Democratizing Information, Knowledge and Content On The Internet Won’t Be Enough

Look, we have come a long way. Today, we can work, learn, collaborate, socialize, play games, learn, speak up, create, organize, and do many other things online. We can even undertake big, society-wide projects and initiatives and see them to their fruition by coordinating online.

But it wasn’t always like this.

There was a time when megacorporations of the late 20th century dominated the Internet of the 2000s with their ‘Internet start pages’, ‘portals’, and ‘online stores’.

The users were expected to consume the content produced by these megacorporations and buy their products like little obedient plebs without so much as being able to give feedback to those megacorporations. The plebs could only dabble on the tiny corners of the Internet in their community forums and blog rings, where ‘they belonged’.

Even a comment form on any major newspaper’s website was too much — after all, who do you think you are — a lowly pleb — to be able to comment under an article written by an author of a glorious major newspaper like NYT? You go and dabble on the fringes of the Internet instead — where your ‘user-generated’ content ‘litters’ the Internet in the most undesirable fashion. Yes, there was a time when some argued that user-generated content was littering the Internet.

Then the Open Source revolution happened. Those lowly plebs living on the fringes of the Internet got empowered. Community forums started dotting the landscape, the communities became larger. Their blogs started receiving more traffic. Now they had online shops too, thanks to the increasingly featured Open Source software. A small world with a small economy was born on the fringes of the Internet, still out of sight, still shunned, but alive and thriving.

And sometime in the mid-2000s, things fundamentally changed.

The user-generated content on the fringes of the Internet became more in volume and better than the content that the megacorporations were creating. Churned out by many sources ranging from technical forums to gaming forums, from blogs fueled by passion to newly emerging small publications run by communities or small teams.

The emergence of social networks amplified this trend to high heaven: Now content generated by the plebs on the Internet was reaching hundreds of millions through the sharing feature of social networks — things were going viral. Suddenly, user-generated content was not ‘littering’ the internet anymore: The new motto was “Content is king”.

Now the people were creating content for the people.

Some criticize this paradigm, even today. They say it enabled ‘fake news’, bad behavior, unhealthy trends, and so on. Some of this criticism has merit. But most of it seems to come from the old traditional corporate media which lost its monopoly on information due to this revolution. Those who sold the lie of nonexistent WMDs are complaining about ‘fake news’ even as they sell new lies to maximize their majority shareholders’ profit — the irony. And some of the criticism about truly unhealthy content does not hold water too: Back before the Internet that content and the crowd that consumed that kind of content still existed — but it was far from the sight of the more educated public — except not being able to see it did not mean that it did not exist before or that it was much less in its scope and its following.

In contrast, the benefits of this paradigm were immense: Information and knowledge started flowing freely, and people started doing things that they weren’t able to do before; Instant access to news provided via citizen journalism… Knowledge, education directly provided by the people… People organizing and collaborating to build things or make things happen… Even things like crowdfunding and citizen-run initiatives…

We were able to democratize knowledge, information, and even software.

Then something else happened — people started writing, publishing, making & distributing art, songs, and entertainment on this information infrastructure we built.

Suddenly, entertainment started getting democratized. Now, the fans would get their entertainment directly from the artists they followed, instead of getting it from the corporate middlemen standing in between and deciding who gets what and for what price.

In a very short time, it went even further — anything that could be created and distributed online became part of this new phenomenon, and what we today call ‘the creator economy’ was born.

We have now democratized everything! For the people, directly by the people!

Except…

There Are Still Things That We Could Not Democratize Yet — And They Plague Us

Physical, critical aspects of our societal needs and activities are still not democratized.

We don’t have an impactful Open Energy movement that allows us to generate energy.

We don’t have a workable Open Farming movement that allows us to grow our food.

We don’t have a prolific Open Manufacturing movement that allows us to create at least the simple tools and goods for our daily needs.

Without even going into more difficult-to-implement examples like Open Medicine, Open Health, Open Housing, Open Education, and even Open Science, merely the lack of those three basic ones is enough to largely offset the level of democratization we achieved in all other areas.

We still have to pay a lot for our energy. Food prices are the highest they have been in the last 45 years and rising. The cost of ordinary, daily goods and tools is also following the inflation trend and costing us more of our money, and as a result, our time.

The lack of democratization and Open Source-style self-sufficiency in these physical aspects of our lives is diminishing the gains we made in other areas and pushing the entire society down by stealing from us as much money and control as it can.

It doesn’t matter how much knowledge is out there, how much art, entertainment, and content is available if the people who are supposed to benefit from those don’t have the money or time to do anything with them.

Not to mention that people in this position definitely can’t lift their heads and do anything to change society and push it in a better direction.

As things are now, whatever progress we make in democratizing the other areas of our civilization will be nullified by the centralized private capital controlling our civilization’s basic physical necessities.

Even the economic gains won’t last: Have people created alternate, democratized information, knowledge, and entertainment economies that work? Just jack up food, energy, and goods prices to suck away all their gains. They won’t even let us have any money. If we can make it, they will suck it away.

Moreover, people who can’t support themselves economically can’t fund & support such democratized, peer-to-peer economies either. If they can’t support themselves, they won’t be able to support all the educators, independent journalists, scientists, open-source software developers, artists of all kinds, and any kind of creator. The democratized information economy cannot exist without an accompanying democratized physical economy.

So, We Need to Democratize the Physical Economy…

We must have a prolific Open Energy movement that provides us the methods, device blueprints, and easy-to-get and maintain, cheap energy bundles that do everything for an average household to function.

We should be able to generate energy through the means available in our locale, through solar energy or chemical/biological energy that works in whatever sustainable method we can invent.

This movement must get even more fleshed out to support other activities than just maintaining a household, and it definitely would get there if we manage to get to that first level — the base we establish that way can be used to provide power to bigger activities, including manufacturing. This can happen even by running household-grade, but efficient systems in parallel.

Open Manufacturing must develop parallel to the Open Energy movement, and it must not wait to get empowered by Open Energy’s breakthroughs. We already have the early stages of 3D printing, including printers that can print metal. As 3D printing and other methods for Open Manufacturing are pushed forward, they can also empower Open Energy and vice versa. This parallel progress can help us bring individual households, smaller communities, and then larger communities to a self-sufficiency level much faster.

Open Farming follows from those — it must also progress in parallel, but ample energy, specific tooling, and equipment are necessary to make Open Farming viable on any scale. This one is one of the more difficult ones, but succeeding at it means we can solve all kinds of things ranging from price inflation to hunger.

These three most important fields will unlock and empower almost all others. But this does not mean that other Open movements must wait until significant progress in these areas is made. Open Banking, Open Science, Open Education, Open Medicine — all the Open movements must move forward at the same time, drawing on the success of each other. However, it is easy to see how the earlier three can unlock new horizons for all the democratization movements.

We Came A Long Way And We Have A Long Way To Go

We had great success with Open Source software, Open Knowledge, and all that.

Our success in those areas shows that democratization movements work, and they change society and our civilization in very good ways. We know progress and change are doable because we did it in those areas.

This means that we can also democratize others and there isn’t a fear of failure: We now know that by pushing forward, repetitively experimenting, developing, and iterating, we can democratize anything.

It’s doable. We did it. We can do it again and again until we have an open society.