Eben Moglen

We find ourselves now in a very different place. You live there, I live there, my other clients live there. It’s a place in which the primary infrastructure is produced by sharing. The primary technology of production is unowned. The effectiveness of that mode of production in the broader society is now established. Plus or minus the couple more years left before Microsoft fails entirely, we have now proven either the adequacy or final superiority in crass economic terms of the way we make things. We have brought forward now the possibility of distributing everything that every public education system uses freely everywhere to everyone: true universal public education for the first time. We have shown how our software, plus commodity hardware, plus electromagnetic spectrum that nobody owns, can build a robust, deep, mesh-structured communications network which can be built out in poor parts of the world far more rapidly than the twentieth century infrastructures of broadcast technology and telephones. We have begun proving the fabric of a twenty-first century society which is egalitarian in its nature, and which is structured to produce for the common benefit more effectively than it can produce for private exclusive proprietary benefit. We are solving epochal problems.

We are introducing new possibilities based upon new technological arrangements to deal with the fundamental political difficulties that we have coped with, and our predecessors in seeking equality and justice have coped with, for generations. We are very lucky. We live at a time when technological progress and the pressure for human justice are coming together in a way which can produce fundamental satisfactions that have eluded us for centuries. But in that luck there comes responsibility. We need to get it done.

There are other people with other views. We are not everybody. The other views assume that this technology too can be shaped to support hierarchy, that it can be shaped to support ownership, that it can be shaped not only to ignore the moral question I have put forward, but to make that moral question invisible to almost everybody. Forever. The folks on the other side are also very powerful. They look way more powerful than we. They are also quite clear-sighted. They also understand that there is an epochal openness here, and they have no more intention of giving up what they claim as theirs now than they ever have had.