Open Source and the Amish
"The technical rationality of open source should always serve value rationality."
I have a strong interest in NAS (network-attached storage) systems. But what I find most interesting about the NAS community is not the hardware or the software, but its culture: people deeply distrust the products of large tech companies and prefer to build their own systems—maintaining their own data, running their own services, and refusing to hand control to Apple’s ecosystem or Google’s cloud.
This makes NAS enthusiasts sound almost like the Amish. The Amish are famous for rejecting modern technology, but their reasoning is more subtle than simple technophobia: they ask whether a given technology serves their values and community. Each new tool is evaluated: does it strengthen family bonds or weaken them? Does it foster community or atomize it? If the answer to the latter question is yes, they reject it. NAS enthusiasts perform a similar calculation. They don’t reject tech as such; they reject tech that centralizes power over their data in corporate hands.
The open-source movement has always been more than a technical choice; it is a value statement. Richard Stallman’s GNU project was explicitly political: software freedom as a precondition for human freedom. The cypherpunks—who gave us Julian Assange and Satoshi Nakamoto—believed that cryptography was the tool by which individuals could resist state and corporate surveillance. The internet itself was born in military-academic networks, always entangled with power; the open-source movement was a counter-movement that tried to keep the internet’s infrastructure in common hands.
Sci-hub, Z-library, PT communities—these operate on a logic of shared access to knowledge, a kind of cyber-communism of the information age. They are direct descendants of the open-source ethic: the idea that information wants to be free, that access to knowledge should not be gatekept by capital.
Maximum Weber argued that Calvinist Protestantism gave capitalism its “spirit”—the ethic of productive labor and deferred gratification that drove early capitalists. Perhaps the internet’s original sharing spirit played a similar role for the information economy: the culture of giving away code, documentation, knowledge without payment created the commons on which the entire digital world is built. The irony is that the tech giants who benefited most from open-source culture are now its most aggressive captors. Technical rationality, if it does not remain in service to value rationality, ends up serving whoever holds the most capital. The Amish understood this instinctively.