Kevin Carson is working on a fourth book! What he stresses is “a very rough draft” is available online here; it looks fascinating, as usual. 
Its topic is “the potential for networked organization to constrain the exercise of power by large, hierarchical institutions in a way that once required the countervailing power of other large, hierarchical institutions.”
(I guess releasing ongoing drafts of a work on open source is a way of achieving unity of medium and message.)
Thanks a lot, Roderick.
As a matter of fact, Raymond’s “release early and release often” motto made me feel kind of guilty about waiting so long in the past to get drafts polished up in something approaching final form before I published them. Then, too, it brings me all kinds of leads that makes my work easier (“many eyeballs make shallow bugs”).
I’ve got to say, the image that conjures up is not appealing.
Ah, the beauty of “open source government”. With the blueprints for how our government is run like the Constitution and the Federal Register you too can craft and run your own constitutional republic right there in your living room. To submit a bugfix, say of the 8th amendment to include the death penalty, submit it to the congressional bug-tracker and a committee will get to your submission as soon as it deals with the other 3-million or so.
Roderick,
I like your “Dirty Rod” picture at the top of the blog.
Looks amazing! Here’s hoping Kevin decides on a better title than the misleading and propaganistically problematic Open Source Government.
I know that OS Government is already used with a somewhat different connotation by other people. I might modify it with a subtitle of some sort, like “How Superempowered Individuals and Networks are Contesting the Power of Large Organizations.”
That’s the general point I was trying to make with the previous post but perhaps I did not do the sarcasm well enough.
Would “governance” be an option?
“Governance” is synonymous with “government”.
To the extent that os government forgoes the initiation of force, then government is the correct word to describe it.
When it’s purpose is aggression, it might be called an os state.
All legitimate government is stateless. The state, as it represses our right to govern our lives and in so doing, inhibits or destroys legitimate government, is the essence of anarchy and this “government by fiat” or “fiat government”, is as fake as the “fiat money” it prints; its responsible for most of the injustice, suffering, chaos and violence from which real government – the voluntary private sector – helps to protect us.