RDS: Oh, oh, oh, oh...I see, I see. Alright. Well I mean you offered up an interesting tag cloud. Why don't we just start at the fact that I think we're returning to the era of indigenous wisdom prior to 1491, which is a great book that I recommend, and my summary of that book is at Amazon. The Native Americans and their counterparts in the southern hemisphere and elsewhere all understood that the earth was a closed system, that it had limits and that they were one of hundreds of thousands of species that were sharing the earth in a symbiotic manner.
But consequences, that's not something that modern western science understands...and I send people the book called Voltaire's Bastards. So we're actually returning to the original wisdom of our forefathers centuries ago. The second point I'd make is that we're rejecting the hierarchical industrial model, which is based on top-down, 'because I said so,' and often is focused on short-term profits for the few instead of long-term sustainability for the many. Instead of a horizontal, top-down command and control structure, what we're finding works better is the traditional communitarian bottom-up structure as you say. And the reason bottom-up works better, is because in bottom-up, everybody is involved. They're involved in fact-finding; they're involved in making the rules; and they're involved in enforcing the rules -- and all of those rules are by consensus, they're not rules that have been paid for by some billionaire intent on screwing the public by buying a few congressmen.
Rob: Amen. Your book, you're newest book is called Open-Source Everything.
RDS: It's actually called The Open-Source Everything Manifesto.
Rob: Okay, sorry. Yes. Now you talk about open source ecology, the open meme, open source as a value system -- which I'm very interested in -- open source culture, you say that open source does not mean free. Can you talk a little bit about it? I'm particularly interested in the open source as a value system.
RDS: Well, one of the things that I have found as a former spy and as someone who has spent a quarter century, 25 years, trying to reform governments, secrecy is toxic. Secrecy is a way of avoiding accountability; it's a way of avoiding anyone understanding that you actually don't know what you're doing, or that you're doing something for the wrong reasons. I mean we went into Iraq on the basis of 935 now-documented lies. In that book by Charles Lewis, although it's called 935 Lies, it's actually not about just those lies, but about the general culture of secrecy and unaccountability by not just the US Government, but by most governments, and certainly state and local government as well.
Secrecy and lies are bad for the public because they end up allowing the few people to do things that are not in the public interest, that profit the few at the expense of the many. So the primary focal point of the open source culture is what Buckminster Fuller would call ephemeralism -- doing more with less. And you do more with less by putting all the facts on the table. You do more with less by not having hidden agendas. You do more with less by quickly and clearly identifying waste and eradicating that waste so that there is no waste. So the open source culture is by and large not just about information technology, it's about everything. It's about every possible product. And it also demands that holistic analytics and true cost economics be fully integrated.
It's all well and good to pretend to be about open source. For example, ESRI, a very fine company that is very, very proprietary and does not play well with others, is very enthusiastic about open data. They're enthusiastic about open data because that's code for give us your data and we'll sell you our software so you can make better use of your data. In fact, the open source psychology requires that we have open source software, open source hardware, open mesh, open spectrum, open cloud...all so that open data is easier to produce, easier to share, easier to make something of.
Now true cost economics is something that is just now coming to the floor. It was pioneered by Herman Daley...some people call it the triple bottom line. One of the very bad things about secret hierarchies or hierarchies, whether they're secret or not, is that they tend to make decisions based on how money is perceived by those at the top -- only money. Only the short-term financial input, including of course the stock market and the appraisals from the investment bankers. There is no thought given to the fact that we have a 22% unemployment rate in the United States of America. There is no thought given to the fact that all these smart phones that we're so pleased with are putting hundreds of thousands of Chinese into leukemia wards, because they're all rooted in a Class A carcinogenic that is only legal in China. The whole open source meme is really about so much more, but I would say it has four words in it: clarity, diversity, integrity and sustainability. And that's the subtitle of my next to last book which was called Intelligence for Earth.
Rob: Clarity, Diversity, Sustainability...and what was the other one?
RDS: Clarity, Diversity, Integrity and Sustainability.
Rob: And how do they apply to open source?
RDS: Oh gosh, I don't want to be flippant but you need to buy the other book, which is also free online so I'm not pimping my books. All of my books by the way...all of my books are free online through phibetaiota, select the book...
Rob: Okay, fair enough. Now, you talk about open source intelligence, and I wonder is that the kind of intelligence that spies talk about with HumInt and SigInt, human intelligence or signal intelligence?
RDS: That's a wonderful question and I'm really glad you asked it because today in the United States of America, Jim Clapper and Mike Vickers are leading an extraordinarily corrupt secret intelligence community in which over $80 billion -- they fudge the numbers -- but it's over $80 billion including some of the black programs. Over $80 billion are being sent on secret technical collection. It does not produce anything useful. General Tony Zinni, when he was the commanding general of the central command at the time that was 2 wars and about 12 different operations, he is on record as saying that he got less than 4% of what he needed to know from secret sources and methods.
There are a number of dirty little secrets in US intelligence, but the biggest one is there's no intelligence being produced by US intelligence. It doesn't actually provide what the true meaning of intelligence is -- decision support. It does not actually provide decision support for making strategic decisions about how to invest the tax payer dollar, and of course one strategic decision that the two-party tyranny should have made long ago is to not borrow $1 trillion a year. That's absolutely a crime against the public that they're all impeachable for. The intelligence community does not provide serious intelligence support or decision support for policy, especially outside of national security. They don't support agriculture. They don't support energy. They don't support health. They're absolutely useless on veteran's affairs. The intelligence community does not provide decision support for acquisition. We've actually lost the ability to design and build cost-effective ships, airplanes, tanks, and artillery systems because we are operating in a system in which government spec cost plus contracting -- essentially allows the contractors to build anything they want in the most expensive way possible without regard to the fact that we can't fit all those people in an airplane and fly them anywhere. The Striker, the armored vehicle of the US Army is a classic case in point. It had to be broken up into pieces to be flown on multiple airplanes. One...one vehicle. And of course the intelligence community has not provided adequate support for tactical operations, which is where General Michael Flynn and General McChrystal actually made a very good name for themselves using new ways of providing intelligence support to tactical operations ways that still have not been mastered by the US intelligence community because it frankly doesn't care. It's not in the business of providing decision support -- it's in the business of spending money as quickly as possible on the most worthless possible things, with NSA being the classic poster child.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
1
1
