Open-Source Everything

A few years ago, Douglas Rushkoff earned road trips of media mileage with the revelation that he had undergone a techno-conversion: Once an internet-worshipping cyber-evangelist, a willing consultant to translate net culture to Corporate America, Rushkoff had became convinced that the digital revolution had been taken over by corporate interests, who used it to coerce us into gratuitous purchases. The product of this conversion was a book, Coercion: Why We Listen To What They Say.

Now, with his latest book, Rushkoff again is charting some new digital ground. Exit Strategy is to be the first open-source novel. How? With footnotes. Rushkoff's book is about a Wall Street newcomer who enters the tech game in 2008, a few years after the Big Correction. Is it any good? Actually, the novel is beside the point. Like Torvalds' Linux kernel in 1992, Ruskoff's novel is a starting point. We're supposed to pretend that it's the 23rd century and the book has been lost for 200 years. The readers are anthropologists charged with annotating the text to make it palatable to future readers. Rushkoff posts a chapter a week to his website. Then, in the fall when the entire book has been posted, Rushkoff picks the best notes, which make it into the published text. Shift caught up with the New York University professor late last week to ask him about the project, as well as open-source applications in other realms.

Shift: Do you see other possible applications of the open-source philosophy?

Rushkoff: What I'm really interested in now is open-source religion -- the idea that religions are projects. Only what happens is that institutions arise to protect the code of religions, and then people no longer have access and the religions die. When religions are open and people are participating in their evolution, they stay alive and real. And once an institution is erected, the impulse is to keep it the same. Things get locked down as sacred and there's no more room for discussion. Well, in theory, Judaism was constructed as an open-source religion. The idea was that a bunch of rabbis would sit around a table and argue about stuff. And that's kind of changed over the last century or so. People are starting to look at it as a much more closed-source religion.

I don't know that my novel really, in current terminology -- in software terminology -- whether it counts as open source. There's a central document that remains unchanged. The thing that's open source is the experiment around it, this almost talmudic conversation between people posing as anthropologists 200 years in the future. So it's really more of a game, pretty much a free for all. I don't really care so much about the text, and making the book good. It's really more about the footnotes.

How did publishers react when you told them you wanted to make this book open source?

They got really upset. They said, you can't put this online, you're going to challenge your authority as an author, you won't have as much respect anymore because then anyone can write... I was like, Why don't I change my whole role as an author from author of this whole world to facilitator as a way of looking at the world. I really believe that top-down, sole authorship is not going to be as interesting, or as relevant, as something that's community-authored.

How do you think the project is going so far?

So far I'm really pleased. I was a theatre director way back when, and this is much more like doing a play, like inviting people to a party and seeing what they do. It's like a fantasy role-playing game -- you set up some basic rules and then see where people go with it. Also, you know, it's just starting -- the reason I did this with Yahoo! Internet Life (who host the project web site and will be covering the project in their magazine), really, is that they have a magazine with a circulation of, like, 1.5 million. All of these people subscribed all throughout middle America are way into this magazine. So those will be mailed out in a few weeks, and then things will really get going.

So now you have the netheads, and soon you'll be getting Mr. and Mrs. AOL in Middle America. Right. So far, the first two chapters are up, and then the next one goes up soon, and it continues, once a week for 14 weeks. And in January, the open-source published version comes out. And there have been some really amazing footnotes -- you have to check out the one about taking a chill pill (see sidebar, with a selection of Rushkoff's favourite footnotes).

What else do you see as adopting well to an open-source methodology?

Gosh, almost any discipline that you want to have still growing. All media is open source. All discussions about media are open source. Science -- the scientific method is open source.

Would you licence your book under the General Public Licence?

I'm not talking about the book as a property -- I'm talking about the world as a creation. I'm trying to create an open source future. I'm trying to say this world, 200 years from now, this world of anthropologists, those people, that is a world that we can create together. I'm like the gamemaster and they're the fantasy role-playing characters. But I'm trying to be a very non-authoritarian game master because I've already created the kernel document that everyone is going to comment on. I'm hoping some people end up being anthropologists who are against the ones currently dominating the discussion -- that the new people would be a lot more libertarian and say that the market would have cured everything, we should have just left it. You know, there are only 150 footnotes up there right now.

What would an open-source future look like?
An open-source future is one in which we realize that reality itself is open source. That the world is conforming to our expectations of it, and that we are all participating and all contributing to its unfolding. The reason that people have gods and all this other stuff is because they can't cope with that yet. That's a scary thought -- that we're in charge. We've got the whole world in our hands.

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Christopher Shulgan is Shift's online editor. His email is chris@shift.com.