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Pitch decks and promotional collateral talk about world domination and changing the way we work, play, and live. [...] "This is not a small social app," the founder of Clinkle, a small payment app, said. "What we're trying to do here is fundamentally change how people trade. Every human being, …

[...] The stock market bubble of the first internet boom did not herald a warmer, fuzzier era of more democratic computing. It inaugurated a new era of “greed is good,” and in the process, Silicon Valley learned that it could actively profit from social inequality. The only catch was it had to be w…

Computing history shows us that the “computer revolution” was never really meant to be a revolution in any social or political sense. People who were not seen as worthy of wielding power were deliberately excluded, even when they had the required technical skills. To a great extent, that process co…

[...] today’s open source communities have the potential to serve as gateways to a more radical politics, one that pushes for the decommodification of not just information but also the material resources needed to sustain the production of information.

What’s needed, then, is a leap of faith: fr…

Seen in that vein, the radical undertones of open source didn’t just come out of nowhere, and they’re not unique to software. Instead, open source is simply a response to the very real contradictions that abound when property rights are applied to information. Where it fails is by offering an easy …