This is not the place to explain free/open-source software - I'll leave that to others.

Broadly, the history of mainframes, personal computers, and web applications is a cycle of centralization, de-centralization, and now a re-centralization. Before PCs, computers were huge, expensive, centralized systems that were jealously guarded. A lot of the fervor over personal computers was about empowerment - individual people could now operate and have control over their own computer, pushing power away from the center. With the rise of the Internet and especially the Web, we started to hear about network effects - the idea that when you hook computers together they become even more powerful and useful. There was interconnection but also democratization (and manifestos that seem quaint today but were really inspiring back then). The Internet was designed to be a decentralized system, and it was supposed to upset the balance of power.

The so-called Web 2.0 made the internet even more useful in many ways - it enabled collaboration on a huge scale and let us access our data from anywhere. It also brought the idea of the social graph or social networking to our attention. But it also marks a huge re-centralization. Instead of keeping our data on our own personal computers (or before that, in files) and under our own control, we've started to disperse our data across the net in various web sites. True, this is still decentralized in a way (multiple web sites), but each of these sites represents one central entity controlling many users' data.

We've done this mainly because it's convenient and/or useful - we can access email from any web browser rather than having to go home or carry a laptop. But we also give away control over our data. Most cases companies use this data for benign purposes, such as gathering aggregate marketing data to sell to pay the bills. But web sites can be hacked and web companies can go bankrupt or get acquired by less scrupulous companies.

Recently, groups such as autonomo.us have started to look for ways to decentralize things again. It seems to me that the conversation is mainly about changing free/open-source licenses so web sites have to publish their source code and provide APIs or import/export functions so users can retrieve their data. To me this is great but also unsatisfying.

Which brings me to my point:

What if we could have both the decentralization advantages of personal computers and the network effects of the internet and Web2.0, but without the centralization of Big Data? What if individual users could have web applications that they could control themselves, but which enabled them to access their data from anywhere and control who else had access to it? What if all these personal web apps could talk to each other and create a decentralized social graph that's under the control of users rather than a company?

If you've known me for awhile you know I'm really into all kinds of electronic music. For awhile I was totally infatuated with Max/MSP and all-digital laptop music. I'm still interested in that, but for my own music-making I've gravitated more towards physical instruments like keyboards and bass. I've also become more interested in instruments with hardware sequencers, like drum machines and the 303.

You can read elsewhere about how influential and cool the TB-303 is, or you can listen to pretty much any electronic album made from the late 1980s to the present. The 303 is not the easiest instrument to work with, but it's played a huge part in creating loop-based music.

Aside from the musical aspects, though, the x0xb0x is cool because it's open-source, or rather open hardware, which means that every aspect of its construction - the instructions, the parts list, and the PCB design, schematics, and firmware - is available for free downloading and sharing. LadyAda, the originator of the project, runs a forum for people who are building and hacking the kit, and even posts links on the x0xb0x site to people who are sourcing their own PCBs and parts, and building and selling x0xb0xes totally independent of her.

In the end, building an x0xb0x is going to be a lot more trouble than driving over to Guitar Center and forking over some cash, but in the end I'll end up with a unique intrument that I made myself. It's the musician equivalent of a Jedi making his own lightsaber or something.

Update 2009-1-12: I should clarify that the x0xb0x in the picture above is not mine, which I'm still in the process of building. This would go faster if I had an actual electronics setup at home, instead of running out to get parts or tools as I need them.

The protagonist in the Algebraist, Fassin Taak, lives in a galaxy-wide civilization called the Mercatoria, which was nearly destroyed by AIs long ago, and which is currently under attack by a bunch of terrorists (the Beyonders). A lot of what we do hear is filtered through the Mercatoria - people describe the beyonders in the Mercatoria's terms because that's what they've been allowed to find out. As the novel progresses, we sift through the propaganda and get a different picture.

Turns out that the Mercatoria which seemed pretty normal and good to most of the people who live there, is in reality the hegemonizing oppressive ruler of the galaxy. The Beyonders live in habitats out between the stars because they've been driven away from the central worlds and that's where they can survive. The glimpses we get suggest that everything we've heard is a load of FUD, and they're actually pretty honorable and cool people. I wish we'd gotten more than a few tantalizing glimpses, but maybe that's what makes them so cool.

The Beyonders really struck a huge resonant chord with me. Not their violent actions (though their violence has limits, unlike other groups in the book), but how they have to hide away just so they can live a life free from control. They make me think of the citizens of Zion deep under the sewers of Machine City, the crew of Serenity, who fought on the losing side of a war against the oppressive, conformist Alliance, the ferals of Kim Stanley Robinson's Antarctica. Or real world Jews, Mennonites and other underground Christian groups (but without the violence), and lots of other groups who just want to be free and do their own thing.

Oh, and free/open-source software people. To be sure, being a GNU/Linux partisan is a lot safer than following some radical religious or political idea, but it definitely takes sacrifice and work to stay free in the face of slick, seductive proprietary software (I'm not immune - my PowerBook boots OS X as well as Ubuntu and I use Ableton Live for music). Open source people have to carve out their own community and make their own space in the cracks of the harsh business landscape.

So anyway. To Linux, the official OS of the diaspora and the underground. It's probably installed on The Serenity and software libre most probably runs the Beyonders' mesh network.