Free Software as Part of the Anarchist Toolkit

…Humanity is at a turning point because we are faced with a number of grave issues all coming together simultaneously. In large measure these would be the current 6th mass extinction event as agreed by 400 of the worlds top biologists and ecologists and which we are experiencing in the biosphere as we speak. The second issue is global warming where now the consensus of atmospheric scientists seems to indicate we will experience not just the low end of the forecast, but the medium scale warming of up to 4odegrees globally. And in the past few years, there is increasing discussion amongst leading atmospheric scientists that we are in danger of triggering the high end of the forecast with 6+ degrees and that would be a direct threat to continuation of the species. (For example it is estimated without global warming as part of the mass extinction we will lose ~50% of species. Including global warming brings those estimates up into the 60% to 70% bracket.) The third issue is Peak Oil and the long term consequences for industrial society.

So the question is, should we fail the above challenges and humanity enters a long slide downwards and the decay of industrial society, will this era of rapid global communications, vast amounts of digital storage and spare time to write software -disappear, only to be a short lived and unique phenomena in the history of humankind? In other words will the problems we face overwhelm the infrastructure needed to support all these technologies? (And which is suggested in the original Club of Rome reports. These were published in the 1970s and identified not just resource limits, but the possibility of a pollution crisis too as overwhelming industrial society and causing its downfall.) Of course the answer won’t be found here but I think a small part of finding the solution is in fact here in the form of free software.

Anarkismo