Alfredo on (Part I): The Organic Internet

MF/PL Co-Director Alfredo Lopez explores the concepts behind the May First theory of the Organic Internet.

Transcript
* A very long time ago, almost forty years
* I had a mentor whose name was Arthur Felberbaum
* Arthur is probably best known as the founder of the Brecht Forum here in New York City
* Arthur used to say that intellectuals, analysts
* people who are looking at things theoretically and analytically
* have to abstract. Which means,
* create models based on that which is occurring.
* Organizers have to extract.
* Which, for him, meant taking a look
* at a situation you're in and involved in
* and pairing away everything that is replaceable
* and remaining with the irreplaceable (staying with the irreplaceable as we say in Spanglish).
* He said revolutionaries, what makes a revolutionary
* is the ability to do both.
* You never get to that stage, obviously, it's very
* difficult to be able to combine both of those things
* and I've been trying to do that for many years,
* all these forty years.
* That is the standard that we work against...
* a standard of perfection, as it were.
* We've come kind of close with the concept of the Organic Internet.
* In all of my years in the movement,
* I have never come upon a concept that is
* at once so simple and, on the other hand,
* one that people find so difficult to grasp.
* It actually is a deceptively simple concept.
* There is a lot of complexity to it, but
* it's pretty simple to understand right off the bat.
* The way we explain it is
* If you take in the Internet everything
* everything that can be replaced
* take it away
* strip it
* keep that which is irreplaceable
* that is the essential quality of the Organic Internet.
* So, taking a look at the Internet,
* what is it that is replaceable?
* Well, we know just about everything that
* people typically refer to as the Internet
* is actually replaceable.
* We know that because over the years
* over the life of the internet, almost
* all of it has been replaced.
* The protocols, the software, the hardware.
* People call the kinds of computers we have
* here in the office by the same term as that which
* I started using, let's say, thirteen or fourteen years ago.
* But it's inconceivable that these things can be
* considered the same thing.
* While there is some basic similarity
* as there are, say, similarities between ourselves and all the other living mammals on Earth,
* there are so many differences, that we would
* have to consider it different.
* Our hardware has changed.
* Software that runs the Internet,
* although many of the people listening to this may not realize this,
* has changed dramatically and radically in
* so many different kinds of ways.
* The software that is running your Internet currently
* although still based on the same kinds of software
* that originally ran the internet
* is wildly different, radically changed
* much more powerful, and in many cases
* does things that are different, with a logic
* that is different than the software that was originally
* developed. It's all changed.
* What hasn't changed in the Internet is one thing
* people communicating with people.
* With the specific way we communicate
* and the specific needs that we have
* that are answered by that communication.
* The Internet is over a billion human beings.
* And when we talk about the Organic Internet,
* we're not talking only about the fact that it's
* irreplaceable component is actually humans
* we're talking about the way that humanity
* effects the way the Internet acts and develops.
* This is important for a bunch of reasons.
* To understand the Internet very clearly,
* we have to understand what drives it.
* And what drives it is the human need for interaction and collaboration.
* Never before in history has the need for
* collaboration been greater.
* We're living in a period where many people in the world believe
* that the systems that have gotten us to this point,
* that have brought the human race to this point in history,
* have actually failed us.
* We are living in a world in which
* the wealth of the world has never been greater.
* For the second year in a row, we have a surplus
* of farmed, produced, and grown goods.
* Of food that comes from the Earth, a surplus.
* And this very year, for the first time in human history,
* according to the UN, more than a billion people
* on this Earth are starving to death.
* This compounded immorality
* that is, in fact, the systems that have governed us,
* gone out of control and become useless,
* is what makes the collaboration of the human being
* absolutely essential.
* And humanity has always invented stuff
* when that stuff has proven essential.
* When humanity sees a need, perceives a need,
* it meets that need. And collaboration is a fundamental
* need of the entire human race.
* We say collaboration rather than communication.
* People come up to me and say "well you've always had
* mass communication or have for a long time
* you have the telephone, you have this you have that"
* The telephone does allow conversation and communication.
* But the Internet provides for a level of interaction
* and collaboration that has never been known
* in human history.
* Using the Internet, not only can we communicate
* with each other, but we can actually share
* our lives. I was looking at
* a website from one of our members, who
* made a website for his young son. And the website traces
* the development of that child's life into his fourth year.
* Now, that level of intimacy is not always what
* we do on the Internet. I don't have that kind of
* website, for example. But you can.
* The point is, for the first time in history
* not only are we allowed to say,
* express, and show what we want
* of our lives, we're able to make
* choices as to what we think is important in our lives.
* And that kind of liberation brings
* with it an enormous amount of freedom
* of thinking about what's possible
* and confidence in doing what's necessary
* to make those possibilities realities.
* It's for that reason that the Internet
* has actually actively changed
* much of the world. I don't think that
* the President of the United States would be a man of color without
* the Internet. I know that many of the
* struggles that are going on the world, that are
* supported from this country that are supported from other countries, would
* have been impossible without the Internet.
* The Internet is the collaborative
* tool of the human race.
* And it's primary collaborative tool.
* And we have created that.
* As we change as a human race, we alter
* our perceptions, we alter our interactions
* so we alter the Internet.
* Because the Internet is in itself
* it's not only a collaborative tool, but the tool itself
* is a collaboration.
* In developing the Internet, the human race
* collectively identifies what it needs.
* Any software developer will tell you that
* he gets his or her ideas from the interaction
* with whole bunches of people. "We need this or we need that."
* That software developer then reaches out
* to many many other software developers to
* collaboratively begin developing that software.
* And after a version of that software
* is developed that can be used it's released to the
* public and massively tested in a collaborative fashion
* by the Internet itself
* by the people and the movement that we consider the Internet.
* That's how software is produced in the Internet.
* All software is produced that way.
* And one of the great myths of commercial software
* that we'll talk about in another part
* that it's actually different from the production of
* free and open source software. All software
* is produced by the same process.
* Capitalism has never produced a thing
* in its entire history. All it does is
* expropriate and sell things that are produced by people.
* All of this collaboration massively
* done over a billion people, by a billion people,
* by 1.3 billion people all over the world
* makes the Internet the largest mass movement
* in human history.
* The Internet is humanity's
* attempt to collaborate, to save
* itself and its world. There is
* no other explanation for it. No one
* can explain how, in such a very short time,
* one billion people
* can end up doing the very same thing and talking
* and communicating with each other.
* As we develop in the Internet and develop our
* perceptions, so does everything associated
* with the Internet develop. Its technology
* changes based on our needs.
* Its protocols change based on our needs.
* Its rules change based on our needs.
* And at the same time
* in reaction, our needs change
* based on what we're capable of doing.
* It is in this interaction between ourselves
* our needs, our capabilities,
* and the collaborative product
* that emerges from those things
* it's that interaction that makes the Internet
* organic. And when we talk about
* the Organic Internet, we are talking about
* not only an abstraction, a model for
* what it is in fact, but an extraction
* an extraction for what is important and irreplaceable.
* That's the human beings that interact
* through the technology of Internet.