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A New Politics Built on Free Software Ideals?

posted by LaminatorX on Wednesday April 09 2014, @02:23PM   Printer-friendly
from the GNU-is-Not-Utopia dept.

Pav writes:

Roberto Unger is a philosopher, former Brazilian minister, and academic at the Harvard Law School. He is proposing a new left-wing politics informed by Free Software and similar culture (an experimental "technological vanguard" in his language). His agenda is empowerment, and many of his ideas will be familiar eg. anti-IP and wide distribution of cutting-edge tech. His longer term program is frighteningly ambitious it's as if whole industries and economies should evolve towards becoming Free Software projects. He also believes in strong government intervention at the bottom for basic services and the top for blue sky projects. His ideas are methodically explained and seem logical, and they're certainly fascinating.

Unger has written several books, though someone has put together an excellent video summary of his ideas and arguments. Ungers critique of the current state of left-wing politics particularly resonated it's devastating. Is this finally a politics that could speak to us?

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 09 2014, @05:24PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 09 2014, @05:24PM (#28936)

    Interesting. Imagine a world where no one had gotten rich from IP (no Thomas Edison, Walt Disney, Steve Jobs, etc.) and we replaced their efforts with patronage from nobility, religious groups, universities, etc. Sounds pretty good: we now could watch that Mickey Mouse film that never got shot on the movie camera that never got invented on our iPhone that never got created. And we could do it all for free, and modify it any way we want! ;-)

  • (Score: 2) by moo kuh on Thursday April 10 2014, @12:02AM

    by moo kuh (2044) on Thursday April 10 2014, @12:02AM (#29159) Journal

    I don't think Edison is who you think he is. I would suggest taking some time to read up on what happened between him and Nikola Tesla. I could argue that Edison stifled technological development. I don't know much about Walt Disney. Steve Jobs, meh. He knew how to run a business, market, and sell things. I don't see anything Apple does as particularly innovative. Blackberries were very popular before iPhones. There was an MP3 player with a hard drive before the iPOD. OS-X is just FreeBSD with some GUI tools and a fancy window manager/desktop environment.