Keynote: Is Drupal Moral? (David Weinberger)

session details: Is Drupal Moral?

David Weinburger, co-author of the Cluetrain Manifesto and Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder

• Why even ask? Because Drupal is used in high-visibility places (Howard Dean, Recovery.gov)
• Can technology be moral instead of amoral?
  • can only moral agents be moral?
  • do some things inherently suck, like nuclear bombs?
  • context can help us assign morality to amoral things
• hyperlinks are the new punctuation, telling us how to continue reading instead of when to stop reading
  
  • in the past, knowledge has conveniently, seemingly naturally divided itself into book-sized units
  • Britannica has 180,000 words on "philosophy," Wikipedia has 9,000 (longer than guidelines suggest it should be)
  • but Wikipedia article has links to related articles -- if you count them Wikipedia has much more
  • Wikipedia's shape is closer to the shape of truth than Britannica's
  • traditional databases organize information by reducing information, cramming selected bits in boxes and leaving out everything else
    
  • by linking out (to other sites), we allow each entry to take its own shape while still being organized
• moral principles vs. consequences
  • principles are top-down: make the current situation fit a pre-defined criterion
  • but even if people agree on the principle, they may not agree on how the situation fits! (ex: murder is wrong, but is abortion?)
  • utilitarian approach: judge the unique situation by whether its consequences are more good or bad
  • but anyone can think of a hypothetical case where any situation has good or bad consequences
  • moral intuitionism: trust our guts
  • but some people have really rotten guts
  • for the most part, people are sympathetic creatures and make moral decisions intuitively
  • when sympathy turns toward the world it becomes care
• back to Drupal
  • as a technology, Drupal lets us connect as people and care about each other
  • Drupal, the Web, and morality share a single architecture
  • but it doesn't happen by itself
  • contrasting view: Web allows similar people to cluster together and close their minds
  • but is the traditional newspaper any more diverse than Web sites? are most conversations?
  • small talk allows us to find a common topic where we mostly agree; then we converse about that
    
  • surprisingly, this fundamental question (does the Web make us more or less diverse) doesn't matter
  • we all learn from the Internet that the world is way more interesting and diverse than we thought
• The exciting conclusion
  • yes, Drupal is moral!  But that doesn't tell us enough.
  • regardless of the architecture, we must perpetually fight against our baser nature