Subverting the Matrix
escaping the matrix part 3
While resisting the Matrix is an act of mental rebellion, subverting the Matrix is an act of social revolution. It requires understanding the types of human communities that exist outside of the control of the Matrix. It also requires understanding what sustains them, and if and how they directly or indirectly weaken the structure and control of the Matrix. Once you understand this, it is possible to intelligently align yourself with communities that actively weaken the control of the Matrix.
Gift Culture
Gift Culture (also known as Free Culture, or the Gift Economy) is a social structure where your status is determined by how much you are able to give away. It is not mutually exclusive to any other economic system, and examples of gift economies exist on top of capitalist, communist and socialist economies.
Gift culture has brought forth some of the most astounding recent achievements of the human race, including the scientific research community, much of the World Wide Web, the entire Open Source movement, vulnerability and security research, and Wikipedia, just to name a few examples. Gift economies tend to function best in the digital world, where something can be given without reducing the inventory of the giver.
However, the Burningman project is a massive experiment in bringing Gift Culture back into the physical world, and quite successful at that. Well over 35,000 people populate Black Rock City in the middle of the desert every year to give as much as they can to each other. The event serves in part as a model for the time when energy becomes abundant and human beings are capable of interstellar space travel. Obviously the burning of The Man is the climax of the event.
This is no small coincidence either. Gift culture does subvert the
primary mechanisms of the Matrix. The Matrix subsists by transforming
human endeavor into economic output which it uses to maintain its
control. Gift culture, on the other hand, releases human endeavor for
the good of all who would receive it. When items are given instead of
sold, the power and control obtained through ownership is eliminated.
Furthermore, in the case of Open Source Software, the fact that full
freedom over the source code is also given means that code that the
Matrix would never willingly create is readily available for the
purposes of this HOWTO.
It is interesting to note that even machines of the Matrix are motivated
to participate in gift culture - especially in the Open Source
movement. It benefits many corporations as well as governments
to have a common reference platform upon which they can build their
individual products and infrastructures. Their cooperation in building
this common platform vastly reduces the cost they would have paid to
develop their own platform in-house, and is also inevitably cheaper than
paying a single entity to do the same. The combined experience and
widely distributed expertise, as well as the flexibility of modifying
the common platform to perform a wide variety of tasks, yields a better
system for all, and cheaper. In the digital world where copies are free,
capitalism compels Gift Culture.
Unfortunately, some companies, such as Amazon.com,
reap tremendous benefits off of Open Source Software, yet have a
company policy of zero contribution back to the community. Other
symptoms of this problem include Microsoft's war on the security research community,
and the tendency of (even State funded) University Professors to refuse
to provide Open Source reference implementations of their work. There
are mechanisms discussed in this HOWTO that enable this trend to be
reversed, which leads us nicely into the next cultural segment.
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