pecialties to establish the
rules through which society actually comes into existence.

This marks a profound shift in our relationship to law and governance.
We move from simply following the law, to understanding the law, to
actually feeling capable of writing the law: adhering to the map, to
understanding the map, to drawing our own. At the very least, we are
aware that the choices made on our behalf have the ability to shape
our future reality and that these choices are not ordained but
implemented by people just like us.

Unlike the 1960s, when people questioned their authorities in the hope
of replacing them (revolution), today's activists are forcing us to
re-evaluate the premise underlying top-down authority as an organising
principle (renaissance). Bottom-up organisational models, from slime
mould to WTO protests, seem better able to address today's
participatory sensibility. Indeed, the age of irony may be over, not
just because the American dream has been interrupted by terrorism and
economic shocks but because media-savvy Westerners are no longer
satisfied with understanding current events through the second-hand
cynical musings of magazine journalists. They want to engage more
directly and they see almost every set of rules as up for
reinterpretation and re-engineering.

Applying the theory

So what happens when the open source development model is applied to,
say, the economy? In the United States, it would mean coming to
appreciate the rules of the economic game for what they are: rules.
Operating in a closed source fashion, the right to actually produce
currency is held exclusively by the Federal Reserve. Quietly removed
from any relationship to real money such as gold or silver by Richard
Nixon in the early 1970s, US currency now finds its value in pure
social construction. Whether or not we know it, we all participate in
the creation of its value by competing for dollars against one
another. For example, when a people or businesses borrows money from
the bank (an agent, in a sense, of the Federal Reserve) in the form of
a mortgage they must eventually pay the bank back two or three times
the original borrowed amount. These additional funds are not printed
into existence, but must be won from others in the closed source
system. Likewise, every time a student wants to buy one of my books,
he must go out into the economy and earn or win some of these
arbitrarily concocted tokens, US currency, in or