This book – about a subject called “Open Source Government” – criticizes today’s political systems. Hard. It rattles establishment cages. But this needs to be done. Mathematician Alfred North Whitehead once said, “It is the business of the future to be dangerous … the major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur.” Open Source Government began with two simple facts: first, science and technology is the only way humans have ever made progress. Forty thousand years ago, humans advanced because of toolmaking. Not mythology, not religion, not war, not lunar celebrations – toolmaking. Kings and wars, Presidents and Senate Sub-Committees, have never improved anything, fundamentally. But math and logic and industrialization and the advent of electricity and flight and computers have. Science and technology is the only thing that causes important historical advancement. Period. Second, politics contains no real science. The existence of “social science,” is a myth. Therefore, politics is incapable of advancing human civilization in a fundamental way. Politicians, who are supposed to be the experts, can’t even tell you what the fundamental terms of society mean – terms like “freedom” or “justice” or “security” – and without the ability to even understand what these things are, they simply can’t create technologies to get us there. When Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniac famously built the first small computers in their garage during the 1970s, they changed the world. Meanwhile, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, and hordes of senators and congressmen and governors who claimed they were making “social progress,” didn’t. During the Age of Steam Power, the Age of Electricity, the Age of Flight, the Age of Television, did Senators and Presidents and Secretaries of State create any significant social progress? No. It was James Clerk Maxwell, Sadi Carnot, Nikola Tesla and the Wright Brothers who advanced human civilization. The scientific and technological thinkers changed everything. The politicians did nothing of any lasting value. The message of this book is that the only way civilization was ever going to progress, is by understanding social phenomena scientifically. Then, and only then, can people build technologies that reliably and predictably improve society. Thus, although this book criticizes politics, it book is not about politics. Open Source Government is not a political philosophy. OSG is not right wing, or left wing, or democrat, or republican. Furthermore, OSG is not religion, not new age, not scientology, not philosophy, not a form of self-help psychology. Open Source Government is about understanding society through science and technology. Finally, this book began as a series of live lectures. That’s why these pages, now transcribed, have an informal, spoken word quality which I’ve tried to preserve. I think it makes the explanation of hard science data less daunting and scary. I should also point out I live in California and that’s why this book is USA-centric. I don’t have a deep understanding of European or Russian or Chinese or Islamic cultures, and so on, because I grew up here, in “Surf City.” Thus, I tend to illustrate concepts with American viewpoints. The principles in this book, however, are universal. This is a science book, and science identifies natural phenomena that are independent of arbitrary points of view. I mention this because a few months ago I posted an early version of this book as a white paper and it was downloaded, read and commented on by thousands of people all over the world. So if you live outside the U.S. please remember, even though I’m writing from an American viewpoint the underlying science is universal.
