What Open Source Warfare owes to Open Source Software, and why that debt will be repaid in blood

I'm happy to no longer be working for a government contractor, because it makes me more comfortable to post whatever falls under the ever-seeking eye of John Robb, OSW maven, which is in this case an article in Wired about the IED countermeasure innovation gap. As Johnny Mnemonic said, "When they think you're technical, go crude."

“I can take $600, go into a bazaar, and make a device,” says one senior Jieddo officer. “And I can tie up $1.2 billion to $2 billion of US money by doing it.”
...

Late one afternoon in April, Llamas shows me the latest device they’ve been working on, just in from Afghanistan. A neatly made plywood box about 8 inches high and 5 inches square, it has a length of replica detonation cord emerging from the base. Llamas pulls the box open, revealing a layer of soft foam and a wooden plunger attached to the lid. When stepped on or driven over, he says, the foam is compressed and the tip of the plunger, which is saturated with a chemical, descends into a chamber at the bottom of the box. That chamber contains a second substance, and when the two chemicals mix, a pyrotechnic reaction ignites the end of the detonation cord, which leads to an explosive charge.

The box is the logical conclusion of years of reverse evolution in insurgent weapons technology. Without a power source, a blasting cap, or a single piece of wire or metal contact, it has no electromagnetic or metallic signature. Linked to a charge mixed up from odorless homemade explosives, packed beneath a dirt road, it would be all but impossible to detect: a Flintstones land mine.

I would say something like "this is the new nature of jihad heroism, to make a cheap and simple thing that will bring your inconceivably out-sized enemy low, to turn centuries of industrial development into a disadvantage"...

...I would say something like that, but only if I was living in an ivory tower that reached the mesosphere. When was the last time heroism meant something else? And what changed?

About ten years ago, I read an article (perhaps even in Wired) that attempted to lay out the case for technology.

Don't laugh! Many intelligent people can be made concerned by new devices that they feel enable behaviors that even you would find distasteful, and hold the technological developments which enabled them guilty, as if they were the direct cause. Telecommunications enables ubiquitous surveillance, so it's a sinister omnipresence. Radio enables Microwave Area-Denial Weaponry, so it's a tool of bloodless oppression. Ammonium nitrate enrichment enables cutting the beaks off factory farm chickens, so it's a font of cruelty, rather than a horn of plenty.

So, for those people, this article calmly explained why many folks feel that the benefits outweigh the drawbacks, or rather, that the old problems being solved outweigh the new ones being created. Rather than enumerate each technogenic complication, in the classical style, a large number of them were gathered into a moderate number of types, raised as objections attributed to the opposite view, and serially dispatched.

Of these, the point that stood out to me, or at least that I still remember with unusual clarity, was that technology disproportionately benefits the rich. New things, such as have never been seen before, cost too much even for most people in the first world, much less most of the world as a whole. So all this internet stuff, for instance, is at best a waste of time, in humanitarian terms. To quote a character from Cryptonomicon (who, just to be clear, was being held up as an idiot): "How many schools will be torn down to build the information superhighway?"

But that isn't the whole story, the article explained. Technology benefits people who can't afford much, or even any of it. When I visit cities where it snows, cheap salt production help me get around. When I live in settlements with other humans, herd immunity protects me from Scarlet Fever.

Most of all: a lot of technological development, rather than making entirely new stuff, makes the stuff we already had much cheaper. So all the brand new fancy things eventually become the tired old commonplaces that anyone can have if they want to, if they have a use for them. Poor folks today have access to things the richest and most powerful people of long-since-past could not have, be it advanced metallurgy or instantaneous long-distance communication.

The author positioned technology not only as a net benefit to the global poor, but even as a disproportionate benefit to them. People with less benefit more from these advances, relative to what they had before, compared to the rest of us, who just get a new toy to misunderstand, be distracted by, and eventually ignore as unfashionable.

So a biologist might have said that rats benefited more from the Age of Sail than Europeans did, because after the humans went to all the trouble to build ships to search out new life and new markets, all the rats had to do was hitch a ride. And like the biologist, the author meant to be even-handed, not patronizing. "It's even better for you than for us, and man is it great for us!" he cries.

"You yourself have said it," as Christ said when asked if he was the King of the Jews, at the climax of the great western terrorist monomyth. Unless you enforce widespread technical illiteracy (extant techniques: patents, copyrights, reifications of "Consumers" and "Providers") or provide widespread contentment, trickle-down technology will eventually empower the bottom of the pyramid to be right murderous bastards to you. They're already used to going without; now they just need to cut you off, to make you go without, make you extend your reach in uncomfortable ways.

In the Napoleonic metaphor, they live in Russian winter all the time, and all they need to do to win is to pull you in - or, if you're that stupid, to have you follow them in - rather than let you crouch in a bordering country lobbing cruise missiles at them (in which case neither you nor they win, but we'll see whether we can ever return to the blessed time of the US not needing to invade anything just to be as rich and powerful as we know we deserve to be).

You were probably around back then, probably heard all that bombast of there being a new era coming, of ideas and ideals, the electronic frontier that would level all the steep and awful oppressions of the Old Ways? It didn't work out that way, because though these prophets were doing all this complaining, were nearly professional complainers, they had nothing to complain about (so the modern internet is their legacy in more ways than one). The world wasn't going to change to the way they thought they wanted, because they didn't know from want. They didn't know from need.

But I still congratulate them, because they paved the way for everyone else, and that some of these elses turn around and use their sophisticated free software & entertainment distribution systems to trade ideas on how to cause maximum property damage and loss of life, again and again, until their demands are met...well, that's what the prophets of information technology said they wanted! Democratization, freedom, an end to the staid networks of power that they could feel pushing them into locker after locker, at their meaningless school, at their degrading job, with every good toy that got a warning label and every good show that Fox canceled.

What they (including I) wanted was trivial. What they (meaning only they) have achieved is not: a burgeoning population hungry to take and use their every good idea.

As an American, I'm contractually obligated to believe in some version of the second amendment (the Constitution is now muddling through its third century, and like Christianity in that stage of its life, heresies are flourishing). I propose this perspective to other Americans: that people destroy our butter when we use our guns on them is a good thing, because it is the second amendment writ large across the face of the world. Tyranny, even our own, becomes more and more expensive as technology develops. Which is good! Hegemony is tough, to say nothing of being morally fraught.

And this formulation should be recognizable to Open Source advocates. Every advance of Linux raises the bar, next to which there is a sign which reads "Your product must be at least this good to compete" and another which says "Your product can be at least this good, for free." The cost to enter the market lowers, but the cost to dominate the market raises.

Like an IED, no matter what you do with Linux, no matter how you refine it, it still follows its original purpose. It still expresses the will which fed and animated its originating phenomenon, to the point that we needed an acronym for it. They aren't "bombs," and it isn't "a Unix-like Operating System." They are both a kind of ordinance aimed at the heart of overfunded, overextended competitors. Easy targets, in other words.

Let the lessons of Open Source be two-fold: always celebrate the achievements of the like-minded, and never let yourself become an easy target.

Welcome to the future we wanted.