Narcotized by ideologies of free/open source software and free culture, which were supposed to bring about a generalized hi-tech gift economy, America had sleepwalked into a situation in which the jobs and incomes of the ‘middle class’ in general, and creative/intellectual professionals in particular, were under threat while the lords of the computing clouds accumulated stratospheric fortunes from their ‘meta’ positions on these developments. These processes should not be understood deterministically, as unavoidable outcomes of technological progress, because software more than any other technology expresses its designer’s worldview and decisions. Thus, while the ‘lock-in’ that comes with large systems is a real problem, it ought to be possible to rethink our technology—and the worldview it expresses—from the ground up. And a superior alternative to Silicon Valley machine-worship would be a romantic, humanistic orientation, attentive and open to the irreducibility of experience, promoting the place of the creative, productive individual, rather than consigning this figure to technological redundancy.
Rob Lucas, Xanadu as Phalanstery
