Open Policy

Threats and
opportunities in
a wired world
Paul Miller
Paul Miller is a policy advisor at
Forum for the Future.
p.miller@forumforthefuture.org.uk

Forum for the Future is a UK-based

sustainable development charity working to
accelerate the transition to a sustainable way
of life. We have partnerships with business,
local authorities, regional bodies and
universities, working with them to deliver
a shared commitment to sustainability. We
provide advice and develop partnership work
on issues as diverse as climate change,
procurement strategies, environmental
accounting and the digital divide. We also
communicate what we learn with our partners
to a wider network of decision-makers and
opinion formers and run a number of cutting
edge projects engaging with a wider
audience from business, government, higher
education and NGOs on key sustainable
development challenges.

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© Forum for the Future, 2002

Published by Forum for the Future in November 2002

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Internet references correct at time of going to press.

Editor Tim Aldrich

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www.slashdot.org
www.plastic.com
Further details on Peretti’s
email are available at
www.media.mit.edu
/~peretti/
Introduction
With the click of a mouse, the message was sent. Nike,
sports clothing giant and symbol of personal freedom,
had created a feature on their website allowing shoppers
to customise shoes with words or slogans of their choice.
On 5 January 2001, Jonah Peretti ordered a pair of shoes
customised with the word ‘sweatshop’ and Nike refused
to deliver. But the email conversation between Peretti and
the Nike customer services department about why the
company wouldn’t allow his request was stored on
Peretti’s computer.
Peretti forwarded the email conversation to just
twelve friends, but within hours thousands of people
had seen the message. Within days the message had been
posted on popular discussion sites like Slashdot.org and
Plastic.com and was seen by tens of thousands of other
internet users. Soon, Peretti was getting calls from
journalists and TV producers asking him for interviews.
NBC’s Today programme flew him to New York to appear
live in front of millions of viewers. There was nothing
Nike could do to put the genie back in the bottle.
Once the message was out, there was no going back.
This essay considers why one click of Jonah Peretti’s
mouse changed the way that millions of people think
about one of the world’s biggest corporations. It’s an
exploration of the technological and social factors that
make it possible for wired-up Davids to take on global
Goliaths and what this means for business and govern-
ment. It does this with a view to learning how organisa-
tions can rise to the new challenge of ‘hacktivism’ – the
coming together of hackers and activists – and turn it
into an opportunity to accelerate the transition towards
sustainable development.
• Small worlds explains some of the theory behind the
phenomenon that allowed the ‘sweatshop’ email to
jump out of Peretti’s immediate friendship group and
find millions of readers world-wide.
• Information overload and network failure looks at some
of the social effects of digital technology and particularly
how the rise of the internet has been accompanied by a
breakdown in traditionally trusted positions in society.
There’s an increased sense of unease about the effects
of global business and the ‘network society’.
3
 • Then we look at the so-called Hacker ethic. In internet
speak, hackers aren’t the computer criminals that the
media would have us believe (they’re termed crackers).
A hack is simply defined as ‘a neat programming trick’,
a hacker as ‘a computer virtuoso’. It was hackers that
created the technology and computer programs that
make up the internet we all take for granted today.
But what were the personal values that drove them?

• A global conversation argues that the internet,

created by hackers, is qualitatively different from
previous communication technologies. The internet is
fundamentally empowering. Unlike the development of
print, radio or television beforehand, it allows all those
connected to the network to communicate on an almost
equal basis. As the internet and other open technologies
reach more people the opportunity grows for people to
become activists rather than passive-ists – global
players rather than couch potatoes.

• Open Policy argues that the challenge for companies,

governments and international institutions is not how to
seal themselves away behind ever more sophisticated
(and expensive) firewalls but how to come to terms with
the changed technological and social landscape. They
should consider the idea of Open Policy, a new tool
proposed here, for inspiration as to how to deliver
sustainable development in a networked world.

The overall message is that increasingly we will all

find ourselves becoming activists through our use of, and
interaction with, technology – sometimes unwittingly.
Put simply, we will all become hacktivists. This provides a
challenge to the old institutional tools of governance and
decision-making, but it also provides an opportunity for
government and business to move off the back foot in the
debate about accountability and unleash a new source of
creativity and innovation.

But first, let’s begin by looking at some evidence that

Jonah Peretti isn’t alone.

4
 The rise of Hacktivism

Imagine you’re a BP employee curious about what’s

really going on in the debate about the environmental
impact of your company. In an attempt to hear the other
side of the argument, you surreptitiously log on to the
Greenpeace website during your lunch-break. If you’d
done this at the height of the controversy over the
NorthStar oil exploration project in Alaska, you
would have been in for a shock.
www.greenpeace.org Greenpeace had set up a so-called IP detection
system whereby their web server monitored the address
from which a page request was made and, if it matched
a list of BP-owned domains, delivered a special pop-up
page aimed directly at BP employees. Brian Fitzgerald
of Greenpeace International explains, “We told them we
knew that the Northstar development project in Alaska
had been controversial within BP, and encouraged staff
to come forward with any information that they felt the
public needed to know about safety and environmental
concerns about the project within BP.” The hacker trick
didn’t go unnoticed. According to Matthew Spencer,
a Greenpeace campaigner in the UK, BP’s head of
security told him at the BP Annual General Meeting
that the pop-up was “very clever”.
The story of the internet we’ve all heard is of the
dotcom boom and bust. The books and television
documentaries now charting the demise of the dotcoms
tell the story of a bunch of bright young things pulling
the wool over the eyes of the established business world.
But as the story above illustrates, behind the headlines
the internet was being put to an altogether different use.
Political and environmental activists were learning that
the new technologies could be used to bring attention
to their cause.
As well as established campaigners – like Greenpeace –
turning to cyberspace, this was the beginning of the
www.cultdeadcow.com flowering of hacktivist groups such as the Cult of the Dead
www.thing.net/~rdom/ Cow, the Electronic Disturbance Theatre (EDT) and the
ecd/ecd.html ElectroHippies who use their programming skills to stage
www.fraw.org.uk/ehippies virtual sit-ins on company and government websites.
A popular tool has been the Distributed Denial of
Service (DDoS) attack, as seen during the Seattle World
Trade Organisation (WTO) protest of 1999. As the
protestors on the streets were being tear-gassed by police,

5
 500,000 people were silently, remotely, bringing down the
WTO’s website. This was the work of the ElectroHippies
who had organised a cyber protest whereby anybody who
wanted to could join together to repeatedly ‘ping’ the
WTO website – the equivalent of knocking on the door.
With half a million computers repeatedly requesting a
response from the website at the same time, the server
was unable to cope and the website was brought down,
thereby causing ‘denial of service’ for regular users.
Ricardo Dominguez of the EDT points to the idea
of the ‘Panther Moderns’ – characters who break into
‘the Information Bunker’ by inserting 10,000 new
realities into it – in William Gibson’s cult cyberpunk
novel Neuromancer as the inspiration for EDT’s use
of Denial of Service attacks. Indeed, hacktivists have
found that electronic blockage can sometimes cause more
financial stress and damage than physical blockage, as
companies and governments become more reliant on
electronic transactions (Dominguez, 2001).
EDT was involved in using a similar tactic in what
has become known as the ‘Toy War’. At the height of the
dotcom frenzy, brand was everything in cyberspace and
your domain name was key to your brand – they were
traded for hundreds of thousands of dollars. In Autumn
1999, the established start-up eToys.com managed to
evict an arts co-operative from the domain name
‘eToy.com’ through the US courts. When hacktivist
groups became aware of what had happened, they turned
the internet on the internet company. It was war. The aim:
to force eToys.com to give back the domain name. The
tactic: to deflate eToys.com’s share price from $87 per
share to nothing in a campaign that would last for the
‘twelve days of Christmas’.
Different groups took different angles of attack:
putting negative rumours in share dealing chat rooms;
virtual sit-ins to slow the eToys.com server; and even
creating a program called ‘virtual shopper’ which went
round the site selecting hundreds of products but when
it got to the final ‘click here to buy’ screen would just start
again. Over the twelve days, eToys.com’s market value
dropped by $4.1 billion or 70 per cent. EToys.com relented
and gave back the domain name. Shortly afterwards they
went bust – a victim of the dotcom shake out and, perhaps,
of the hacktivists (Wishart & Bochsler, 2002).

6
 Some hacktivists have defaced the websites of their
targets (The US Central Intelligence Agency temporarily
became the ‘Central Stupidity Agency’) while other
groups have set up spoof sites to draw attention to the
social and environmental records of companies, while
mimicking the look and feel of the real site. For example
www.rtmark.com/shell Shell has been a victim of RTMark and, at the height
of the controversy over genetically modified crops,
Monsanto fell foul of a group called the Decepticons
at www.monsantos.org (Taylor, 2001).
www.theyesmen.org A group called ‘The Yes Men’ took things one
step further. Shortly after they set up a spoof WTO site
at www.gatt.org, they received an email inviting then
WTO director Mike Moore to address a conference in
Finland. The Yes Men replied saying that unfortunately
Mr Moore wouldn’t be able to make it, but would it be
okay if he sent a substitute speaker? The conference
organisers agreed and when it came to the event, 150
business people were in for quite a surprise. After a rather
unorthodox presentation, the speaker stripped out of his
business suit to reveal a skin-tight golden leotard with a
rather peculiar device attached (the story is documented
at www.theyesmen.org).
So, Jonah Peretti’s ‘sweatshop’ email isn’t alone in
cyberspace. The above are just a few examples of people
using digital technologies for ‘activist’ ends. Sometimes
the hacktivists are individuals (you don’t need a multi-
million dollar campaign fund to make your point),
sometimes they’re groups with a shared agenda and
increasingly hacktivism is also being used as a tactic
by established campaigners.
Now let’s turn to the factors that have made this
possible. We’ll then go on to discuss what it could mean
in the long run.

7
 Small worlds

A few years ago, two students at the University of

Virginia conducted a curious experiment. Brett Tjaden
and Glenn Wasson created a web-based game called ‘The www.cs.virginia.edu
Oracle of Kevin Bacon’, whereby players could enter the /oracle
name of any actor and, assuming two actors are connected
if they’ve ever acted alongside one another in the same
film, see how many degrees of separation there are
between their chosen actor and Hollywood film star,
Kevin Bacon. The game draws on the Internet Movie www.imdb.com
Database and its details of 500,000 actors but, perhaps
surprisingly for that large number of individuals, it turns
out that the average number of links to Kevin Bacon is only
2.896. So choose any actor and you’ll find that, on average,
it will take less than three steps to reach Kevin Bacon.
Mr Bacon is not alone. The same is true for almost
any actor you chose as the centre of the Hollywood Web.
If you’re interested, the late Rod Steiger tops the league as
the most connected actor with an average of 2.53 steps to
everyone else.
It was an experiment by Harvard psychologist Stanley
Milgram in the 1960s that coined the phrase ‘six degrees
of separation’. He sent letters to 300 randomly selected
people in Omaha, Nebraska asking them to try to get the
letter forwarded to a single target person in Boston using
only their personal contacts. The experiment set off a
chain of people, each attempting to zero in on the target
by sending the letter to someone else: a friend, family
member, business associate, or casual acquaintance.
Milgram’s aim was to discover how connected we are.
His surprising finding was that for the 60 chains that
eventually reached the target, the average number of steps
in the chain was six. But how did this work? And why are
actors like Kevin Bacon so connected? In his recent book,
Small World, Mark Buchanan charts the history of the
science explaining the social network phenomenon.
If you’re trying to find out if ‘six degrees of separation’
is possible globally, initially it appears to be a difficult
modelling problem. Imagine drawing a diagram of six
billion dots in such a way that you could link any two
dots by travelling along just six lines – even if they were
on opposite edges of the diagram. If each dot were
connected to its nearest 50 neighbours, it would take
about ten million steps to get from one side of the paper

8
 to the other. If the connections were entirely random it
would be possible, but this diagram is far removed from
the reality of society where each of us has friends and
family that are not randomly selected but are a function
of birth, location and other factors. It turns out that a
simple trick allows you to create a realistic model that
does fit with real world experience. The trick is a small
number of random connections amongst a large number
of strong, predictable ones. If you were to run a test on a
computer to find the number of degrees of separation
with two out of every 10,000 of the links being random,
you come out with a figure of eight degrees of separation.
If three out of 10,000 connections are random, the
average number of degrees of separation becomes five
(Buchanan, 2002).
To many people in the policy community this is a
familiar model. Originating in the US amongst commen-
tators like Robert Putnam but continuing in Europe, the
debate about social capital uses the idea of bonding social
capital within social groups and bridging social capital –
links into other groups. A society is more likely to be
sustainable, or have greater social capital, if it contains a
mixture of strong bonds, connecting family members,
close friends and neighbours, as well as random links
which connect groups that are not alike.
But this isn’t the whole story. There’s another factor
that makes ours a ‘small world’. Malcolm Gladwell,
author of The Tipping Point, looked at how connected
students in a Manhattan college were, by asking them
to look at a list of surnames from the phone book and
note how many people they knew with any surname
from the list. The average was 21, but what surprised
Gladwell was the range, which stretched from two to
95 (Gladwell, 2000). It seemed that some people were
very well connected and it turns out that these ‘hubs’
or ‘connectors’ play an important role in creating small
worlds. In his book, Linked, network theorist
Albert-László Barabási explains:
“Hubs are special… indeed, with links to an unusually
large number of nodes, hubs create short paths between any
two nodes in the system. Consequently, while the average
separation between two randomly selected people on Earth
is six, the distance between anybody and a connector is often
only one or two.” (Barabási, 2002)

9
 But what’s this got to do with hacktivism? Few can
deny that the twentieth century saw an unprecedented
rise in the ease and speed of global communication.
As we’ll see in the next section, we are more connected,
able to send and receive information to and from more
people in more places, than we’ve ever been before.
Technology is facilitating a change towards a greater
number of ‘random’ or ‘bridging’ connections in society.
Word spreads in minutes in this type of ‘small world’.
Reputations can be shattered in the space of hours and
whole organisations can be demolished by scandal
almost overnight. It turns out that a little bit of
randomness has turned society into what mathematicians
call a complex adaptive system, and this is where the
relevance for hacktivism comes in: these types of system
behave very differently from the traditional model of a
hierarchical society.
Jonah Peretti’s ‘sweatshop’ email was able to jump
from a small circle of friends because of the small world
phenomenon. A few random connections and the help of
a few highly connected people meant that the idea passed
quickly from just a few people to go on to be seen by
millions. And if it can happen once, it can happen again.
This, of course, has implications for those charged with
managing reputational risk for companies as well as for
people in government. Now, more than ever before, there’s
a strong case for understanding how to respond to the
challenge of the small world phenomenon.

10
 Information overload and network failure

Back in 1965, Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, noted

that over the previous six years the number of transistors
that fitted onto a microchip had doubled every eighteen
months. He predicted that this trend would continue and
history has proved him right. Moore’s Law means that by
2015 there may have been a 137 billion-fold increase in
the power of chips in just 50 years. But that’s not all.
In 1956, hard disk drive storage cost roughly $10,000 per
megabyte. In 2001, a megabyte cost roughly half a cent,
a decrease in price of two million times in less than 50
years (Kay, 2001). And according to a Scientific American
article from 2001, each day installers lay enough fibre
optic cable to circle the Earth three times (Stix, 2001).
Because of digital technology, information can
be processed, stored and transmitted more easily and
cheaply than ever before. In the developed world a
proliferation of methods for accessing that information
is taking place. Just for starters, each of us sends infor-
mation via email, mobile phone, fax and post as well
as receiving information from newspapers, TV, the
web and a multitude of other media.
However, information has left us with questions:
the first picture of the delicate blue Earth taken from
space in the 1960s; computer-generated images of the
hole in the ozone layer; pictures from famine-struck
Africa during the 1980s. We know more than ever
before and can communicate more readily than ever
before, but still we lack answers to the world’s problems.
In this environment of overwhelming information,
choice, and complexity we need some method of
navigating our way through. Trust is our traditional
compass, telling us what to heed and what to disregard.
We’ve relied on trusted relationships to guide our actions.
But technology has also led to the erosion of traditionally
trusted positions in society. As Geoff Mulgan puts it in
his book Connexity:
“Business leaders are naturally threatened when their junior
staff are more competent with technologies than they are,
politicians naturally fear the instant demands of interactive
technologies, and husbands and wives have good reason to fear
the ease with which their partners can find out whom they
called, where they ate, what they bought.” (Mulgan, 1997)

11
 It seems that there’s so much information available we
don’t know whom to trust anymore. We’re not just in an
information rich period; we’ve reached ‘information
overload’.
Information and communication technologies are
linked to another source of instability as well. According
to some commentators, notably Spanish born sociologist
Manuel Castells now based at the University of California
at Berkeley, ICTs have helped create a ‘Network Society’.
He says many of the economic and political changes that
have occurred over the past few decades have been due to
the development of the network as a new organisational
form (Castells, 1996).
In business, as demand for products and services
has become unpredictable and markets have diversified
to become global, the system of mass-production has
become too rigid and costly to sustain. Hence large
companies have adopted new business models, often
subcontracting to small and medium sized businesses
whose flexibility allows productivity gains for the large
corporations as well as for the economy as a whole.
This new organisational form could be called a network
business, relying on a large number of connections
between smaller businesses, where the connections
can easily be broken and reformed in a short amount
of time according to demand.
Visa, the credit card company, is an oft-quoted
example of this type of restructuring. It’s not really a
company at all, but a co-ordinating body owned by
21,000 financial institutions to oversee transactions.
In 2002, over $2 trillion in goods and services will be
purchased using Visa, constituting the largest consumer
purchasing block in the world, but Visa has no assets
other than its relationships. Its success is based on its
network structure (Leadbeater, 1999).
The network business may have enabled global
companies to thrive economically, but these complex
supply chains of materials, information and knowledge
mean that it’s impossible to say exactly how many people,
in how many different locations were involved in the
production of the final product. This leaves consumers
unsure of the social and environmental implications of
their purchasing decisions. What were the conditions like
in the factory that produced the product?

12
Were endangered resources used in its production? Was
pollution caused during manufacture? These are questions
that companies are increasingly being asked to answer.
Outside the business sphere, the effects of the
network society are mixed too. Our definitions of families,
communities and businesses have become more fluid and
flexible. As the think tank, the Future Foundation, put it:
“The Network Society is created by the actions and choices
of individuals participating in key emotional, social and
economic networks, rather than consisting of fixed social
structures and groupings.” (BT/Future Foundation, 2001)

The network society is undermining conventional ways

of organising society using institutions without always
suggesting a viable alternative. Not all people have the
necessary skills to exploit the opportunities. So, whilst
the ‘digerati’ can play the network and command huge
salaries, the pay gap between the highly skilled and the
low skilled grows ever wider. In pursuing the individual
goals offered by the network, the most talented in society
are tearing up the social contract which underpinned the
social safety net for the most vulnerable in society.
Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam is in no doubt
that the canaries in the coal mine of the network society
have fallen off their perch in the US. In his book, Bowling
Alone, he charts the demise of social structures in America
such as Parent Teacher Associations, churches, recreation
clubs, political parties and bowling leagues, citing Walther
Lippman’s words, “We have changed our environment
more quickly than we know how to change ourselves” as
one cause of Americans’ feeling of social disconnection
(Putnam, 2000).
So, we find ourselves caught in a quandary;
enjoying benefits from the digital revolution, but
confounded by the complexity of the society it’s creating.
The real world riots on the streets of Seattle, Prague and
Genoa are just one symptom of the lack of answers to the
questions posed by our digital networked society.
Hacktivism is also due to growing discontent at the
perceived failings of unfettered, and increasingly opaque,
global business and the splintering society that has
accompanied the rise of digital technologies. It seems
that information overload and network failure may be
causing the system to crash.

13
 But it needn’t be like this. There are opportunities, so
far largely unrealised by business and government, to use
digital technologies for social and environmental benefit.
In order to see where these opportunities lie, we need to
go back and examine the origins of the internet and learn
a little about the people who created it.

14
The hacker ethic

“Don’t tell anyone! This isn’t what

we’re supposed to be working on.”

Ray Tomlinson, the inventor of email

Hacking has very little in common with its media

portrayal of teenagers bringing down the Pentagon’s
computer system from their darkened bedrooms. Instead
it has its origins in the labs of MIT in the 1960s and 70s
where the first computer scientists worked on a diet of
late nights and Chinese takeaways to create the software
and hardware that are the building blocks of today’s
information economy.
In his book A Brief History of the Future, John
Naughton tells the story of the internet pioneers – people
who were interested in furthering their academic careers
in Universities rather than in making money. Giving away
information for free was in their interest, increasing their
chance of being cited by other academics, and they
designed the net with this sharing of information in
mind (Naughton, 1999).
He tells of people like Ray Tomlinson, the inventor
of electronic mail, who graduated from MIT in 1965
before going on to work at BBN, a company contracted
by the US Government to work on ARPANET, the
precursor to the internet. Famously, the text of the first
email is forgotten, all we know is that Tomlinson sent it
from one machine in his lab to another in the same room.
Tomlinson also assigned the @ character to email
addresses, using it because it was the only character on
the keyboard not to be used for anything else. Little did
he know that it would go on to become one of the most
important symbols of the digital age. But despite his
major contribution to the development of the internet,
Tomlinson is not a rich man. In an interview for Forbes
magazine, he says with a laugh, “Innovation is sometimes
rewarded, but not this innovation” (Cavender, 1998). And
in this respect, Tomlinson is not unusual among the inter-
net pioneers. Sociologist Pekka Himanen puts it plainly:
“The Net and the personal computer would not exist
without hackers who just gave their creations to others.”
(Himanen, 2001)
As the internet grew, a hacking community developed
– with communication facilitated by the technology they

15
 were creating. This community evolved according to rules
set by the original few – but there was never any internet
authority to enforce them. Instead, they were maintained
through a shared set of beliefs. According to Steven Levy
in Hackers, Heroes of the Computer Revolution, the beliefs
of the hacker are:
• Access to computers should be unlimited and total

• All information should be free

• Mistrust authority – promote decentralisation

• Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus

criteria such as degrees, age, race or position

• You create art and beauty on a computer

• Computers can change your life for the better

(Levy, 1984).

In a recent book, Pekka Himanen goes one step further

and tries to explain the “hacker ethic”, the passion for
technology that drives hackers to spend hundreds of
hours programming code quite often for no financial gain.
He updates Weber’s notion of the Protestant Work Ethic
for the digital age, describing the seven values of the
hacker ethic as:
• Passion

• Freedom

• Social worth

• Openness

• Activity

• Caring

• and Creativity (Himanen, 2001)

It’s important to note that the hacker ethic is not

limited to geeks alone. The hacker ethic fits neatly with
many of the values of those committed to the sustainable
development agenda. Indeed, a society that is made up of
people who are passionate, believe in freedom, social
worth, openness, activity, caring and, above all, creativity
is vital if we are to achieve a more sustainable way of life.

16
For instance, there’s more than a hint of similarity between
hacker values and the values of Forum for the Future:
• Commitment

• Respect

• Co-operation and Learning

• Fairness

• Honesty and Openness

• Compassion

• Fun

• Integrity (from Forum for the Future’s Values Statement)

The values of the internet’s creators are now embedded in

the technology itself. Each new member of the internet
community has to adhere to the technical rules of the
internet. Going back to basics, computers themselves
behave according to a set of rules; a given set of inputs will
cause a specific set of outputs dependent upon the rules
set by the programmer. Therefore in designing a network
of computers one needs to set rules by which computers
can communicate with one another. The rules are
informed by the values of those creating the rules, just as
the laws passed by a government depend on the values of
the individual politicians in that government.
For instance, without thinking about it, all of us
circulate information to others for free via the net rather
than charging for our thoughts. The internet has also
been designed so that information costs the same amount
to transmit whether you’re sending it to a computer a few
meters or thousands of kilometres away. Although we
think of the internet as simply one medium among many,
in its very design it is different to other media, and this in
turn shapes what it is used for. Our actions are shaped by
the values that were embedded in the technology at
its inception.
But what are the specific effects of the values of the
original internet pioneers that influence how we should
react to the growth of hacktivism?

17
 A global conversation

“Suppose all the information on computers

everywhere were linked, I thought. Suppose I
could program my computer to create a space
in which anything could be linked to anything.”

Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web

(Berners-Lee, 1999)

The internet has grown from its tiny origins to take

in over 580 million people, surely beyond the expec-
tations of the early pioneers. And because of the way it
was designed many believe it is a fundamentally enabling
technology. The Cluetrain Manifesto, one of the most www.cluetrain.org
influential books in Silicon Valley, begins thus: “People
of Earth... a powerful global conversation has begun.
Through the internet, people are discovering new ways
to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed” (Levine
et al, 2000). It is this idea of conversation – two-way equal
communication – that differentiates the internet from
‘push’ media such as radio, TV or newspapers. The
network doesn’t differentiate between people depending
on their sex, race or age; anybody can contribute or
collaborate via the internet. As a cartoon in the
New Yorker pointed out, “On the internet, nobody
knows you’re a dog.”
There are already some excellent examples of
conversation and informed policy debate taking place
on the web. openDemocracy, based in the UK, is one. www.opendemocracy.net
According to its creators, it aims to invite the best
thinkers, policy makers and creators from across the
spectrum to debate with intelligent and questioning
people around the world, independent of vested interests.
The site says, “openDemocracy will seek to be clear and
enjoyable. Editors and guides will filter out repetition and
protect the network from disruption and noise. Together
with the members, they will attempt to establish the facts
and ask the right questions.”
OneWorld is another good example. The site brings www.oneworld.net
together information from NGOs in developed and
developing world alike and describes itself as, “Dedicated
to harnessing the democratic potential of the internet to
promote human rights and sustainable development...
OneWorld aims to transcend geographic and linguistic
barriers in our work; in particular to give a voice to those

18
 typically overlooked by mainstream media and policy-makers.”
The implications of a network where information is
sent at light speed is that companies and governments will
be forced to become more sustainable in their operations
since they will be under scrutiny like never before.
Hacktivism means that there will be fewer opportunities
than ever for companies to pull the wool over the eyes of
NGOs and activists. The protest groups involved in street
protest have been some of the most avid users of the inter-
www.indymedia.org net. A visit to the Indymedia.org site shows just how suited
the technology is to activism. Video and audio clips, press
releases, articles and photographs from ‘actions’ around
the world are posted 24 hours a day. A whole new system
of information transmission has been created for a group
of people who are cynical about the lack of alternative
voices in the mainstream media. As their catch phrase
goes, ‘Don’t hate the media, be the media.’
And the internet is easy. The speed and anonymity it
provides suit people that otherwise may not have taken
action. As Oxblood Ruffin, spokesman for hacktivist
group the Cult of the Dead Cow says, “I know from
personal experience that there is a difference between
street and online protest. I have been chased down the
street by a baton wielding police officer on horseback.
Believe me, it takes a lot less courage to sit in front of
a computer.”
Some of the established NGOs have latched onto this.
‘Automatic’ campaigning is a feature on their websites,
allowing visitors to send electronic messages to global
leaders quickly and cheaply. For instance, a few clicks on
www.oxfam.org.uk the Oxfam UK website currently allows you to make your
feelings known about the policies of the big international
coffee companies to their chief executives in minutes.
The internet can be seen as an ‘active’ medium. It
encourages interaction rather than the previous layers
of communication technology which have encouraged
a couch potato mentality. Even Robert Putnam, while
ringing the alarm bell of declining social capital in the
US, thinks the internet has potential. He ends his book
with a rallying call:
“Let us find ways to ensure that by 2010 Americans will spend
less leisure time sitting passively alone in front of glowing
screens and more time in active connection with our fellow
citizens. Let us foster new forms of electronic entertainment

19
 and communication that reinforce community engagement
rather than forestalling it.” (Putnam, 2000)

Here two important caveats must be raised. Firstly,

the explosion of digital technologies in the developed
world is just part of the picture. Roughly one third of the
world’s six billion – and rising – population have yet to
make a telephone call. The developing world has so far
been largely excluded from the ICT revolution; internet
penetration tends to follow the contours of existing maps
of economic success. It will be a long time before the
whole world is part of a network society.
Secondly, as Lawrence Lessig, Professor of Law at
Stanford warns, there is a danger that the internet is set
to become an organ of control rather than freedom as a
few media conglomerates begin to control both the
architecture and content layers of the Net (Lessig, 2001).
He puts the success of the internet down to its architec-
ture as a neutral platform upon which a wide range of
creators could experiment. The legal architecture
surrounding it protected this free space so that culture
and information could flow freely. But according to
Lessig, this freedom is under threat as companies are
using both the law and technology to tame the internet.
Innovation, he says, will be increasingly controlled by
owners of the networks and those who control
intellectual property rights.
But the overall trend is inescapable: each of us is
becoming more connected and the number of people
connected around the world is increasing. The danger of
control does not mean that hacktivism will disappear; the
actions of companies and the effects of legislation will just
change it. Hacktivists have always used a mixture of real
and virtual performance, theory and technology. Maybe
the balance will change, but the spirit of playfulness and
conversation will remain.
For companies as well as for governments, the
challenge is to use this vitality to help create a more
sustainable future. To do this, new tools will be required.

20

“For nature’s sake, steal our formula.”
Opencola removed the
formula from their site
on 31 October 2002. A
copy is currently available at
www.forumforthefuture.org.uk
/openpolicy
“Linus Torvalds’s style of development – release early and
Open Policy
Billboard advertisement for Ecover washing powder
Coca-Cola and Microsoft both have secrets that they’ll
do anything to stop you or me from finding out. The code
(or in Coke’s case the recipe) at the heart of their business
success is a closely guarded secret, impenetrable to com-
petitors, consumers or the government. For decades this
‘closed’ model has been the dominant paradigm for
holding onto market share, but there are signs that
things might be about to change.
New Scientist recently reported a group of students
in the US launching ‘Open Cola’ where, instead of
remaining in the company safe, the recipe for the cola is
printed on the side of the can. The point is that if you can
improve on their recipe, you’re welcome to do so, but only
provided you honour the ‘open source’ principle and
include the new recipe with your version of the cola
(Lawton, 2002).
The open source model is entwined with the ‘hacker
ethic’ and the theory behind it is simple: the ‘source-code’
(the fundamental programming instructions that make
software tick) are always included for all and sundry to
view. Anybody is then free to improve or modify the
source-code, provided that they make the new code
available when they publish the software. Although it
wasn’t called that at the time, this was the model that
enabled those original pioneers of the internet to create
the system that they did.
Open source has come to the attention of the IT
world (and Microsoft in particular) through the develop-
ment of the operating system Linux, originally created
in 1992 by a 21 year-old student at Helsinki University,
Linus Torvalds. Torvalds developed the operating system
in a manner that caught Eric Raymond’s attention, as
he explains:
often, delegate everything you can, be open to the point of
promiscuity – came as a surprise. No quiet, reverent cathedral-
building here – rather, the Linux community seemed to
resemble a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and
approaches… out of which a coherent and stable system could
21
 seemingly emerge only by a succession of miracles. The fact that
this bazaar style seemed to work, and work well, came as a
distinct shock… the Linux world not only didn’t fly apart in
confusion but seemed to go from strength to strength at a speed
barely imaginable to cathedral-builders.” (Raymond, 1999)

The relevance of the open source model becomes appar-

ent when we look at the response of many companies and
government bodies to activists and hacktivists. So far,
they’ve generally attempted to shut them out. But there
are signs this might be changing. For example, in business
the debate about corporate accountability and corporate
social responsibility is now high profile and most large
companies address social and environmental issues to
some extent.
The language of ‘stakeholder engagement’ has also
gained currency in recent years, and understanding of
what constitutes good stakeholder engagement is devel-
oping and maturing. The concept isn’t rocket science.
Stakeholders are those groups of people that affect and/or
are affected by a particular organisation. Engagement
involves identifying and prioritising the groups and entering
into a process of dialogue with them, to understand any
concerns and explore ways to address them. This dialogue,
when done well, is a key part of accountability. As Simon
Zadek puts it in his book The Civil Corporation:
“Stakeholder engagement is arguably the most critical
ingredient in the development of the civil corporation.
Done well, it can underpin a powerful change process
that benefits all. Handled badly or implemented in bad faith,
however, it can equally be an expensive, time-wasting and
counter-productive activity that neither builds understanding
and trust, nor establishes and enhances long-term mutual
commitment and productive collaboration.” (Zadek, 2001)

The argument presented in this essay is that there is a

need for a massive increase in transparency. Organisations
should learn from the open source movement where
sharing and openness leads to far greater innovation. To
be fair, some organisations are already developing tools of
digital engagement. For example, BT’s 2001 social report www.bt.com/betterworld
was entirely web-based, and the format allowed a more
interesting, interactive discussion of key issues. Shell has www.shell.com/tellshell/
its Tell Shell site, which allows debate on social and

22
 environmental issues relating to the company. The EU
www.europa.eu.int has launched its Interactive Policy-Making initiative
/yourvoice although so far the issues debated have been limited.
But we could go much further. In the Hacker Ethic,
Pekka Himanen suggests that the open source model
could be applied more widely, saying, “The hacker open
model could be transformed into a social model – call it
the open-resource model – in which someone announces:
I have an idea, I can contribute this much to it, please join
me! Although this version of the open model would also
involve local physical action, the Net would be used as an
effective means for joining forces and later disseminating
and developing the idea further.”
This idea deserves further exploration. Companies
and public bodies that wish to be leaders in sustainable
development and improve their social and environmental
performance, should experiment with the idea of Open
Policy. They should first look to a particular problem, say
how to cut their carbon dioxide emissions, to try it out,
and if successful should extend it to other areas.
This is how it might work. In developing an Open
Policy, the equivalent of the software source-code would
be the policy and how it was implemented. Organisations
would set the criteria for a particular policy (say, cutting
their carbon dioxide emissions by 20 per cent by 2010),
but then would open up the decision to anyone who
might wish to contribute. Using the web, they would
provide all the information available to contributors who
would then be able to post ideas as to how the goals could
be met. A system, such as that employed by the commu-
nities at Slashdot.org or Plastic.com, where users rate the
postings of other users for usefulness and relevance, would
ensure that the best ideas gradually move up the agenda.
These ideas could then be taken by other users and
improved still further until eventually, rather than coming
to a compromised endpoint between several entrenched
positions, the process would result in the ‘best’ solution
given the skills, knowledge and creativity of those involved.
The Open Policy approach would have several
advantages. First, it will take the venom out of the current
situation where conflict and suspicion are often the norm.
Cyberprotest thrives on the oxygen of secrecy. Hacktivists
are simply spurred on by organisations building up their
firewalls and adding expensive security systems. If you try

23
 to hide it, they’ll try to find it. Open Policy, on the other
hand, by focussing on solving problems should lead to a
more constructive dialogue and encourage collaboration.
Secondly, Open Policy will mean that if an
organisation is serious about sustainability, it will show.
Up until now, many ‘sustainable development’ policies
have been cosmetic and unless you’re an expert it’s been
difficult to tell apart those that are truly committed from
the ‘greenwashers’. Open Policy would focus on how to
solve a real challenge with real impacts. It shouldn’t be
used to simply reword a PR statement. It shouldn’t be
a talking shop.
Thirdly, it will take policy out of boardrooms and
policy elites. Business thinker John Kao proposes that
creativity rises exponentially with the diversity and
divergence of those connected to a network (Kao, 1996).
And, in order to move towards sustainability, we need a
great deal of creativity. The beauty of Open Policy is that
anybody can contribute; the focus of success is on how to
create the most successful outcome, not on who you are.
This, of course, should not belittle the responsibility of
organisations to engage with the stakeholders affected
by their activities.
Finally, Open Policy could promote the spread of
best practice from one organisation to others. Solutions
could be taken as complete policies and adapted to new
organisations. Perhaps a central Open Policy website
could carry examples of particular policies that could
be used by other organisations. It might be a way of
overcoming the problem of organisations refusing to
learn from best practice policy that was ‘not invented
here’. Open Policy would actually encourage organi-
sations to take policies from elsewhere and improve them.

24
 Conclusion

“Have you ever seen a child take apart a favourite toy?”

asks Albert-László Barabási in Linked,
“Did you then see the little one cry after realizing he could not
put all the pieces back together again? Well here is a secret that
never makes the headlines… After spending trillions of
research dollars to disassemble nature in the last century, we
are now just acknowledging that we have no clue how to
continue – except to take it apart further.” (Barabási, 2002)

Reductionism isn’t limited to science. It has permeated

government and business thinking for the entire
twentieth century. Institutionally, we are struggling to
adapt the hierarchies of the reductionist age to the
challenges of the network society. Only now are policy-
makers beginning to sense that the complexity of society
cannot be handled using command and control. Our
reaction to complexity, whether we are dazzled in the
headlights of unpredictability or thrive on the unlimited
possibilities, is key to the survival of society. And if we
are to thrive we will need new tools.
Sustainable development requires us to collaborate on
a global scale linking social, economic and environmental
concerns in a complex way, not segregated in the way that
the majority of governments and businesses create policy,
universities teach or the media report. We need an
innovative approach. And maybe the internet provides
us with an opportunity.
We started with the story of an email with
unpredictable consequences – Jonah Peretti’s ‘sweatshop’
message that reached millions of people. We then looked
at other examples of activists using the internet, people like
the ElectroHippies who co-ordinated the virtual protest
that accompanied the street protest in Seattle. We looked
at the reasons why the internet makes it easier to be an
activist: the small world phenomenon that means ideas can
reach millions in a matter of minutes and the breakdown
of traditionally trusted positions in society which has left
society unsettled. We went back to the beginnings of the
internet to look at the hacker ethic that drove the pioneers
to create the technology that is now enabling a ‘global
conversation’ to begin. And finally we looked to the open
source movement for inspiration as to how business and

25
 government could use the idea of Open Policy.
Thus far, government and business have failed to
grasp the opportunity that technology presents to open
themselves up. They’ve quite often seen the ideas of
people outside their organisations as a burden rather
than a resource. That needs to change. Open Policy
would be one way of turning the vibrancy of the internet
into a positive solution, both for the organisations
involved and for sustainable development. The idea itself
is open and upgradeable so consider this as a proposal for
Open Policy version 1.0, your comments on how it could
be improved and implemented are very welcome.

www.forumforthefuture.org.uk/openpolicy

26
Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Lia Abady, Vidhya Alakeson,

Tim Aldrich, James Goodman, Matthew Gorman,
Britt Jorgensen, Vannessa Mamo Mason, Sally Norwood,
Sara Parkin, Jonathon Porritt, Paul Taylor, Ben Tuxworth,
Sally Uren, Annette van der Kolk, Jamie Wallace, James
Wilsdon, Susanna Wilson and Martin Wright. All have
provided advice and support for this project, however the
responsibility for any errors rests with the author alone.

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28
Open Policy
Threats and
opportunities in
a wired world
Paul Miller

Government and business are under pressure

from campaigners to be more accountable, more
engaged and more responsive to social and ethical
concerns than ever before. In addition to this,
the internet has spawned a whole new breed of
campaigners, as two tribes – hackers and activists –
have joined forces.
Journeying through weird, wired and wonderful
‘hacktivist’ groups, the latest thinking on networks
and the origins of the internet, Paul Miller explains
why internet activism is set to increase and why it
should be treated as an opportunity rather than a risk.
He argues that instead of raising the barricades, the
nature of the internet provides a strong rationale for
opening up, engaging with stakeholders and even
allowing them to set policy.

ISBN 0-9540069-1-7
£7 www.forumforthefuture.org.uk