The Open-Source Everything Manifesto: Transparency, Truth, and Trust by Robert David Steele (review)

What is there not to like about “openness”? The premise seems to have virtue, particularly in the space of critique of government. From totalitarianism through to oligarchies, it can be argued that it is opacity and secrecy that have contributed to abuses of power for many centuries. In other spaces, the notion has caught hold. In several scientific fields, it appears that a lack of openness can lead to misconduct and in some cases a slowness that may cost lives. In the humanities, we might say that its absence fosters insularity. In computer software production, open-source paradigms have led to remarkable developments such as the Linux kernel and allowed us to see the inner machinations of the code that is responsible for many aspects of our daily lives. There is much to be said for open practice.

And yet, there are some troubling aspects of “openness” that often go unexamined by those who fetishize the concept. The most obvious of these is the conflation of personal and public in demands for transparency: the famous ironic quip that if one has nothing to hide, one has nothing to fear. The other is the way in which rhetorics of openness seem co-genetic with the growth of neoliberalism, the political rationality in which politics is displaced by economics. Indeed, the idea of open practices as reducing “transaction costs” of interactions (whether societal or technological) is an example, par excellence, of neoliberal rationality’s ubiquitous language of economics (Brown 2015; Davies 2014). We thus begin to see a tension between those who believe that open practices, across all spaces, might contribute to social justice and those who, ever more, claim the openness a panacea in terms of economics, proselytizing transparency, visibility, rationality, trust, and individual libertarianism while all the time resting upon the theology of the invisible hand.

Robert David Steele, the author of The Open-Source Everything Manifesto, is, by my reading, of the latter persuasion. Steele’s biography makes the most of his previous career as a CIA spy but goes light on his prominent claims that all recent terrorist attacks in the United States—including Sandy Hook and the Boston bombings—were “false flags,” that is, conspiratorial events that did not really happen. Steele calls Ron Paul—the Republican who denies the reality of global warming, opposes all abortion, supports the rights of businesses to discriminate on sexual orientation, and believes all hate crime laws to be unconstitutional—“ethical and consistent” (19). (What I take Steele to mean here is that Ron Paul is not corrupt; he really believes what he campaigns for and can’t be bought. Why this merits both the terms ethical and consistent I am unsure. I would say that it is purely the latter.) Furthermore, for all his critiques of trickle-down economics as “what is really concentration of wealth” (144), Steele’s book comes across as somewhat naive, triumphalist, and uncritical in its approach toward openness. Indeed, to continue the religious strain of the preceding paragraph, Steele comes to openness with the fervor of a True Believer, and his manifesto, in the way of that genre of course, is the Holy Text.

And be in no doubt: there’s theology in this book. The word God appears alongside its patriotic counterpart of saintly nationhood, “We the People,” on many occasions throughout. This is counterbalanced, however, by the author’s insistence on jam-packing the volume full of near-indecipherable, and near-unexplained, technical diagrams and military-style acronyms (such as “M4IS2” [22]) for future progress. This intersection of the religious and the scientistic will certainly appeal to those in utopian studies as an object of study. For Steele posits a plan for what he calls a “World Brain” through openness that will achieve the positivist x-axis goal, as time unfolds, of a “100% of Humanity World that Works for All” (115).

Futile as it would...