Organisation and Action,” In: Ken Knabb (editor), Situationist International Anthology, Berkeley, Calif>: Bureau of Public Secrets.

John Downing, 1984. Radical Media: the political experience of alternative communication. Boston: South End Press. Free Software Foundation, “What is Free Software?,” at http://www.fsf.org/

John Frow, 1996. “Information as Gift and Commodity,” New Left Review, volume 219 (September/October).

Francis Fukuyama, 1992. The End of History and the Last Man. London: Penguin.

Mark Geise, 1996. “From ARPAnet to the Internet: a cultural clash and its implications in framing the debate on the information superhighway,” In: Lance Strate, Ron Jacobson and Stephanie B. Gibson (editors), Communications and Cyberspace: social interaction in an electronic environment. Cresskill, N. J.: Hampton Press.

Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, 1997. “Cooking Pot Markets: an economic model for the trade in free goods and services on the Internet,” First Monday, volume 3, number 3 (March).

Richard Gombin, 1971. Les Origins du Gauchisme. Paris: Editions du Seuil.

Warren O. Hagstrom, 1982. “Gift Giving as an Organisational Principle in Science,” In: Barry Barnes and David Edge, Science in Context: readings in the sociology of science. Milton Keynes: The Open University.

George Katsiaficas, 1987. The Imagination of the New Left: a global analysis of 1968. Boston: South End Press.

Kevin Kelly, 1997. “New Rules for the New Economy: twelve dependable principles for thriving in a turbulent world,” Wired, volume 5, number 9 (September), pp. 140-144, 186, 188, 190, 192, 194, 196-197.

Neil Kleinman, 1996. “Don’t Fence Me In: Copyright, Property and Technology,” Lance Strate, Ron Jacobson and Stephanie B. Gibson (editors), Communications and Cyberspace: social interaction in an electronic environment. Cresskill, N. J.: Hampton Press.

Bernard Lang, 1998. “Free Software For All: freeware and the issue of intellectual property,” Le Monde Diplomatique (January), and at http://www .monde-diplomatique.fr/md/en/1998/01/12freesoft.html

Andrew Leonard, 1998. “Mutiny on the Net,” at http ://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/1998/03/cov_20feature.html

Andrew Leonard, 1998. “Let My Software Go!,” at http ://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/1998/04/cov_14feature.html

Karlin Lillington, 1998. “No! It’s Not OK, Computer,” Guardian, On-Line Section (April 6).

Karl Marx, 1973. Grundrisse. London: Penguin.

Marcel Mauss, 1990. The Gift: the form and reason for exchange in archaic societies. London: Routledge.

Netscape Communications Corporation, 1998. “Netscape Announces Plans to Make Next-Generation Communicator Source Code Available Free on the Net,” Press Release for 22 January 1998, at http://www.netscap e.com/newsref/pr/newsrelease558.html

David Noble, 1998. “Digital Diploma Mills: the automation of higher education,” F irst Monday, volume 3, number 1 (January).

Keith W. Porterfield, “Information Wants to be Valuable: a report from the first O’Reilly Perl conference,” at http://www.netaction.org/ articles/freesoft.html

Eric S. Raymond, 1998a. “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” First Monday, volume 3, number 3 (March).

Eric S. Raymond, 1998b. “Homesteading the Noosphere,” First Monday, volume 3, number 10 (October).

Howard Rheingold, 1994. The Virtual Community: finding connection in a computerised world. London: Secker & Warburg.

Douglas Rushkoff, “Free Lessons in Innovation,” Guardian, On-Line Section (April 9).

Situationist International, 1981. “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy,” In: Ken Knabb (editor), Situationist International Anthology. Berkeley, Calif.: Bureau of Public Secrets.

Raoul Vaneigem, 1972. The Revolution of Everyday Life. London: Practical Paradise.

James Wallace, 1997. Overdrive: Bill Gates and the Race to Control Cyberspace. N. Y.: John Wiley.

---

Read about Timothy Wilken’s  GIFTegrity, Read the Scientific Basis for the GIFTegrity, and the Specifications for a GIFTegrity. Read more about the Gift Economy.

 

More dialogue from the Energy Resources Yahoo Group.

---

Trapped in Illusions

Arthur Noll

Money and markets are not the only illusionary way of looking at the world that has destroyed civilizations, the more basic cause of the trouble is human nature, which grabs hold of these illusionary ways of thought because it feels good to them.  There are many ways to see the world wrong, money and markets is one of the most insidious, because it looks rational on the surface.  No one on the surface of things is expecting mystical beliefs to come true to satisfy the sustainable working of markets, what is mystical about trading this bit of paper for that product?  It is tangible, involves real things.  But when you look a little deeper, magical expectations are exactly what you find.  Markets inherently drive towards infinite growth, infinite substitutions, the expectation of this coming true requires magic.

Is there no better system than money?  I thought about this for years and came up with nothing.  All the advantages you talk about, yes, I’ve gone over them repeatedly and came up with nothing better, yet the flaws of the system drove me back to keep looking.  And I found it, found it right in front of my eyes and yet had not seen it. I’ve written of it before, I’ll repeat it again.  We can organize and work as a single body works. Does your stomach demand payment before it sends it’s work to the small intestine?  Does the small intestine hold out for cash or credit before nutrients go into the bloodstream? No, a thousand times no.  Stuff is simply freely passed around.  The brain must make calculations of Energy Returned On Energy Invested (EROEI), considering the problems of the whole body, coodinating it’s movements, to get the stuff in the first place. If the brain is smart, it may also consider whether that EROEI is sustainable.  Society can operate the same way.  We figure the EROEI of the actions of that society, and the sustainability of that EROEI, and within those limits, resources are as freely passed around within the group as they are passed around in the body.  If a part of your body doesn’t work right anymore, has a negative EROEI, you may consider very seriously cutting it off.  The same can happen to people in this society.

Done in this way, the disadvantages of barter are gone, and the advantages of money are also gone. You do not worry about getting what you need for what you have made on a specific exchange, the problem with barter. You simply take what you need from where it is made, and give what you made to whoever wants it. Even without considering the long term problems of the market, money is a far more cumbersome system compared to this, think again of my example of the various organs demanding payment. Your body would work like a herky jerk puppet if it worked at all, on such a system. And I think current society has that same herky jerky quality to it.  There has not been a better system in human consciousness before, but now I give you one. The “body society” should be able to grow to be much smoother in it’s immediate actions as well as having advantages for making plans for the long term. Evaluation of resources and the actions of people making up the body of society can be done without the distortions of and problems of barter, money or mysticism, they can be done on the basis of EROEI for the whole group and the sustainability of that EROEI.

I see no problem to having such a system grow to many higher levels of complexity, just as living organisms have many layers of complexity, yet this basic principle applies across the board.

Problems of cheating are much like the problems a body has with fighting cancer.  A body either snuffs cancer or it dies.  Many researchers now feel that in the trillions of dividing cells in a body, potential cancers happen fairly frequently but are usually snuffed immediately by the immune system.  We can have such an “immune system”.

While I believe it works on paper, there is an obvious problem in changing over to it.  It is outside the sense of reality most people have about how things are.  Born into such a system, I think most would adapt to it very easily, but changing as adults simply is not going to happen.  They don’t understand it, don’t understand the problems with money, are in denial that the problems with it are serious enough to change.  People fell under the sway of monetary systems because it feels good to the people on top, and people on the bottom often live in hopes of someday becoming richer and sharing some of that good feeling.  Those on top do not want to give up that good feeling, they are not going to give up their money and the power it gives them, regardless of abstract arguments of how bad this system is for society and nature. Those on the bottom do not want to give up their dreams, and people in both positions may simply be too lacking in brain power to understand the whole thing.

So I am back to evolution.  If something really is flawed, and there really is a better way, that better way should win the struggle in the end.  However, if a better organized system that is very tiny takes on a huge and poorly organized system, there are obvious dangers.  The small, efficient system had better not challenge too directly. Best to let the big system crunch itself first as much as possible.  And right now, this better organized system exists only in my mind and my writing about it.  Very small indeed.  So it is with all ideas. Yet I believe the system stands very well on paper, stands up to intellectual criticism.  I think it would stand very well in reality.  It could take over, and controlled growth would rule cancer, instead of the other way around.  Will getting there be hard? Yes. Very hard. Lots of blood, sweat and tears. But I think the effort would be worth it.  It is a goal that stands in my mind, that endlessly beckons me on to keep writing, keep trying.

 

Comment by ECO

Our monetary system really arose out of trade using cattle as the marker; and the dividend/interest was the calf that the cow carried. As this system evolved into what we know today as the Global Monetocracy System, usury based in the above scenario came into play and skewed the system so as to create the huge imbalance in power between the developed world and the developing world that we see today.

While I have been hearing a lot about the gifting economy that you mention here, Arthur, like you I seriously doubt that in its present state of consciousness that the human family can make the leap from the present system to a new system such as this. Although I do believe that as humanity progresses into more ‘organic’ systems, e.g., bio-mimicry, as you suggest, this kind of system will be possible. But the old system is certainly failing us and we appear to need a transitional system that will bridge the gap.

I really do not believe that we can attribute our attitude toward money as simply ‘human nature’ as you suggest, but must go back in history to see how the present system evolved from a few who saw it as a means to improve their own personal power and brought the rest of the world into their game.

A couple years ago, someone introduced me to the work of J.W. Smith, whom I mentioned previously, but failed to provide an online hyperlink that would give more detail. I was particularly interested in Smith’s work because he suggested in his second book “The World’s Wasted Wealth” that a 2% administrative or transaction fee placed on the use of money, rather than an interest fee, would result in money again being used as a transactional marker and get it out of the category of a “commodity”.

Society might be able to more readily adjust to this type of monetary system whereas it is doubtful that it could make the leap to a gifting economy.

Those interested can explore Smith’s work in greater detail at The Institute for Cooperative Capitalisms.

What I think is becoming more and more obvious is that the system we use today is not appropriate to support an energy system based on renewables, even if that system is mixed with fossil fuels for some time to come.

So the search is on to determine what is the best of all alternatives, and Smith’s work among others must be considered.

 

---

Read Arthur Noll’s Harmony.

Search the SynEARTH network  for more by Arthur Noll.

ECO is a pseudonym of Marguerite Hampton, an activist and writer with the Turtle Island Institute.

Read about Gift Economy,  GIFTegrity, Read the Scientific Basis for the GIFTegrity, and the Specifications for a GIFTegrity.

 

Reposted from Awakened Women eMagazine. Thanks for the link to Marguerite Hampton of the Turtle Island Institute.

---

Do Turkeys Enjoy Thanksgiving?

Arundhati Roy

LAST JANUARY (2003) thousands of us from across the world gathered in Porto Allegre in Brazil and declared ò reiterated ò that “Another World is Possible”. A few thousand miles north, in Washington, George Bush and his aides were thinking the same thing.

Our project was the World Social Forum. Theirs to further what many call The Project for the New American Century.

In the great cities of Europe and America, where a few years ago these things would only have been whispered, now people are openly talking about the good side of Imperialism and the need for a strong Empire to police an unruly world. The new missionaries want order at the cost of justice. Discipline at the cost of dignity. And ascendancy at any price. Occasionally some of us are invited to ‘debate’ the issue on ‘neutral’ platforms provided by the corporate media. Debating Imperialism is a bit like debating the pros and cons of rape. What can we say? That we really miss it?

In any case, New Imperialism is already upon us. It’s a remodelled, streamlined version of what we once knew. For the first time in history, a single Empire with an arsenal of weapons that could obliterate the world in an afternoon has complete, unipolar, economic and military hegemony. It uses different weapons to break open different markets. There isn’t a country on God’s earth that is not caught in the cross hairs of the American cruise missile and the IMF chequebook. Argentina’s the model if you want to be the poster-boy of neoliberal capitalism, Iraq if you’re the black sheep.

Poor countries that are geo-politically of strategic value to Empire, or have a ‘market’ of any size, or infrastructure that can be privatized, or, god forbid, natural resources of value — oil, gold, diamonds, cobalt, coal — must do as they’re told, or become military targets. Those with the greatest reserves of natural wealth are most at risk. Unless they surrender their resources willingly to the corporate machine, civil unrest will be fomented, or war will be waged. In this new age of Empire, when nothing is as it appears to be, executives of concerned companies are allowed to influence foreign policy decisions. The Centre for Public Integrity in Washington found that nine out of the 30 members of the Defence Policy Board of the U.S. Government were connected to companies that were awarded defence contracts for $ 76 billion between 2001 and 2002. George Shultz, former U.S. Secretary of State, was Chairman of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. He is also on the Board of Directors of the Bechtel Group. When asked about a conflict of interest, in the case of a war in Iraq he said, ” I don’t know that Bechtel would particularly benefit from it. But if there’s work to be done, Bechtel is the type of company that could do it. But nobody looks at it as something you benefit from.” After the war, Bechtel signed a $680 million contract for reconstruction in Iraq.

This brutal blueprint has been used over and over again, across Latin America, Africa, Central and South-East Asia. It has cost millions of lives. It goes without saying that every war Empire wages becomes a Just War. This, in large part, is due to the role of the corporate media. It’s important to understand that the corporate media doesn’t just support the neo-liberal project. It is the neo-liberal project. This is not a moral position it has chosen to take, it’s structural. It’s intrinsic to the economics of how the mass media works.

Most nations have adequately hideous family secrets. So it isn’t often necessary for the media to lie. It’s what’s emphasised and what’s ignored.

Say for example India was chosen as the target for a righteous war. The fact that about 80,000 people have been killed in Kashmir since 1989, most of them Muslim, most of them by Indian Security Forces (making the average death toll about 6000 a year); the fact that less than a year ago, in March of 2003, more than two thousand Muslims were murdered on the streets of Gujarat, that women were gang-raped and children were burned alive and a 150,000 people driven from their homes while the police and administration watched, and sometimes actively participated; the fact that no one has been punished for these crimes and the Government that oversaw them was re-elected … all of this would make perfect headlines in international newspapers in the run-up to war.

Next we know, our cities will be levelled by cruise missiles, our villages fenced in with razor wire, U.S. soldiers will patrol our streets and, Narendra Modi, Pravin Togadia or any of our popular bigots could, like Saddam Hussein, be in U.S. custody, having their hair checked for lice and the fillings in their teeth examined on prime-time TV.

But as long as our ‘markets’ are open, as long as corporations like Enron, Bechtel, Halliburton, Arthur Andersen are given a free hand, our ‘democratically elected’ leaders can fearlessly blur the lines between democracy, majoritarianism and fascism.

Our government’s craven willingness to abandon India’s proud tradition of being Non-Aligned, its rush to fight its way to the head of the queue of the Completely Aligned (the fashionable phrase is ‘natural ally’ ò India, Israel and the U.S. are ‘natural allies’), has given it the leg room to turn into a repressive regime without compromising its legitimacy.

A government’s victims are not only those that it kills and imprisons. Those who are displaced and dispossessed and sentenced to a lifetime of starvation and deprivation must count among them too. Millions of people have been dispossessed by ‘development’ projects. In the past 55 years, Big Dams alone have displaced between 33 million and 55 million people in India. They have no recourse to justice.

In the last two years there has been a series of incidents when police have opened fire on peaceful protestors, most of them Adivasi and Dalit. When it comes to the poor, and in particular Dalit and Adivasi communities, they get killed for encroaching on forest land, and killed when they’re trying to protect forest land from encroachments ò by dams, mines, steel plants and other ‘development’ projects. In almost every instance in which the police opened fire, the government’s strategy has been to say the firing was provoked by an act of violence. Those who have been fired upon are immediately called militants.

Across the country, thousands of innocent people including minors have been arrested under POTA (Prevention of Terrorism Act) and are being held in jail indefinitely and without trial. In the era of the War against Terror, poverty is being slyly conflated with terrorism. In the era of corporate globalisation, poverty is a crime. Protesting against further impoverishment is terrorism. And now, our Supreme Court says that going on strike is a crime. Criticising the court of course is a crime, too. They’re sealing the exits.

Like Old Imperialism, New Imperialism too relies for its success on a network of agents ò corrupt, local elites who service Empire. We all know the sordid story of Enron in India. The then Maharashtra Government signed a power purchase agreement which gave Enron profits that amounted to sixty per cent of India’s entire rural development budget. A single American company was guaranteed a profit equivalent to funds for infrastructural development for about 500 million people!

Unlike in the old days the New Imperialist doesn’t need to trudge around the tropics risking malaria or diahorrea or early death. New Imperialism can be conducted on e-mail. The vulgar, hands-on racism of Old Imperialism is outdated. The cornerstone of New Imperialism is New Racism.

The tradition of ‘turkey pardoning’ in the U.S. is a wonderful allegory for New Racism. Every year since 1947, the National Turkey Federation presents the U.S. President with a turkey for Thanksgiving. Every year, in a show of ceremonial magnanimity, the President spares that particular bird (and eats another one). After receiving the presidential pardon, the Chosen One is sent to Frying Pan Park in Virginia to live out its natural life. The rest of the 50 million turkeys raised for Thanksgiving are slaughtered and eaten on Thanksgiving Day. ConAgra Foods, the company that has won the Presidential Turkey contract, says it trains the lucky birds to be sociable, to interact with dignitaries, school children and the press. (Soon they’ll even speak English!)

That’s how New Racism in the corporate era works. A few carefully bred turkeys — the local elites of various countries, a community of wealthy immigrants, investment bankers, the occasional Colin Powell, or Condoleezza Rice, some singers, some writers (like myself) — are given absolution and a pass to Frying Pan Park. The remaining millions lose their jobs, are evicted from their homes, have their water and electricity connections cut, and die of AIDS. Basically they’re for the pot. But the Fortunate Fowls in Frying Pan Park are doing fine. Some of them even work for the IMF and the WTO — so who can accuse those organisations of being anti-turkey? Some serve as board members on the Turkey Choosing Committee — so who can say that turkeys are against Thanksgiving? They participate in it! Who can say the poor are anti-corporate globalisation? There’s a stampede to get into Frying Pan Park. So what if most perish on the way?

Part of the project of New Racism is New Genocide. In this new era of economic interdependence, New Genocide can be facilitated by economic sanctions. It means creating conditions that lead to mass death without actually going out and killing people. Dennis Halliday, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator in Iraq between ‘97 and ‘98 (after which he resigned in disgust), used the term genocide to describe the sanctions in Iraq. In Iraq the sanctions outdid Saddam Hussein’s best efforts by claiming more than half a million children’s lives.

In the new era, Apartheid as formal policy is antiquated and unnecessary. International instruments of trade and finance oversee a complex system of multilateral trade laws and financial agreements that keep the poor in their Bantustans anyway. Its whole purpose is to institutionalise inequity. Why else would it be that the U.S. taxes a garment made by a Bangladeshi manufacturer 20 times more than it taxes a garment made in the U.K.? Why else would it be that countries that grow 90 per cent of the world’s cocoa bean produce only 5 per cent of the world’s chocolate? Why else would it be that countries that grow cocoa bean, like the Ivory Coast and Ghana, are taxed out of the market if they try and turn it into chocolate? Why else would it be that rich countries that spend over a billion dollars a day on subsidies to farmers demand that poor countries like India withdraw all agricultural subsidies, including subsidised electricity? Why else would it be that after having been plundered by colonising regimes for more than half a century, former colonies are steeped in debt to those same regimes, and repay them some $ 382 billion a year?

For all these reasons, the derailing of trade agreements at Cancun was crucial for us. Though our governments try and take the credit, we know that it was the result of years of struggle by many millions of people in many, many countries. What Cancun taught us is that in order to inflict real damage and force radical change, it is vital for local resistance movements to make international alliances. From Cancun we learned the importance of globalising resistance.

No individual nation can stand up to the project of Corporate Globalisation on its own. Time and again we have seen that when it comes to the neo-liberal project, the heroes of our times are suddenly diminished. Extraordinary, charismatic men, giants in Opposition, when they seize power and become Heads of State, they become powerless on the global stage. I’m thinking here of President Lula of Brazil. Lula was the hero of the World Social Forum last year. This year he’s busy implementing IMF guidelines, reducing pension benefits and purging radicals from the Workers’ Party. I’m thinking also of ex-President of South Africa, Nelson Mandela. Within two years of taking office in 1994, his government genuflected with hardly a caveat to the Market God. It instituted a massive programme of privatisation and structural adjustment, which has left millions of people homeless, jobless and without water and electricity.

Why does this happen? There’s little point in beating our breasts and feeling betrayed. Lula and Mandela are, by any reckoning, magnificent men. But the moment they cross the floor from the Opposition into Government they become hostage to a spectrum of threats ò most malevolent among them the threat of capital flight, which can destroy any government overnight. To imagine that a leader’s personal charisma and a c.v. of struggle will dent the Corporate Cartel is to have no understanding of how Capitalism works, or for that matter, how power works. Radical change will not be negotiated by governments; it can only be enforced by people.

This week at the World Social Forum, some of the best minds in the world will exchange ideas about what is happening around us. These conversations refine our vision of the kind of world we’re fighting for. It is a vital process that must not be undermined. However, if all our energies are diverted into this process at the cost of real political action, then the WSF, which has played such a crucial role in the Movement for Global Justice, runs the risk of becoming an asset to our enemies. What we need to discuss urgently is strategies of resistance. We need to aim at real targets, wage real battles and inflict real damage. Gandhi’s Salt March was not just political theatre. When, in a simple act of defiance, thousands of Indians marched to the sea and made their own salt, they broke the salt tax laws. It was a direct strike at the economic underpinning of the British Empire. It was real. While our movement has won some important victories, we must not allow non-violent resistance to atrophy into ineffectual, feel-good, political theatre. It is a very precious weapon that needs to be constantly honed and re-imagined. It cannot be allowed to become a mere spectacle, a photo opportunity for the media.

It was wonderful that on February 15th last year, in a spectacular display of public morality, 10 million people in five continents marched against the war on Iraq. It was wonderful, but it was not enough. February 15th was a weekend. Nobody had to so much as miss a day of work. Holiday protests don’t stop wars. George Bush knows that. The confidence with which he disregarded overwhelming public opinion should be a lesson to us all. Bush believes that Iraq can be occupied and colonised ò as Afghanistan has been, as Tibet has been, as Chechnya is being, as East Timor once was and Palestine still is. He thinks that all he has to do is hunker down and wait until a crisis-driven media, having picked this crisis to the bone, drops it and moves on. Soon the carcass will slip off the best-seller charts, and all of us outraged folks will lose interest. Or so he hopes.

This movement of ours needs a major, global victory. It’s not good enough to be right. Sometimes, if only in order to test our resolve, it’s important to win something. In order to win something, we ò all of us gathered here and a little way away at Mumbai Resistance ò need to agree on something. That something does not need to be an over-arching pre-ordained ideology into which we force-fit our delightfully factious, argumentative selves. It does not need to be an unquestioning allegiance to one or another form of resistance to the exclusion of everything else. It could be a minimum agenda.

If all of us are indeed against Imperialism and against the project of neo-liberalism, then let’s turn our gaze on Iraq. Iraq is the inevitable culmination of both. Plenty of anti-war activists have retreated in confusion since the capture of Saddam Hussein. Isn’t the world better off without Saddam Hussein? they ask timidly.

Let’s look this thing in the eye once and for all. To applaud the U.S. army’s capture of Saddam Hussein and therefore, in retrospect, justify its invasion and occupation of Iraq is like deifying Jack the Ripper for disembowelling the Boston Strangler. And that ò after a quarter century partnership in which the Ripping and Strangling was a joint enterprise. It’s an in-house quarrel. They’re business partners who fell out over a dirty deal. Jack’s the CEO.

So if we are against Imperialism, shall we agree that we are against the U.S. occupation and that we believe that the U.S. must withdraw from Iraq and pay reparations to the Iraqi people for the damage that the war has inflicted?

How do we begin to mount our resistance? Let’s start with something really small. The issue is not about supporting the resistance in Iraq against the occupation or discussing who exactly constitutes the resistance. (Are they old Killer Ba’athists, are they Islamic Fundamentalists?)

We have to become the global resistance to the occupation.

Our resistance has to begin with a refusal to accept the legitimacy of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. It means acting to make it materially impossible for Empire to achieve its aims. It means soldiers should refuse to fight, reservists should refuse to serve, workers should refuse to load ships and aircraft with weapons. It certainly means that in countries like India and Pakistan we must block the U.S. government’s plans to have Indian and Pakistani soldiers sent to Iraq to clean up after them.

I suggest that at a joint closing ceremony of the World Social Forum and Mumbai Resistance, we choose, by some means, two of the major corporations that are profiting from the destruction of Iraq. We could then list every project they are involved in. We could locate their offices in every city and every country across the world. We could go after them. We could shut them down. It’s a question of bringing our collective wisdom and experience of past struggles to bear on a single target. It’s a question of the desire to win.

The Project For The New American Century seeks to perpetuate inequity and establish American hegemony at any price, even if it’s apocalyptic. The World Social Forum demands justice and survival.

For these reasons, we must consider ourselves at war.

©2004 by Arundhati Roy

---

We have previously featured three essays by writer and activist Arundhati Roy. (1) (2) (3)  I highly recommend her book The God of Small Things, which won the Booker Prize, sold six million copies, and has been translated into forty languages.

Google Arundhati Roy.

Reposted from the SynEARTH Archives. … The following is the introduction to the book Problems of Humanity. The first edition of this book, published in 1947, contained essays on the basic problems of humanity. These had originally been issued in pamphlet form between October 1944 and December 1946, and dealt essentially with conditions during and immediately after the war years of 1939-45.

In 1953 a second edition was published which omitted outdated material. A further revision was made for the third edition in 1964.  While some of the book is now out of date, most of the problems described continue to haunt us.

---

Solving the Problems of Humanity

Alice Bailey & Djwhal Khul

It is essential that all thinking people should give time and thought to the consideration of the major world problems with which we are now faced. Some of them can be solved with relative rapidity – given common sense and a correctly appreciated self-interest; others will require foresighted planning and a long patience as, one by one, the necessary steps are taken, leading to the readjustment of human values and the inauguration of new attitudes of mind regarding right human relations. In the recognition of the growth in human consciousness and in a realization of the distinction obviously existing between primitive men and our modern intelligent humanity lie the grounds for an unshaken optimism as to human destiny.

Events in the immediate foreground do not blot out the long history of human development and obliterate recognition of the long range changes which have taken place within the human consciousness; these basically condition human objectives, all human contacts and underline with understanding and perspective the reactions of the race of men.

The slow and restricted movements of the primitive races of mankind have given place to the speed and the rapid movement (the almost unbelievably rapid movement) and transportation facilities of the airplane. The uncouth sounds and the limited vocabulary of the savage races have developed into the intricate language systems of the present nations; the various modes of primitive communication by means of drums or bonfires have been replaced by the telegraph, the telephone and the radio; the wooden dug-out of the uncultured islanders has developed into the greyhound of the sea, racing from port to port under mechanical power and in the space of a few short days; the early slow modes of travel by foot, on horseback or by chariot have given way to the trains, speeding across entire continents at the rate of seventy miles an hour or more. The early and simple civilizations have been succeeded by the intricate and highly organized social, economic and political civilization of modern times. The culture of the ages, the arts, literature, the music and the philosophy of all time is today at the disposal of the average citizen.

The above contrasts provide a perspective and a background which will inspire hope for the future and confidence in the ultimate destiny of man. The past is in reality more like the prenatal stage than an ordinary living process; it is a preface to a richer and a more enlightened life; it is a preliminary period to a culture and a civilization which will redound to the glory of God and constitute a vital testimony to the divinity of man.

When the birthing process is over, a new humanity will be seen active upon the earth, a new race of men – new because differently oriented.

There are necessarily many lesser problems but those dealt with in this book cover the major ones with which humanity is at this time confronted, and which must find some solution during the next twenty-five years. This will have to be done by the simple method (simple to write but difficult to implement) of establishing right human relations between men and between nations.

The immediate spiritual problem with which all are faced is the problem of gradually offsetting hate and initiating the new technique of trained, imaginative, creative and practical goodwill.

Goodwill is man’s first attempt to express the love of God. Its results on earth will be peace. It is so simple and practical that people fail to appreciate its potency or its scientific and dynamic effect. One person sincerely practicing goodwill in a family can completely change its attitudes. Goodwill really practiced among groups in any nation, by political and religious parties in any nation and among the nations of the world can revolutionize the world.

The key to humanity’s trouble (focusing as it has in the economic difficulties of the past two hundred years and in the theological impasse of the orthodox churches) has been to take and not give, to accept and not share, to grasp and not to distribute. This has involved the breaking of a law which has placed humanity in a position of positive guilt. War is the dire penalty which mankind has had to pay for this great sin of separateness. Impressions from the Hierarchy have been received, distorted, misapplied and misinterpreted and the task of the New Group of World Servers is to offset this evil.

Humanity has never really lived up to the teaching given it. Spiritual impression, whether conveyed by the Christ, by Krishna or by Buddha (and passed on to the masses by Their disciples) has not yet been expressed as it was hoped. Men do not live up to what they already know; they fail to make practical their information; they short circuit the light; they do not discipline themselves; greedy desire and unlawful ambition control and not the inner knowledge. To put it scientifically and from the esoteric angle: Spiritual impression has been interrupted and there has been interference with the divine circulatory flow. It is the task of the disciples of the world to restore this flow and to stop this interference. This is the major problem facing spiritual people at this time.