Liberating the Tools We Need to Write

A prototype of the One Laptop Per Child computer, which utilizes open software to distribute the sharing of knowledge, http://laptop.org, Photo: Mateo LeFou

From Inked Paper to Electronic Media

Paper and ink documents do not require any special technology to read or write. This is so obvious I have to say it. You do not need a special reader, computer, or other mediating device. To record your thoughts for the future or for others a simple stick saturated with ink and a sheet of paper or their equivalent is enough. And to read it, you need nothing at all, just the ability and knowledge to decode the marks. You need, in short, only readin' and 'ritin': education. What is more, the document is yours to do with as you like and is not dependent on the local monopoly that made the paper or ink or tablet or whatever; and it won't become illegible if those who made the technology (and oddly neglected to patent it) decide to change it, either because the market demands it (they need to make more money) or because it's a static market and their shareholders insist on new products (or, in short, they need to make more money). For paper and ink and its equivalents, the longevity of the document, it's ability to stay a document and not become like chicken scratches or a Frisbee or paper aeroplane, depends simply on the physical and chemical robustness of the ink and paper and, lest we forget, on the ability of people to read the language.

Since the modern period -- since the rise of the public sphere and other public modes of exchange and investment and governance -- it has been the historical responsibility of national government to teach its people to read and write. Why? It's almost absurd to ask. But if a people cannot read and write, then a nation's wealth is imperiled: no business, no history, no public sphere, no future.

Switch now to the present and to the contemporary and future usage of digital media. The trend, which has only been accelerating, is to produce electronic documents and to save them in huge electronic archives. Paper-only documents, which recorded so much of our past so easily and which anyone with training could produce (no special technology required), are increasingly a thing of the past. They linger on out of cultural momentum, but to me they mark the past. The future is digital and electronic.

The advantage of this condition is that it actually has the potential of being more democratic and allowing for more universal access than paper and ink. Not because it is cheaper (though that may well be the case once the land is stripped of trees) but because digital documents are easier to produce and distribute. This ease of production and circulation also implicitly enables a nation's people to participate in the global economy. The alternative is a very likely impoverished isolation.

The Bargains We Made

But at what price have we bought this promise of global prosperity, this neoliberal dream? That price is measured in more than dollars, but even in dollars it is very high. Unlike ink/paper technology, which anyone can use and which can preserve thoughts for millennia, the documents we create today using an office productivity suite not only require us to use technology that is neither open nor free nor easily producible but proprietary: it's owned by someone, in this case, most often your local monopoly. It's as if a language were created that you had to pay to learn and then all the important texts were written in it. Only those who paid could write and read the texts.

An analogy: It is as if we had entered the European feudal age, when a version of this was in fact the case. The language for official communication was Latin, not what people spoke, and learning Latin cost a lot, so that only a very few families in this Cathedral culture could wield official power. With the Renaissance, the people's language (what they actually spoke, especially at the marketplace) was used and culture, commerce, flourished. What counted as the public sphere grew, and has continued to grow.

The threat against public culture lies in the use of technologies of writing and reading that effectively exclude all but the privileged public. Quietly, with almost no political discussion, we have made a bargain and nearly betrayed our present and future. The privileged (like those in this room) who enjoy neoliberal practices benefit from this world; the rest are effectively illiterate, as they cannot engage in the information economy characterizing the world today.

The Solution Is Open

The solution is to use open standards and open source. Why are open standards important? Open standards are "publicly available and implementable" standards (Wikipedia). Any compliant application, whether it be proprietary or open source, can use an open standard. The result of this open standard? Files can be freely passed among applications. You no longer need to worry that your colleague or collaborator or any recipient is using the same applications as you or that you will have to pay for the privilege of reading a public document created using proprietary technology. It's the file that counts, not the application. But open standards are but one half of the coupling.

We need more. Open standards allow for free exchange of files both now and in the future, but open source allows for anyone to afford the application, both now and in the future. Open-source applications, like OpenOffice.org, are free, gratis: you pay nothing to use them. This is an important point: by coupling open standards with open source, OpenOffice.org gives everyone the ability to participate with no encumbrances in the public sphere.

How might this work? Let's imagine that the public sector uses StarOffice or Workplace or OpenOffice.org or whatever and saves its documents as Open Document Format (ODF) or PDF files. The government, either working on its own behalf or with the private sector, installs OpenOffice.org on computers in all public libraries and other public spaces where it can site a server or computer. Anyone thus has access to these documents. Is this an insecure arrangement? No, because open source and open standards are constructed from the ground up with real-world security issues foremost. Systems and files can be made secure. Security works at every level, and heterogeneity of systems is allowed, in fact expected (this is the real world). In contrast, Microsoft claims its systems are really only secure if you use Microsoft exclusively.

But we know that blaming the victim, in this case the person affected by the viruses and crashes, is a poor way to defend oneself. The better argument is to recognize the flaws in the model. But the model Microsoft has promulgated cannot support a heterogeneous world where different systems coexist. Open source and open standards can. They have been designed from the very beginning with that model in mind.

And the technologies are maturing. It is the case now that support for most every language spoken here in Toronto exists for OpenOffice.org, which can run on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and many other platforms. If you wish to customize it, that's possible, too. The code and license allows you to write plugins, add-ons, whatever you need to extend the application. And if you don't want to do this yourself, it's easy to pay for someone to do it for you.

What makes Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) special is the ability, after all, to enhance it, to make it your own and in doing so, to make it everyone's. The logic of freedom when applied to open source determines an ever expanding commons, not a shrinking pool. What's more, this logic can be extended to work outside of software production. OpenOffice.org's end-user documentation, for instance, has been entirely produced by a group of people working under the aegis of a free license.

Every country I've visited, every country I know about, even those like Venezuela, are deep in the sink of proprietary software and dependent on proprietary formats and relations. Regional alternatives and existing open standards are shut out. These countries are only now coming to understand the implications of using proprietary formats and only now are realizing that there is choice in the tools of production they have come to use.

But now that nations like France, Denmark, Belgium and so on are seriously debating the open-source ODF, there is little reason for a nation like Canada, with its diverse and multilingual populace, to produce and exchange documents its people can read and edit only by buying inadequate proprietary applications.

Inadequate? Yes, because unlike proprietary applications, OpenOffice.org can be easily translated into North America's indigenous languages; in fact, I've sought to initiate such work already. And unlike proprietary applications, OpenOffice.org is free -- it costs nothing. First Nations people and the speakers of the dozens of languages one hears spoken just in Toronto, can use a single application for free without fear of being called a thief or worse, losing their language by being forced to use the fixed default language of a software application.

I call then upon Canada's governments -- city, provincial, federal -- to answer a challenge: To give her people an ambition that will shape the world and make it better, not by erecting a bigger phallic symbol -- we've got the Toronto CN tower -- but that will chart the path for participatory democracies throughout the world. I call upon the government to move to the OpenDocument format; to move to OpenOffice.org; to move to technology that declares for freedom, for diversity, for community engagement, and for social responsibility.