Weinberger: The Opposite Of ‘Open’ Is ‘Theirs’

Weinberger beautifully nails the true value of an open web (or Net): it remains ours.

The Net as a medium is not for anything in particular — not for making calls, sending videos, etc. It also works at every scale, from one to one to many to many. This makes it highly unusual as a medium. In fact, we generally don’t treat it as a medium but as a world, rich with connections, persistent, and social. Because everything we encounter in this world is something that we as humans made (albeit sometimes indirectly), it feels like it’s ours. Obviously it’s not ours in the property sense. Rather, it’s ours in the way that our government is ours and our culture is ours. There aren’t too many other things that are ours in that way.

If we allow others to make decisions about what the Net is for — preferring some content and services to others — the Net won’t feel like it’s ours, and we’ll lose some of the enthusiasm (= love) that drives our participation, innovation, and collaborative efforts.

So, if we’re going to talk about the value of the open Internet, we have to ask what the opposite of “open” is. No one is proposing a closed Internet. When it comes to the Internet, the opposite of “open” is “theirs.”

via www.hyperorg.com

This reminds me of piece I wrote last year, Web Culture: Individuality, Belonging, And Scalar Freedom:

[…] people are discovering all over again, that connection to other
people around issues that matter can become the defining source of
happiness and purpose, in a way totally different from mass affiliation
— being a citizen of large and unresponsive country, where ‘culture’
has become a product of multinational corporations, churned out from
music, movie, publishing, and television factories.

Our old dreams are manufactured. Our new dreams must be
bottom-up, like connection on the web, or in wiring within our heads.
If we are to make sense of the post-everything future before us, it
will have to come from our conversations among ourselves, on a social scale in which we feel that we matter.

Post-everything will mean embracing something we know will involve
us, leaving behind our second-class status as members of the mass
audience, and become living, active participants in a new culture.