Intro1 – The Information Society
The development of wider, more complex information networks, with more and more direct connections have lead to faster and better intercession of information throughout the world. This influences the society in a material way as the society can use these information networks to share information, but it also does change our view on society, and the possibilities of building our society. As it comes obvious that the society is constructed in a network of plural and changing connections and not in a hierarchic structure of static units, it also comes clear that the ways of the political structures of modern states have already come obsolete and harm the development of our societies. The information technologies give us different models of society and it does not stop at the Internet. A network can be used in production in different ways, and one model, that of open source, is especially interesting as a new model of social production.
In 70's and 80's French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari theorized society, among other things, as a rhizome. World organized in old fashioned hierarchical statical ways has had hard time to understand what kind of social and political solutions this theory could lead to, but it seems that the open source community [link to linux homepage] that develops the technologies that make the Internet work, is formed in deleuzian-guattarian ways - thinking of the community in deleuzian-guattarian way in fact completely solves the problem of existance of open source community, posed by John Mark Walker. In fact, a society built as a peer-to-peer network and open on the code level of its organization and production would definitely be deleuzian-guattarian.