What Is Open?

Andrew Prescott

‘Open’ has become one of the keywords of the age. As walls and borders have loomed large over the past year, openness seems more important than ever. We want more open governments whose actions can be investigated by the use of open data. We want knowledge and culture to become more open. Firms like British Telecom stress that they offer ‘Openreach’. We want the skies, the seas, the roads to be open.

The pervasiveness of the word ‘open’ in contemporary discourse is striking, because it is an example of a concept from technology that has become applied to society at large. Early pioneers of computing loathed proprietary closed software that could only be run on particular machines. They developed open versions of operating systems like Unix, which could be extended and improved by anyone. Because open source leveraged collective endeavours and helped focus effort on particular aspects of software, it proved to be a very effective method of software development. It was through producing open source browsers like Firefox that Mozilla helped ensure that access to the web would not be controlled by proprietary browsers like Internet Explorer.

Open development has a strong track record in software development, but does that necessarily mean it is a good metaphor to think about society at large? In a famous book published in 1945, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Karl Popper criticised philosophers like Hegel and Marx for their deterministic view of history, rooted according to Popper in Plato’s rejection of Athenian democracy. Popper argued that Hegel and Marx had, by their insistence that there were inexorable closed laws of history, laid the foundations of twentieth-century totalitarianism. For Popper, the only way of escaping the closure of historicism was the open and fluid dynamics of a liberal, modern democracy.

However, Popper’s description of what constituted an open society was vague – it is largely defined by being not historicist and not totalitarian. We can all easily agree that we do not want to live in a totalitarian society, but what is an open society? What are its limits? Is it a society where there are no restrictions on what giant corporations like Apple and Amazon can do? Is it a country which rejects socialised health care because it does not want to restrict the choice of the individual patient? The collapse of communism ushered in a triumphalist neo-liberalism in which the wisdom of the market rules supreme. Isn’t a society ruled by the market just as closed as one ruled by Marxism?

Think about the BBC. The chaotic early development of radio in the United States and concern that the limited range of radio frequencies might be overwhelmed resulted in the British government, in the form of the General Post Office, taking a very closed and controlled approach to radio. The British Broadcasting Company was formed in 1922 by a consortium of radio manufacturers and financed by a levy on equipment. Sir John Reith, when appointed as the first Director General, knew nothing about radio, but quickly established a strongly educational and religious ethos and also made it clear that he would be independent of government. In this approach, Reith was bolstered by the strong cultural consensus of the 1920s around what was respectable and improving.

As a government monopoly with a restricted cultural outlook, the BBC is, strictly speaking, a closed organisation – for the first thirty years of its life, it was a monopoly. Yet in terms of access to culture and the promotion of national well-being, most British people would say that the BBC has been a great success, and would consider it to have promoted open culture.

Part of the reason for the BBC’s success was that Reith made it clear from the beginning that the BBC would be independent of government, when he refused to act as a government mouthpiece in the 1926 General Strike. The licence fee was also valued as a mechanism that transcended commercial interests. The BBC is valued because it offers everybody access to a wide range of culture in a way that is not wholly driven by market imperatives.

The BBC model will not work in an international digital environment. In the 1920s, it was much easier to impose national frameworks for the adoption of new technologies. But part of the lesson of the BBC is that openness does not necessarily mean the adoption of market-oriented solutions. A truly open body values impartiality and independence and resists commercial or government pressures. An open society cherishes the belief that every citizen should have the opportunity of satisfying their curiosity on any subject. The way in which the internet lowers the barrier to publication and allows me to publish articles and books whenever I like is something that should excite a truly open society.

That doesn’t mean that in an open society all knowledge comes free of charge. Consider the print precedents. Books are expensive commodities, but the public library system (until it started to be gradually strangled by funding restrictions) enables me to get hold of any book or article I want for the price of a postage stamp. That is an open system. As the public library system is undermined, the assumption appears to be that we will get books via Amazon, paying through the nose for each item. That is a closed system.

An open society is one in which knowledge is open. Everything else – freedom of speech, democratic government, religious freedom – flows from that. The great nineteenth-century librarian Sir Anthony Panizzi said in 1836:

“I want a poor student to have the same means of indulging his learned curiosity, of following his rational pursuits, of consulting the same authorities, of fathoming the most intricate inquiry as the richest man in the kingdom, as far as books go, and I contend that the government is bound to give him the most liberal and unlimited assistance in this respect”.

That’s a pretty good motto for an open society. And a good benchmark for a healthy internet.

If an open society is driven by a thirst to share and make available knowledge, it follows that open knowledge will break down borders and barriers. Sir Anthony Panizzi, who designed the famous Reading Room of the British Museum where Marx studied, was himself a refugee, who had been forced to flee Italy because he had been fighting for democratic reform. That is why Panizzi was convinced that open access to knowledge will break down borders and barriers.

Openness isn’t about untamed market economics. It isn’t about unlimited consumer choice. It isn’t even necessarily about freedom of movement. It is about access to knowledge. The concomitant of this is that an open society is a questioning society. It is a society that doesn’t take anything on trust but wants to investigate and interrogate. It doesn’t blindly follow precedent but wants to work things out for itself. It questions and interrogates what words like ‘open’, ‘disruptive’ and ‘transformative’ mean and how they are used.

The motto of the Royal Society, founded in 1660, is ‘Nullius in verba’, which means ‘Take nobody’s word for it’. That’s a great watchword for an open society.