Douglas Rushkoff, the brainiac who brought the world “The Merchants of Cool” and “The Persuaders” on PBS’ Frontline, has written his first business book, Get Back In The Box, in which he “contextualizes the open source ethos as part of a bigger renaissance: the emergence of an authorship society.”
This renaissance ethos of authorship isn’t limited to some isolated group of “cultural creatives” in New York, San Francisco, and Cambridge. No, it’s a mainstream “red state” American trend, as well, emerging as crafts fairs, a NASCAR culture of car modification, gun kits, backyard farming, and even home schooling.
This is the spirit of authorship presaged by the Internet and now extending to every area of our lives. The hacker mentality is all around us, evidenced in everything from the hubris to learn the entire genetic code and attempt human cloning to a growing stack of new translations of the Bible.
It is the real legacy of the open source movement—misunderstood even by many of its participants as solely a way to develop computer operating systems, and underestimated in its potential impact by even its staunchest opponents.
[via Random Culture]
I only started reading Get Back In The Box a couple of days ago, but it’s absolutely BRILLIANT. Favorite quote (so far):
“Rather than trying to understand the products we made or services we offered, we simply put them in different packages. We managed our brands instead of our products.”
This one’s definitely worth pre-ordering at Amazon.