This is the second of four “interventions” for changing the register from digital industrialism to something, well, better. The idea of changing the register is introduced here, and the first intervention, “denaturalize power” is here.

The first time I used a word processing program was in the computer lab at college. When I was ready to save my file, the grad student supervising the lab asked me how I wanted to save my file: as a “protected” file that no one else could open, a “read only” file that other people could open, or a “read-write” file that people could not only open but also change. I went with read-write, of course.

I’ll never forget how that concept stayed with me as I left the lab and considered the other media and institutions in my world. Which things were read-only, and which were read-write? And why?

Why is money read-only? Or religion? What if we could change them? How much of the world was arbitrarily protected from our intervention, who got to make those decisions, and what happens if we violate them? I had been raised in the read-only media environment of television, and learned to be a spectator. Might the read-write possibilities of the digital environment grant me greater access to the dashboard of civilization?

For me, that’s what the digital renaissance was all about. And the cultural institutions with which I allied myself at the time — Mondo2000, the Well, Free Software Foundation, the SF Rave scene, the open source community, the cypherpunks, and the cyberpunks—all seemed to be about developing and activating this sensibility. The world is open to our intervention; anything and everything can be reprogrammed, from the norms of gender and the rules of the economy to the articles of the US Constitution. If they’re locked down by laws, chances are it’s because they’re actually changeable. We’ve simply forgotten.

By denaturalizing power (what I wrote about in the previous piece), we reveal that the codes we have been living by were actually written by people to favor their own interests. This then triggers our sense of agency to change them. Most of the social and economic laws we accept at face value were written in the era of the printing press or at best, the age of top-down broadcast media. A digital environment offers us new possibilities of access, authorship, and agency. We are free to develop, as I explained in my 2010 book Program or Be Programmed, from player to cheater to author to programmer — and not just online, but in everything.

I’m not calling for a revolution here, but a change in orientation. The laws we accept as sacred inviolable truths are not from God at all, but fungible human artifacts we can adapt or discard. We mustn’t mistake this for the accelerationist anti-institutionalism of those who want to tear down the institutions of democracy altogether. Rather, we reclaim the capacity to revise, rescript, and reprogram them ourselves. We can retrieve the functions that our institutions have failed to deliver, and find new ways to fulfill them.

We are in charge here.

Next week, the third intervention: resocializing people.