I felt the need to write something this morning, inspired partially by TeacherKen’s dedication over at Daily Kos.

I’ve recently been reading this book called “Viral Spiral” by David Bollier. It’s a good read so far. The premise of the book is that during the dark, dark years of the Bush Administration, when hordes of liberally-inclined Americans felt pretty disenfranchised and aliented by what Bollier calls conventional politics, a new kind of digital republic was taking shape, right under the noses of the gatekeepers.

Sure, it exists pretty much exclusively in software, platform, and web development spaces, but it was started with a fundamentally different conception of how the world works, and the internet represented the promise of a new kind of society. The medium allowed the new digital citizens to operate and develop without having to negotiate the usual avenues for creative production–namely, traditional copyright.

This was a fantastic development for many reasons. It allowed the internet to flourish into a place where culture is free. Not free in the sense that it doesn’t cost anything, but free in that there are no idiotic restrictions when it comes to the creation by individuals and collections of individuals. It also allowed for things like this site to be created, by a guy like me with limited knowledge about php, ajax, or html coding. Nucleus CMS and Wordpress are platforms created by a community of programmers who try things out, each adding small parts to make an otherwise bland web-publishing platform into something really exciting and revolutionary.

Why is this a big deal, you say? Well, now anyone can publish their stuff. Anyone can be heard. And it’s not just because of the generosity of the programmers who put it together who decide for some reason to not make money off of their expertise–much like programmers are doing on has-been software distribution models like we find on today’s iPhone app store. No, there is in fact an implicit give-and-take. The new digital citizens find value in helping people to express themselves in an intimate, many-to-many fashion. They also expect producers (formerly: consumers) of the publishing media to provide feedback and ideas for future derivations of the code.

Personally, I’ve offered my advice many times recently to the amateur programmers who are putting together plugins and skins for Wordpress, which this site, incidentally, is going to be moving to in about 1 week, if I can get my act together aka if I can decide on a color scheme. The amazing part is, that even though these digital citizens are working 9-5 or have traditional jobs where they make money off of copyright, they will immediately fix a bug in the code and release a new version. I’ve updated a seemingly-simple star-rating system for the new Free Press website 5 times in 2 weeks. This is not the sign of an unworkable program; it’s the sign of a participatory society bubbling up without any of the gatekeepers paying attention at all.

But the digital citizens don’t crave attention. They do it for love of the game. I’ll probably talk about the political implications later, once I get further into the book. But for now, have this:

There is a new conception of value being played out in the new digital republic, and it signals an end to the traditional dollars-and-cents capitalistic interpretation of value. We value ideas, people, and constructive creativity. We value what we create. The days of alienation from our labor is coming to an end. Sure, it’s not going to be overnight, but believe me when I say that there will be a time in our lifetime when the information society takes over completely. Not in a corporatistic sort of way, but in an organic, collective kind of way, a decision we will all agree with. As we depend on traditional hands-on labor less and less, and the factory model become more and more untenable for humanity’s survival, believe me when I say the utterly peaceful self-expressive revolution will be total.

And it will be good. For everyone.

Except the rich gatekeepers. Screw ‘em.