Open Sourcing Our Way to an Online Commons

Abstract

Understanding the social dynamics shaping the internet is vital as media power takes on new dimensions in the digital realm. The internet is increasingly necessary for participation in social life yet corporations continue to shape the online architecture to suit their own narrow commercial interests. In their drive to enclose the internet, online media companies create synergistic membranes with prescribed circuits that constrain user freedoms. Taken together, these synergistic membranes form a new layer of the internet — the Google layer, which constrains and commodifies users' range of motion within a narrow, privatized slice of the world wide web. This jeopardizes the creation of a commons-based communications system with a public service orientation, something that is essential to participatory and democratic dialogue. The open architecture of the internet, characterized and supported by free and open source software (FOSS), defends the digital commons against cyber-enclosure. Social practices and values that distinguish FOSS comprise a liberatory praxis as well as an alternative vision of social organization offline that prefigures a more democratic media system, and broadly construed, a more democratic society.