Public Faith

I was first attracted to open source – public code that everybody relies upon – after observing that its developers are creating trillions of dollars in economic value, while giving away their code for free.

I previously understood faith only as a powerfully destructive force in the world, but I never took stock of all the ways it helped galvanize others or provided insight into our interconnected struggles.

I want us to grasp that religion cannot be relegated to just a private or just a public sphere, but it is an animating force all around us that we give value to.

Working In Public, despite being a superlative book-length tour of the open source movement, isn’t really about collaborative software development. It’s really about how a virtualized, digital world decoupled from the physical constraints of manufacturing and meatspace politics manages to both pay for and govern itself despite no official legal fra... See more

And all this happened with surprisingly little at stake: in the case of open source the main incentive is just individual software engineers gaining prestige and high-paying jobs. Nadia Eghbal has written extensively about the incentive problems in the open source community holding back progress.

The open community of the internet is somewhere where you can find other people who are interested in those same things as you and who want to learn about those same things as you in a way that was not really possible before, without there being a substantial amount of transaction costs involved.