Constitutional democracy = open government. Community-driven software = open source. America = open everything.
I don't think the main point of the constitutional democratic movement was necessarily to open the functioning of government to everyone. But in America, to an extent, that was the end result. One of the big ideas here was that anyone could become President if they worked hard enough. Before, of course, not everyone could become kings or queens. You had to be of royal family. This seems obvious, but the radical and revolutionary nature of constitutional democracy, at the time, cannot be understated.
And the full implication, which has culminated in many ways in the Internet, is absolutely stunning: Anyone can be anything at all if they put their mind to it. To put it another way, everything is open.
This concept of "open" has an elegant geometry that has been refined through our culture acting out these ideals. It is really a beautiful idea, which I feel should be examined, so we can capitalize on the American dream and fulfill it in our own lives. Here are my thoughts on the matter.
What does it mean that something is open? In some ways, it's obvious. If I want to be a CEO of a corporation, I can be one. How? The easiest way, of course, is to form my own corporation. I have a feeling that a lot of people thinking about the philosophy of openness will stop there. But I don't think that's good enough.
Anyone can form a corporation. In America, it's ridiculously easy. But will the corporation make money? Now to my mind, the idea that "anyone can become a CEO" has absolutely no relationship to the concept of openness if anyone can be a broke CEO, but only a handful of people can actually make money at it. The concept of openness is much more complex than that.
I like Andy Warhol's statement: "In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes." This statement has been lauded as getting to the very heart of what America means. And through Warhol's life work, in a lot of ways, he made it happen. Not only was his life a rags-to-riches story, but after he became famous, he made everyone he ever contacted, including heroine addicts, working class drag queens, and so on, literally famous. He created a dialog between working class and superstar cultures. And everyone could be a star if they found their way to his little working space in New York City.
This concept of openness has a lot more meat than the superficial idea that anyone can be a CEO of a corporation. Whether you're a CEO of a corporation is determined by whether the Secretary of State in your state has a copy of a piece of paper in their filing cabinet. Whether you're famous, whether you're a star, on the other hand, has to do with whether scores of people think wonderful thoughts about you. This is far more meaningful.
It may not look it at first glance, but a similar thing is going on even in the example of the everyman CEO. If people are enticed by the idea that anyone can become a CEO of a corporation, it doesn't have to do with just your title, or with a piece of paper, but with whether scores of people think wonderful enough thoughts about you to give you money. This, I think, is what the idea of openness is all about.
So where does it come from? How do you get scores of people to think wonderful thoughts about you? The answer is really simple: you must think wonderful thoughts about everyone else. They then can't help but think wonderful thoughts about you, because that's how people's psychology works.
Unfortunately, there are systemic obstacles to thinking wonderfully about each other. This is what oppression is, and yes, oppression still exists. But the light at the end of the tunnel is the opposite of systemic oppression: systemic openness.
The constitutional democratic process is exactly that—systemic openness. It is a system characterized by openness. And the only way to fully realize the implications of the constitutional democratic process, and fulfill the promise it holds for the human race, is to open every system.
So not only should anyone be allowed to be President of the U.S. government, everyone should be allowed to be the President of Coca Cola. There should be a pathway towards being that President as well. For all genders. For all disabilities (within reason). And so forth.
Openness has a couple of logical implications. It means people are held accountable to those they affect in their decisions. It means everyone who has a stake in something has an ability to affect it in some way. It means that autonomous actors, in whatever form they take—corporations, individual people, collectives, and so on—have the power to do dialog and dialectics with one another to form a new idea within the context of the organizations which they feel involved with. There is nothing that "we just don't talk about." Someone, somewhere, has to talk about it, especially if it's a problem, or else it won't serve a purpose of any kind.
It means that the autonomous actors have communication channels open to them which connect them to all the other autonomous actors they deem necessary to talk to. This doesn't just mean that everyone can send mass emails and online petitions to the President of Coke—it means that the President of Coke will actually listen in some way. Coke has a delicious flavor, and serves as a cultural icon. It is also a cultural ambassador to many other nations. Coke thus has a responsibility to maintain their status in our culture, and if they do something which rubs Americans wrong, we have a right to talk about it, directly to the corporation. Otherwise, Coke is in a state of catatonic schizophrenia, and we're all in trouble.
I like Coke because of the Andy Warhol connection, and because of the fact that it unites Democrats and Republicans. It is our mainstay, much like the Queen of England. In a lot of ways, Coke is invisible. Which is as it should be. As long as it is affordable, we should be allowed to organize our culture around it.
This invisible quality should be the most important quality of leadership in organizations. Organizations should have a powerful main thrust, then keep cool and invisible, so that we can organize ourselves around them. In many ways, the U.S. government is invisible. Who is really in charge? The people who are in charge are invisible. Many of them are corporations, but many are also individuals, because we all hold a vote. The government, then, is what we say it is.
This is how openness works. I hope I live to see the day when every organization in America aggressively takes up a policy of openness. It is the way to innovation, as the Japanese economy proves. We're the premier open organization, but Japan seems to have an edge on us in the idea of openness in corporate decisionmaking. (See here.) But I think we can do better. I think we should prove to the world that we can open everything.
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