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Our speaker this month will be Geof Glass. Born in Ottawa, Geof Glass has been an award winning professional software developer since 1991. As a PhD student in the school of communication at Simon Fraser University, he studies the on-line commons. The 37-year-old Burnaby resident is a cofounder of the Vancouver Fair Copyright Coalition and is greatly concerned about the planned overhaul of Canadian copyright law and the creation of a surveillance society by Lawful Access legislation.

Geof will discuss three popular myths about technology.

Myth #1: Technology is just a neutral tool. ("Guns don't kill people, people kill people.") The ethics vs efficiency debate between free software and open source advocates often hinges on this myth. This is why free matters.

Myth #2: Innovation follows a rational path of progress in which better technologies out-compete worse technologies. In reality, the technologies that succeed become popular and attract investment, and are improved so that their success often retrospectively appears foreordained. The best example is the DOS/Intel IBM PC. The argument that locking down tablets is ok because they are "not computers" takes for granted the outcome of this process of development, when in fact the struggle is over what the category of "tablet" means. Technological determinism is, however, valuable to FOSS advocates who seize on it as a rhetorical device to rally the troops. FOSS is technically superior, therefore its success is foreordained: anything that gets in the way is an intervention in this natural process. Technologies are given meanings by various competing groups. These meanings alter technical characteristics. Once the struggle is over, the meaning becomes stabilized and appears natural and the fact of the struggle and the alternative paths not taken is forgotten. This model is well supported by empirical research.

Myth #3: Information exceptionalism: information is special because it is naturally abundant, making it unlike physical resources, which are scarce. This is a special case of #2. This is largely a consequence of technology and of the idea of the information society/knowledge economy. It was only about 20-30 years ago that economists really developed the concepts of non-rivalry and non-excludability. Information is created through human communication: there is no such thing as a state of nature for information. The abundance of information is therefore not natural, and it is not a forgone conclusion. Furthermore, the scarcity of physical resources is something that has been constructed through the market, as an analysis of the tragedy of the commons argument and the history of the English commons makes clear. The same could easily happen to various kinds of information and knowledge, at which point the outcome would eventually looked natural and necessary.

So come out and exercise your mind. Expand your understanding of technology, FLOSS and how we think about it. Our meeting will be from 7:30pm to 10:00pm in Room 7000, Simon Fraser University, Harbour Centre, Downtown at 555 West Hastings Street. Hope to see you there.

https://www.meetup.com... (https://www.meetup.com/VanLUG-BC/events/51955302/)

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