The Open Source Culture

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Open source making: new language for shining human being

We are now living in the age of consumerism and massive production of commodities. As consumers, our motivations for life and work are to maintain being capable to shop willfully, and we are in fear of losing it which makes us stressed.

1 As consumers, we don’t have true identities, our identities as consumers are actually collages of the signs carried by commodities. Our true selves are replace by those signs, which finally relating to social class and hierarchy.

2 As consumers, we are treated as dummies or puppets. All the commodities are designed for the assumed most stupid brain, just press one button and everything will be done, or just purchase and the everything happens automatically. And people become real dummies if they have get used to this and the only thing they want to do is to find the “only button” or pay money.

3 All commodities charges, especially those with high technology or signs for some cultural or social meaning. If people want to maintain or enhance their ability to shop or follow the fashion of commodities, they have to work for something, which is usually not so meaningful for themselves. This is slavery without lash.

4 As consumers, all the curiosity, intelligence, interaction and understanding of the world stop on this surface of commodities, with all the out side world and the world behind the commodities in a darkness of all kind of myths. Such as how the stuff works, or by owning certain commodities the owner will become cool and popular. Those myths are embedded in our subconsciousness and become our mental constrains. In this darkness hides the stakeholders of consumerism who created those mythes and are constantly absorbing energy from every consumer.

5 In consumerism everything has an ownership, which defines the boundary between self and others. The boundaries render every individual a closed sphere of ownerships and profits, which inevitably conflicts with other spheres, as resources are limited. In a world everyone actually competing with each other, true interaction rarely happen, which we call love.

What are we living for? Psychologist Abraham Maslow gave the answer based on his experiments, in his theory about hierarchy of human needs, he said that human needs can be categorized as physiological needs, safety needs, social needs, esteem and self-actualization. What we can learn from this is that consumerism will fail finally, because although it did pretty well to meet some of the lower level needs, it is actually incompatible with all the high level needs, such as morality, creativity, spontaneity, problem solving and acceptance of facts in the self-actualization category, those are merits excluded from the assumption of consumer.

While in the esteem needs category, consumerism tried to address those needs but also failed essentially. Although for some one owning an expensive commodity brings self-esteem, confidence, and by relating the price with what we call “success”, achievement and respect by others can also be gained. But, is it a pity that we need to rely on some object to gain something like confidence, or is confidence gained from commodities actually fake?

To sum up, by failing to answer those high level human needs, consumerism set a barrier for “being”, the consumer. Being only a consumer is definitely not an ideal status in terms of human potential, there is no beauty for being a consumer. We are not living for owning more commodities, every human being has potential, a hero lies in everyone.

The input and output needs:

We can also find out from the hierarchy of needs theory that the needs can also be categorized as input and output needs from basic needs to higher level needs. The basic needs such as physiological needs, safety needs are significantly relied on outside supplies, environment and others. We can call these needs as input needs. The social needs is a balance point of outside and inside. The high level needs like esteem and self-actualization become more interior-outward, we can call them output needs. So the failure of consumerism can be also explained as only focusing on the input needs, by suppling and providing commodities, while neglects people’s output needs. We are incomplete and feel the lightness of life if only our basic needs are repetitively fulfilled or even over fulfilled, which usually makes us overweighted physically and mentally. We need an alternative future, after this super abundance from modernization.

We can imaging a future that it becomes a much less important motivation for people to purse consuming more and newer commodities. More people will transcend from basic needs to higher level needs like self-actualization, the output needs. What do we need to prepare for this coming future?

The outputting process is to make, to construct and to contribute, or work for soul in other words. That’s why Karl Marx said that work will become the prior need in a communism society. When someone work for their soul, and have realized their potential of brain and humanity, it will being like a shining sun outputting light and heat from his inner power. We can call them shining human being.

There should be a set of new tools for this future that everyone could become shining human being. These tools will greatly empower the ability of human mind to make influence. People will be engaged into the process of making the world, not be excluded like the consumerism does. And all these tools will form a new language, which could be understood as a new protocol that links our mind and the outside world more fluidly, or a new interface between the two, for outputting motivation, while compatible with the inputting needs. This new language is not only for speech, and even may not be able to be spoken, it broadly includes all outputting activities, such as self-expression or making all kinds of art.

This language or the set of tools must be open sourced, because if tools are made by others, it can not really be embedded into someone’s output activities unless it is open sources, which means the user can understand how it works in every detail and can customize it. This language is also very powerful and easy to manage, it utilize the achievements of modern technology, such as new media and electronics, and bring them to everyone by going open source. Thus it gives one the freedom to be the “potential being”.

Also open source is a perfect counter-force to consumerism. There are also five points to respond consumerism’s five deficiencies listed before. 1 It is open as source, not end product, so the user define how it will work and look like, which is definitely a outputting activity depends personal “self”. There is no end-products carry the signs for identity collage.

2 As it is source for making, people should really use their brain and hand before they can actually have some working things. There is no space for stupidity in making while in consumerism it only allows stupidity.

3 Also as source, there is no expensive signs associated such as those relating to social hierarchy. What is sold is only the material and basic usability. So the difference in term of price will be like a piece of leather versus Hermes. Thus people are no longer force to work a lot in order to shop.

4 As it is opened, it must be truth based, there is no space for myth, everything can be examined, questioned and testified. A shining human being is not confined by any mind constrains, especially myths that people can not question while have to accept . Thus it gives the freedom to one’s will from another’ will.

5 It’s opened for collaboration. Open source concept are designed for makers to share their idea, source code and eventually collaborate in a same making process, for better version, not closed for monopolizing the profit. It will bring super connectivity to individuals as intense communication and interaction are necessary for creative collaboration.

This new language will like a new natural mechanism that is embedded into the world and our body, with least hardware or software requirements. It’s just like vibrating your vocal cords and sound will be generates. The core of this new language is a central protocol that everything can be compiled here and connected to each other, and the form or interface can be various and ambient. Maybe it could be a very small compiling machine that is built into human body or as body ornamentation(such as body electronic circuit painting). The source code should be light weighted or compressed thus could be shared and sent to others very easily, just like plain text SMS, but could be re-compiled to repeat the process and phenomenon. It should be scalable, evolutionary and open sourced for people to make their own version of language which works better or for their own specific situation, which will eventually allow them to define how their worlds work, or output to the world from their beautiful mind.

Actually the output is love, and “all you need is love”.