For all their complicated arguments, these writers are partly engaged in a countercultural romance. It is not just anti-modernist but also anti-modern. It yearns for a pre-industrial world in which an unbounded terrain of entertainment and folk art is somehow made freely available.
In more extreme form, translated into the political realm, it is also a romance in which power is intrinsically disruptive and the marketplace intrinsically divisive. It is the romance of radical antiglobalization in which the very existence of a military or commercial power is evil. Here is Vaidhyanathan, swept away: "The best way to stop any illegal act, terrorist or otherwise, is to make sure that terrorists do not have support in society in general" by making sure "life is good and secure," inspiring a loyalty to the "larger community."
That same romance though, can lead to real accomplishments if properly harnessed. One example is the open-source software movement, which grew out of an idea proposed by the computer scientist Richard Stallman in 1984. Stallman created a license that would allow users to do whatever they wanted with a program -- study it, modify it, redistribute it -- as long as anything they produced preserved the same lack of restriction.
This inspired hackers, who worked on code for the fun of it as well as for the thrill of bypassing the mainstream (and opposing Microsoft's dominance). The Linux operating system is still developing in this manner after more than a decade of communal work. It is being used in about 40 percent of American companies and runs on Google's 10,000 servers.
Changing the rulers
In a valuable new account of the movement, The Success of Open Source, Steven Weber, a political scientist at the University of California at Berkeley, argues that "by experimenting with fundamental notions of what constitutes property, this community has reframed and recast some of the most basic problems of governance."
For as Weber shows, the development of this complicated product to which no one has the rights has required thousands of contributors, panels of overseers and a relatively strict organizational procedure. Yet no one is paid, and despite temptations and fierce conflicts, few run off in other directions.
This almost institutional activity may not be the one imagined by Stallman. It may not fulfill the romance of "rip, mix and burn." And open source might not have come so far without the foil of Microsoft and without companies like IBM investing in something they could never own. But for now, it works. Weber suggests that open source property resembles ideas of "stewardship or guardianship." He finds a resemblance to the organization of religious groups in which even the leader is subject to a community's rules.
This may be another form of governance then: not a straightforward democracy nor a capitalist enterprise yet bound by ambition and religious fervor, with liberty and law in precarious balance. Such an alternative might even be welcome in other, more bloody realms.
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