Is Open Source Still Useful to Anarchy?

[This is a highly abridged version of an essay that can be found here: https://raddle.me/wiki/open_source_absolutists]

Open-source practices can be enormously valuable to anarchists. They facilitate cooperation, make technology more accessible and modifiable, and can undermine proprietary monopolies. But there is nothing inherently anarchist about the label “open source,” and treating openness as an absolute moral principle can obscure the relationships of power surrounding the labor that produces things.

This becomes especially important with generative AI. Corporations are ingesting enormous quantities of writing, art, code, photography, and other cultural work produced by ordinary people, then concentrating that material into proprietary systems and using it to generate private wealth. The fact that the underlying information was publicly accessible does not make the resulting relationship non-exploitative.

Many anarchist arguments against intellectual property developed when patents and copyrights were primarily tools of concentrated power: corporations and wealthy individuals used them to enclose knowledge, restrict access, and extract rents. The target was clear: capital was using property rights to prevent ordinary people from freely accessing and building upon knowledge.

The generative-AI economy presents a different configuration of power. Much of what corporations are now harvesting consists of writing, art, code, photography, and culture produced by millions of ordinary people outside corporate control. Corporations can systematically absorb this collectively produced commons, concentrate it into proprietary models and infrastructure, and turn it into private capital.

The direction of appropriation has changed. Rather than simply using intellectual property to keep knowledge away from the public, corporations are increasingly taking knowledge produced by the public and converting it into private wealth.

An anti-IP politics developed to oppose the enclosure of the commons should not become so rigid that it ends up celebrating whenever capital discovers a new way to enclose it.

This is why the useful questions are not simply whether something is “open source” or copyrighted. We should ask: Who does the work? Who controls it? Who benefits from it? Who bears the costs? And who has the power to say no?

There is an important distinction between saying that knowledge should circulate freely and saying that corporations should have an unrestricted right to appropriate people's labor for profit. I am not arguing that copyright is inherently liberatory, or that anarchists should simply embrace intellectual property. Abolishing intellectual property does not, by itself, abolish hierarchy. A legal restriction disappearing does not necessarily give workers more control over the conditions under which they work, nor does it prevent capital from appropriating what they produce.

Software, writing, art, music, photography and community-maintained infrastructure all depend upon human labor. Making the resulting products infinitely reproducible does not make that labor disappear. Nor does releasing something under a permissive license mean that the people who created it have surrendered all legitimate interest in how their work is used.

Open-source software can exist inside a highly hierarchical workplace. Volunteers can perform unpaid labor that ultimately subsidizes a corporation. Community-maintained projects can become infrastructure for surveillance or profit-making enterprises. The code can be “free” while the people producing it remain anything but free.

This is where an absolutist anti-IP position can become detached from anarchism's material concerns. If opposition to intellectual property requires us to defend capital's ability to appropriate workers' labor without meaningful control or reciprocity, then we have allowed an abstract principle to take precedence over opposition to domination.

The same applies to mutual aid. Voluntary sharing and collective commons can be powerful forms of solidarity. But a commons is a social relationship, not simply an unlimited stockpile that anyone with greater economic power is entitled to extract from indefinitely.

Too often, we forget the “mutual” in mutual aid and reduce solidarity to an unconditional ideological obligation to serve others. Sharing with our communities is fundamentally different from being dispossessed by corporations that systematically harvest collectively produced knowledge, privatize the resulting wealth, and externalize the social and ecological costs onto everyone else.

That does not mean we should abandon the commons or embrace conventional intellectual property as the solution. It means we should stop mistaking a particular legal mechanism — such as an open-source license — for the underlying political objectives anarchists are trying to achieve: collective autonomy, control over our labor, and resistance to domination.

There are many possibilities between unrestricted corporate appropriation and traditional copyright. Open-source absolutism presents a false choice: either intellectual property exists, or everyone must be free to appropriate everything from everyone else.

As one tool in a bigger toolbox, open source can help people escape proprietary monopolies, inspect and modify the technologies they depend upon, and cooperate outside centralized institutions. But anarchists should judge tools by whether they increase people's autonomy and ability to resist domination.

Sometimes that means sharing freely. Sometimes it means collectively controlling how something is used. Sometimes it means refusing corporate appropriation. Sometimes it means restricting access for security or community-protection reasons.

The anarchist goal is not to abolish or preserve intellectual property as an end in itself, but to create social relationships in which people have meaningful control over their labor, their communities, and the institutions that shape their lives.

Abolishing copyright while leaving capital untouched is not the abolition of hierarchy.

Making software freely available while leaving its producers powerless is not liberation.

Allowing corporations to appropriate collectively produced value without meaningful reciprocity is not mutual aid.

We can defend the commons without defending capital's right to exploit it. We can support the circulation of knowledge without assuming that workers must surrender control over their labor.

The question is not merely whether the code is free.

The question is whether the people who create the world are free within it.