Evgeny Morozov and Tim O'Reilly

[Michael Lenczner-2]

So, I didn't see this on the list yet. Seems obligatory to discuss - or at least include in our archives. 

To me, it just feels like a rehash of Free vs. Open from the turn of the century. In this context, it's a reminder that "open government" isn't really the end goal - in case any of us needed that reminder. It's a tactic we're agreeing on to move towards whatever kind of society we - individually -  actually want - the articulation / discussion of  which is not the subject of this list. The term is blurry, but that's one of the things I like about it (kind of like "social entrepreneurship"). It points in a certain direction like social innovation does (*innovation* yay!, *being nice to things in a sustainable way* wohoo!) but it leaves entire topics untouched. It also prevents different discussions (it's hard to get to anarcho-syndicalism from there), but I hope and imagine that we each have larger discussions elsewhere.

Darin Barney does interesting work on this topic - how to not let these trends like "open government" obscure our political judgement (http://media.mcgill.ca/en/darin_barney)

Anyways - so here's the links. The first is a shorter intro to the article underneath. I would be interested in hearing any of your thoughts on it.

http://io9.com/ive-seen-the-worst-memes-of-my-generation-destroyed-by-464948581

http://thebaffler.com/past/the_meme_hustler

"Morozov's new book, To Save Everything, Click Here, is about how tech-loving pundits and corporate leaders want us to believe that our political problems can be solved by making governments more like Silicon Valley. You can think of his essay about Tim O'Reilly as a deep dive into this idea, where he uses the career of tech biz evangelist O'Reilly as a way of talking about how Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are trying to change politics -- for the worse. Specifically, Morozov is interested in how a 1990s meme that grew out of software development, "open source," has come to influence the idea of "open government." Because O'Reilly was a major popularizer of the open source meme, he's at ground zero of Morozov's salvo."

Michael Lenczner
CEO, Ajah
http://www.ajah.ca
514-708-5112

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