Our democracy our constitutional framework is really a kind of software for harnessing the creativity and political imagination for all of our people. The American democratic system was an early political version of Napster.
I'm sorry that we have to have a Washington presence. We thrived during our first 16 years without any of this. I never made a political visit to Washington and we had no people here. It wasn't on our radar screen. We were just making great software.
In the free/libre software movement we develop software that respects users' freedom so we and you can escape from software that doesn't.
Free software is software that respects your freedom and the social solidarity of your community. So it's free as in freedom.
What you have in most education software is that they're catering to the decision-maker who makes the budget allocations and that decision-maker has a lot of check boxes. Does it do this? Check. Does it do that? Check. They could care less about the end user experience.
Health care and education in my view are next up for fundamental software-based transformation.
The basic problem is that web 2.0 tools are not supportive of democracy by design. They are tools designed to gather spy-agency-like data in a seductive way first and foremost but as a side effect they tend to provide software support for mob-like phenomena.
Since when has the world of computer software design been about what people want? This is a simple question of evolution. The day is quickly coming when every knee will bow down to a silicon fist and you will all beg your binary gods for mercy.
Originally I was in both software and in online computing. The first innovation really was sort of at that time that we're marrying the telephone and the computer so that people wouldn't have to drive to the computer center. We didn't have $1 000 computers.
Diaspora starts about a thousand years from now. Most of human civilisation has moved inside computers essentially a major branch of our descendants consists of conscious software.