Yesterday @kunstreich pointed me to a rather interesting article in the Guardian. Under the ambitious title “The open source revolution is coming and it will conquer the 1% – ex CIA spy“. We’ll pause for a second while you read the article.

For those unwilling to or with limited amount of time available, here’s my executive summary. Robert David Steele, who has worked for the CIA for quite a while at some point wanted to introduce more Open Source practices into the intelligence community. He realized that the whole secret tech and process thing didn’t scale and that gathering all those secret and protected pieces of information were mostly not worth the effort, when there’s so much data out there in the open. He also figured out that our current western societies aren’t doing so well: The distribution of wealth and power is messed up and companies have – with help by governments – created a system where they privatize the commons and every kind of possible profit while having the public pay for most of the losses. Steele, who’s obviously a very well educated person, now wants to make everything open. Open source software, open governments, open data, “open society” in order to fix our society and ensure a better future:

Steele’s visions sounds charming: When there is total knowledge and awareness, problems can be easily detected and fixed. Omniscience as the tool to a perfect world. This actually fits quite well into the intelligence agency mindset: “We need all the information to make sure nothing bad will happen. Just give us all the data and you will be safe.” And Steele does not want to abolish Intelligence agencies, he wants to make them transparent and open (the question remains if they can be considered intelligence agencies by our common definition then).

But there are quite a few problems with Steele’s revolutionary manifesto. It basically suffers from “Boxology Syndrome”.

The boxology syndrome is a Déformation professionnelle that many people in IT and modelling suffer from. It’s characterized by the belief that every complex problem and system can be sufficiently described by a bunch of boxes and connecting lines. It happens in IT because the object-oriented design approach teaches exactly that kind of thinking: Find the relevant terms and items, make them classes (boxes) and see how they connect. Now you’ve modeled the domain and the problem solution. That was easy!

But life tends to be messy and confusing, the world doesn’t seem to like to live in boxes, just as people don’t like it.

Open source software is brilliant. I love how my linux systems work transparently and allow me to change how they work according to my needs. I love how I can dive into existing apps and libraries to pick pieces I want to use for other projects, how I can patch and mix things to better serve my needs. But I am the minority.

Steele uses the word “open” as a silver bullet to … well … everything. He rehashes the ideas from David Brin’s “The Transparent Society” but seems to be working very hard to not use the word transparent. Which in many cases seems to be what he is actually going for but it feels like he is avoiding the connotations attached to the word when it comes to people and societies: In a somewhat obvious try to openwash, he reframes the ideas of Brin my attaching the generally positively connotated word “open”.

But open data and open source software do not magically make everyone capable of seizing these new found opportunities. Some people have the skills, the resources, the time and the interest to get something out of it, some people can pay people with the skills to do what they want to get done. And many, many people are just left alone, possibly swimming in a digital ocean way to deep and vast to see any kind of ground or land. Steele ignores the privilege of the educated and skilled few or somewhat naively hopes that they’ll cover the needs of those unable to serve their own out of generosity. Which could totally happen but do we really want to bet the future on the selflessness and generosity of everyone?

Transparency is not a one-size-fits-all solution. We have different levels of transparency we require from the government or companies we interact with or that person serving your dinner. Some entities might offer more information than required (which is especially true for people who can legally demand very little transparency from each other but share a lot of information for their own personal goals and interests).

Steele’s ideas – which are really seductive in their simplicity – don’t scale. Because he ignores the differences in power, resources and influence between social entities. And because he assumes that – just because you know everything – you will make the “best” decision.

There is a lot of social value in having access to a lot of data. But data, algorithms and code are just a small part of what can create good decisions for society. There hardly ever is the one best solution. We have to talk and exchange positions and haggle to find an accepted and legitimized solution.

Boxes and lines just don’t cut it.

Title image by: Simona

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