[p2p-research] Engineering history

[Kevin Carson]

  Sent to you by Kevin Carson via Google Reader: Engineering history via
Armed and Dangerous by esr on 9/12/10

On a mailing list I frequent, a regular expressed doubt about the
possibility that very small subgroups of a society (less than 5% of its
population) can cause large changes in the overall direction of its
evolution without long historical timespans to work in. But I know from
experience that this can happen, because I’ve lived it. My explanation
(lightly edited and expanded) follows.

Of particular note is my explanation of how engineering design can
shape history.



Sometimes, when society reaches a cusp point, the decisions of
individuals and small groups can have very large downstream
consequences that are even visibly large in the near term.

I have personally been present, and an actor, for at least two such
hinge points of history: the finalization of the Internet design in
1983, and the mainstream emergence of open-source methods in the late
1990s. Even in the relatively short time since it has become clear that
these are game-changers on the civilizational level, with ripple
effects that will shape the rest of human history.

There may be other ways for it to to happen, but the way I’ve seen it
happen is that a few engineers make choices that have very large
implications for centralization vs. decentralization and the prevalence
of information asymmetry, then bake these into infrastructure before
the political class notices that the outcome could have been different.

Thought experiment: imagine an Internet in which email and web
addresses were centrally issued by government agencies, with heavy
procedural requirements and no mobility – even, at a plausible extreme,
political patronage footballs. What kind of society do you suppose
eventually issues from that?

I was there in 1983 when a tiny group called the IETF prevented this
from happening. I had a personal hand in preventing it and yes, I knew
what the stakes were. Even then. So did everyone else in the room.

Thought experiment: imagine a future in which everybody takes for
granted that all software outside a few toy projects in academia will
be closed source controlled by managerial elites, computers are
unhackable sealed boxes, communications protocols are opaque and locked
down, and any use of computer-assisted technology requires layers of
permissions that (in effect) mean digital information flow is utterly
controlled by those with political and legal master keys. What kind of
society do you suppose eventually issues from that?

Remember Trusted Computing and Palladium and crypto-export
restrictions? RMS and Linus Torvalds and John Gilmore and I and a few
score other hackers aborted that future before it was born, by using
our leverage as engineers and mentors of engineers to change the ground
of debate. The entire hacker culture at the time was certainly less
than 5% of the population, by orders of magnitude.

And we may have mainstreamed open source just in time. In an attempt to
defend their failing business model, the MPAA/RIAA axis of evil spent
years pushing for digital “rights” management so pervasively baked into
personal-computer hardware by regulatory fiat that those would have
become unhackable. Large closed-source software producers had no
problem with this, as it would have scratched their backs too. In
retrospect, I think it was only the creation of a pro-open-source
constituency with lots of money and political clout that prevented this.

Did we bend the trajectory of society? Yes. Yes, I think we did. It
wasn’t a given that we’d get a future in which any random person could
have a website and a blog, you know. It wasn’t even given that we’d
have an Internet that anyone could hook up to without permission. And
I’m pretty sure that if the political class had understood the
implications of what we were actually doing, they’d have insisted on
more centralized control. ~For the public good and the children, don’t
you know.~

So, yes, sometimes very tiny groups can change society in visibly large
ways on a short timescale. I’ve been there when it was done; once or
twice I’ve been the instrument of change myself.

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