Talks
Everything I Needed To Know About Open Source, I Learned From Punk Rock
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Everything I Needed To Know About Open Source, I Learned From Punk Rock
by Shane BeckerThe video "Everything I Needed To Know About Open Source, I Learned From Punk Rock" features Shane Becker sharing his personal journey from punk rock culture to his current involvement in open source software. He reflects on how the principles and experiences from his youth have informed his worldview and professional life today.
Key Points:
- Influence of Punk Rock: Becker recalls attending Lollapalooza in 1993, which sparked his passion for punk rock and led him to discover various subcultures, such as DIY (do-it-yourself) and veganism.
- Creating Community: He discusses the importance of forming bands, creating zines, and organizing shows, illustrating the ways in which punk rock fostered a sense of belonging and community.
- Networking and Economies: Becker emphasizes how punk rock taught him about building networks and economies through gift exchanges and collaborations, paralleling the open source software movement.
- Life Lessons: Important lessons learned from his upbringing include resilience and defining one's own path. Becker shares anecdotes from his childhood, including lessons about competition, belonging, and social interactions through sports and comic books.
- Punk Rock as Training for Open Source: He argues that the DIY ethic and the non-hierarchical structure of punk rock closely align with the open source movement's principles, reinforcing the belief that collaboration and free sharing of work are fundamental values.
- Anarchism and Open Source: Becker draws connections between anarchist principles and open source, stressing the lack of authority and the importance of self-organization.
- Cultural Impact: He concludes by reiterating the idea that both punk rock and open source are communities formed by people who are not afraid to break norms and challenge authority, ultimately creating spaces where creativity and innovation thrive.
Conclusions: Becker advocates for a world shaped by the ideals embraced by both punk rock and open source culture—communities built on mutual aid, collaboration, and the rejection of traditional authority. He emphasizes that everyone participating in open source is, in fact, embodying the spirit of anarchy in a constructive way.
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And I have something in both hands, topically, and so I'll be tricky. I decided at the last minute to do a McCovey shift and change my topic to something that will be more important in punk rock or open source.
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Sorry, organizers, namely that there's exactly two ways to put toilet paper on a roll: over the front and the wrong way. Right? So don't act like you've never seen a nice hotel before.
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Um, okay, I'm not here to talk about my favorites. I'm actually talking about everything that I needed to know about open source. I learned from punk rock, and I want to dedicate this talk to the memory of Aaliyah and Aaron.
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I only knew Aaliyah briefly, and I only knew of Aaron's work, following him online for years. Both were probably bright young men who dedicated their lives and their life's work to making culture more open and free. Both of their lives were cut down entirely too short, and we are all worse off for it.
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So, please, no more of this. Whatever demons you're facing, you're not facing them alone. You don't have to face them alone. Here in this room, would you come to these things? You've got a family, you've got a tribe. Just reach out to anyone at all. If you don't know about Aaliyah or Aaron, welcome home—they are incredible, inspiring stories.
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Now, I want to talk about me. Here are those who know me. It’s great to be with you. So nice to meet you! My given name is Shane Becker. My name on the internet is 'vegan straight edge'. You can find out around, that's why I used to look like that.
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Now you can find me online at imshane.com, and if you know me or know of me, just a little—you know that I have what could be described as a high-level checkboxes to pigeonhole me in an overly reductive way. So, of course, I'm vegan, which means no animals; I'm straight edge, which means no drugs; I'm an atheist, which means no gods; and I'm an anarchist.
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I can't help but add that anarchism is something I’ll get into later.
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So this is the joke that I should have made: how many anarchists does it take to change a light bulb? Okay, so for those who didn't see it: none! It can't be changed unless it's smashed. I live in a farmhouse in a neighborhood called Hollywood in a city called Los Angeles. That's a long name for a property to match the bigness of the city. Did you know that you can fit eight other U.S. cities inside of its surface area?
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I live in Minneapolis that way, so keep that in mind the next time you ask me for an airport pickup.
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You can find the farmhouse online at barnhouseliving.com, and on Twitter, I was @barnmouse. Like Kobe said, I put on the world’s best backyard storytelling conference, which I do every twice a year. The next one is running soon, and it's on a fourth. You should come to it!
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The last one—the final show; your last chance to come—is our most common event on November 5th, themed 'collapse'. I work for a company right across the street here in Bend, Oregon: OG-Pog Way. I am the manager of a small software team, some of whom are here today. Where are my speakers? Over here, okay, so look, here's some of my team who are here today. All of them are awesome.
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There's an empty square right here, and we're working on new products, about which I will do any G5 tech talk some other time. Of course, we are hiring, so come work for us. I want to know, who here is not working? My way is anyone unemployed on purpose? That's the recurrent trend I see: Ruby programmers are the bubble inside this bubble. I haven't met any unemployed Rubyists. I don't want the unemployed Rubyists, really; I'm just not a tech talk.
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It's more like my 'quit your job' information. Seriously, talking less like my slides—both of those are my conference. More than anything, it's my personal narrative. There are not a lot of shoulds in here, or lessons to take away from it. You probably have a similar story or sort of an Aaliyah's story.
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The TL;DR is that I grew up through DIY punk rock. Through that experience, I've observed these life lessons that I've learned, and now I'm applying to my life and my involvement in open-source culture.
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Okay, that's right. If you grew up the same way as me, and it’s probably too late for you to be a 15-year-old punk rocker in the Midwest in the '90s. But if you use open source, if you participate in the arc of open source culture, there’s probably something in your past that is the same as growing up punk was for me.
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Maybe you were just a dumb jock with not a care in the world until Coach Taylor taught you that 'with clear eyes and a full heart, you can’t lose.' Right?
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Maybe your aunt Joyce would read Emma Goldman and Guy Debord to you during certain summer holidays and tell you that you should fight foul and faster—my friend, the old world is behind you.
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Maybe the old man Thomas down the block from you growing up as a kid taught you how to build stuff in his garage workshop. Whatever it was for you, that’s awesome.
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This is my story, right? This is not your story. Your story is surely different. How we got here is not the important event. You know that we got here—the thing is that not everyone has the same journey.
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So congratulations to us. We all have some awesome places. Great! Then we're going to drink beer. Number one from each day is coconut water.
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Which, of course, I don't drink, but I hear this is great for hangovers. They’re not certain that here, though. So the whole premise of this talk for me was about looking for patterns in my life and key marks that influenced who I am now or set me on this path.
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And you know, of course, we are who we are because of the entirety of our lives. It's not just this one thing; it's all of the good and all the bad.
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So I've compiled a list of examples—like, you know, things that were important in my life that taught me life lessons that I think are significant and true. That also taught me like terrible atrocity and hatred that I’ll have to unlearn and resist later.
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For example, my dad—he talked about science fiction. He was totally into awesome comic books and baseball. I got my first computer—Commodore 64—but he also taught me about optimism, alcoholism, and anger and abuse.
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He taught me how to be a terrible parent, yet he also taught me about baseball.
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Of course, baseball itself taught me about teamwork and the importance of blank physical exercise. It taught me mental hustle.
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It taught me about statistics long before a math class. Everyone and Tommy, I had the crack of the bat—that's so many calculations to me. I’m talking about quick thinking, and I learned more from baseball about American culture and history than I did from any history textbook.
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You can go watch Ken Burns' baseball documentary on PBS. It's amazing! But like all organized youth sports, they have the potential to teach an unreasonable amount of competition.
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I had this short temper. I would go from zero to Hulk Smash in no time flat—like a bad call sent me there. It was a personal aggression, temper—this competition where the kids on the other team were just kids playing a game.
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They were the enemy. Losing meant the end of the world. So those weren't great life lessons.
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I read a lot of accident and a lot of inspiration, way more than any books that people call quote unquote. As a kid, these comics taught me an ethical framework regarding how to live your life—about honor and loyalty.
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Spider-Man never gives up, even against all odds. He always has terrible odds but just never gives up.
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The 'X-Men', especially the '70s reboot, was the most multicultural book; it was the most multicultural thing in my life. I lived in a pretty white-bread world. I lived in the Midwest, where there were a few black kids on my baseball team, but I'd never seen anyone different.
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So the 'X-Men' showed you different humans and communities. But of course, Peter Parker has his horrible guilt complex because he let the crook that killed Uncle Ben go.
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I've sort of absorbed a fair bit of that guilt complex. You know, no one really dies in comics, and I think that growing up with that has skewed my relationship to death in real life.
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I fetishized things, collecting comic books. I became this hyper consumer; I had to have every issue of every title I read because I speculated that they could be valuable.
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I went to Catholic school, and you can imagine the baggage that comes from that. But it also taught me surprising things, like really good math.
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I loved Catholic school more than public school. I was like who’s who at there? What I never knew was that it was a lot better to have good politics.
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I cared about the difference between 'further' and 'farther', 'fewer' and 'less' because I was in my school’s violent classes.
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That taught me the ease and efficiency of having a uniform; you wore the same thing every day.
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Now you can imagine how I had to deal with guilt, sexual repression, homophobia, and further acculturation into expected gender roles.
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Then we moved to the suburbs, and the suburbs actually showed me real safety, and with that safety, I felt like I could explore my little sliver of the world.
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With that exploration, we started playing night games—nothing is more fun than like flashlights time or like capture the flag at night.
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We were just running around my neighborhood, going into people’s backyards. I think that was really formative for me.
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Of course, in the suburbs, I knew where everyone’s bathroom was in a six-block radius because we all had the same floor plan.
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I was a paperboy, and it was holding people, inviting me into regular life. A new world was opening because it was the same house.
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I grew up in Indianapolis in a working-poor, working-class household, and everyone around me was too.
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And when I moved to the suburbs, people had million-dollar homes, and suddenly, I had to adapt.
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At first, I saw this huge class divide between the really rich and the really poor.
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With that longing, it united all my peers, and some turned to drugs. Just yearning to get out of this place.
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That boredom and depression led me to experience, for the first time, suicide—not mine, but I knew of two within one week.
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Later in high school, I met this man, David Croker. He worked at Eli Lilly, which is a huge pharmaceutical corporation.
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He showed me, for the first time, who knows? Nobody knows SGI. He showed me Silicon Graphics.
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They were high-end units, workstations that cost twenty thousand dollars. On your desk, you could do things that we can now do on our phones.
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I saw a real computer workhorse, and technically, it was Eric's son's version of UNIX. I saw the command line.
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He showed me 3D modeling; his job was to model molecules for drugs. In that moment, I decided I wanted to work for Pixar.
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I did before summer—it was a significant moment. But more important than anything else he did, he showed me the web.
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It was Mosaic, version one or two. There were hundreds of websites and tons of servers; most of them were text documents, not terribly interesting.
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But I did check out the NASA page, looking at the before and after Hubble Space Telescope update—looking at those pages was just amazing.
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Later, I realized the significance of that moment. That night, I walked away, oh my god, 3D models—of course I would.
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But I only saw those things in the context of this multinational corporation. I was in the business of big pharmaceutical.
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Even then, I knew that was it for me. I had all these thoughts—these things I think are good and important.
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I learned the hell of social interaction, too. Okay, when I was really digging into this, I sifted through like decades of relationship trauma and baggage.
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The lesson for me was basically, I learned a lot of things, but nothing taught me more about me in the world around me—my role in it—than when I discovered the otherwise hidden world of punk rock.
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So just once, like you've got some image in your brain when I say punk rock, and I don’t want to focus on particulars; think of it like a quick crash course.
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Like any subcultural identity we have, we have a kind of aesthetic. So it’s going to come through uniformity in some kind of sound or whatever, but it wasn’t just about that.
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Of course, there was music, right? I think a lot of music could be—is—no problem! Someone has the expected aesthetics if you’re at all into the soundtrack of punk rock.
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I remember sophomore year in high school, I got that first mixtape, actually. Okay, I got it from a dude who got a copy from David Borders, who got a copy from shopping Henson and animals.
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After generations of magnetic analog degradation, I heard bands for the first time like Green Day, the Offspring, Rancid, Operation Ivy, and Inside Out.
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The thing that made that music so terrible at two levels made it amazing to us was that: we had something at stake.
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It was something different that was loud and fun. That message was clear: You can make this kind of music, too. You can do it.
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My friends and I formed bands, and I wouldn't ever actually really like hardcore—like a Linux desktop user—but when I learned about this idea of open source, I was like, 'Oh my god! I could do this!'
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I was allowed to do this freely. The same way that person made a bit of music. Those last two minutes of Inside Out and the Gorilla Biscuits were significant for me because they exposed me to the world of hardcore punk rock.
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Hardcore punk, which is sort of louder, faster, and shorter—what punk rock did to heavy metal was to strip it down.
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In a sort of framework of hardcore, I learned that there are other people like me who are straight edge and learned about veganism!
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Looking back now, I see that in that moment, I finally found a tribe, a place to belong.
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Of course, I’m still fast at work with leaders, and I’m standing here on stage talking to you.
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So it’s like peak oil and the collapse of every empire that has ever existed. You can’t know that moment, that history is happening until it's in the rear view.
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When you’re in the poppy field, you can’t tell that you’re higher. The stuff that was happening to me then I could notice that was happy, but I didn’t know those significant moments until I see them now.
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I’ve always been a black sheep. I used to be the sort of token bird in a sea of punks; I’m sure I was the token punk in a gaggle of nerds.
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Then I moved up to Seattle. My roles were reversed there as I transitioned through my new tribe.
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Everything I do now, I see sort of vestiges of what we did then. This isn’t to say like a weird: 'there was a Twitter before Twitter'.
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I learned something, and now I decided, okay, I should apply punk rock ethics to this.
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I observed that in my life, from the times before there were blogs—even sort of way before the web, but definitely before there were vlogs—we made zines.
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We photocopied our own publications to communicate across great time and distance. They were sort of like carrier pigeons to other kids.
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We formed bands to write the soundtrack to our lives, and we created venues so that we had these bands; we wanted to play shows!
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There weren’t CBGBs everywhere, and not everyone could play at CBGBs. That wasn’t the tiny problem, so we made things around.
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You know, punk rock taught us the importance of having a place that was ours, and punk rock taught us that we defined that space.
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That experience of life at least in the time—and I mean like this right here this weekend—this place is really vibrant; next weekend won’t be.
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We need to find that together. You know, we’d book tours and had these bands play in our towns; then our regions and the country.
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We booked tours across oceans and time zones to meet new people. Who here has traveled out of town for this event?
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Who here has traveled to a conference just for the people? We're doing the same thing—just with software.
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It's the music. We built our networks and economies of gifts and exchanges. I learned more about economics from punk rock than I ever did in high school.
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Punk rock also taught me the value of giving things away. We defined our own currency, totally busted.
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Looks like a new professor’s work. So we need to find our own aesthetic.
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We had a sort of tribal identity. When we were like patches on a backpack or instructions on our T-shirts and beta hoodies, it was a flag we flew in front of each other.
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You know, we knew we weren’t alone. In coffee shops and bus stations, we met friends, future lovers, and conspirators.
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We made noise—we poured our band from someone’s sports rack or we used just a boombox with a record button and a small microphone.
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We recorded our demo tapes in bedrooms, attics, and basements. That’s the ultimate MVP—Ultimate Minimum Viable Product.
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You do practice for a week, you press the record button and share it with friends. It’s getting shows, getting those shows two weeks after you learning three songs.
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You would cover something to go play a show in someone’s basement—that’s iterating while getting real feedback!
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We created systems to record our story. All right? We made record labels and book publishers.
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We opened two shops and a vegan bakery because that was our culture, our story. We had to capture it.
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Punk rock taught us that no one else is going to do this for us. We had to define our own path; punk rock gave me the confidence to stand up here today.
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It gave me the confidence to not be afraid of confrontation or authority or embarrassment about it not having to pray like heartbreak headache.
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Punk rock gave me that confidence to come up here and say that capitalism is, indeed, organized crime.
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Unfortunately, punk rock taught me some lessons that I wish I didn’t have to know anymore, but sadly I do.
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Pell Grant taught me that five out of eighteen female speakers is not good enough, and we can do better.
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I know we have to be better. And, so you know, I found myself in a different culture and community replaying some of the same things I said, like more immersion in flat organizations.
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Why are organizations all the rage right now? But you know, we didn’t have bosses, and we did Boston even for ourselves.
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We did things ourselves. In first person, we subscribed to the DIY ethic because that’s all we could do—there wasn't any other way.
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And we had no bosses; we had no employees; we were flat. And, by the way, um; Steve Clapton or even Steve Claw; he and I have flirted with the idea of doing a sort of anarchist training for organizations.
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So if you’re interested in that idea, reach out to me or him. You can look up Steve Claw on Twitter.
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In the near future, I didn’t need the clicker. I started a T-shirt company with Alan Soon.
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Okay, see, this was just a few years ago when I was in scale and because of our ceramic upbringing through this DIY ethic.
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We designed the shirts, printed them in my living room, and made the website. We sold them and shipped them—it was truly DIY!
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When I worked at Engine Yard as their open source cheerleader, I made someone order a Romanian shirt today. It's all that couple, you feel?
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Those Romanian shirts I designed, I probably shipped them to you. I’m not sending you a handwritten note or a love letter.
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It’s just like all the scenes and records that we loved doing the same thing.
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Of course, you know, twice a year I’d typically invite 150 people to my backyard to tell stories together and eat good food, and party together.
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And at the farmhouse, the cops showed up three times because, due to the practice I had from standing my ground against the cops.
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I had the wherewithal to shout, 'You can go directly fuck yourself!' We sent them packing three times.
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And all of the open-source software that I write? You better believe I’m not part of some bigger group.
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I have total agency over the license I always use. Public domain— I think public domain is wildly important.
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I think it’s been eroded over the past couple of decades, and my license is short enough to fit on a slide. For posterity, I’ll read it.
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Public domain, your heart is as free as the air you breathe. The ground you stand on is liberated territory.
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I believe that, but more than anything, I’ll try talking about Hampton Inn or the beginning.
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When I said, 'smash it back!' We’ll come to that later.
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So you know, punk rock taught us that there were no boxes. There were no gods.
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There were no masters. There were no authorities. There were only people.
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We didn’t ask for permission or forgiveness. We built everything ourselves.
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And what we couldn’t build ourselves? We stole!
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There are lots of flavors of anarchism. There’s rhetoric as green anarchists, pink anarchists.
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There are anarcho-syndicalists, and some days I’m a good bit of a classic anarchist.
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I also like this communist communism, but not for the reason that America hates communism.
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I mean, we’ve always had anarchists who are often back in the day but you know there’s an intensity with insurrectionist.
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I’d say I’m more of a negative anarchist.
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When we’re organizing in factories, when we’re defending forests as green anarchists, when we’re fighting for gender equality.
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I simply believe that no one knows how to live your life better than you.
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And that is something that resonated all throughout.
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We’ve all broken rules, consciously and with intent. Oops, I didn’t know you couldn’t: whatever in this state.
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We’ve all sped faster than the speed limit on purpose, right?
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So you've chosen to break the law. You’ve admitted yourself, 'I know better than the man on how fast I can drive.'
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If one law is questionable, what about all the laws? We've all used our cell phones in movie theaters and airplanes.
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My favorite rule that we all break loses a great procession—losing like chocolate-covered pretzels!
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I didn't know the Balkans were great— I'm an awesome chocolate-covered pretzel, right? That is breaking the rules, right?
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That's you deciding that you know better! That is anarchy.
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But anarchy isn't just smashing the windows of multinational banks and fighting cops in the cobblestone streets. It is that too.
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But everyone always says I'm an anarchist because I like setting things on fire. By the way, some things need to be set on fire.
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For the record, I am not an arsonist! Never said anything about lighting fires.
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A teenage sort of pyromaniac looks like a landmine factory, though. There's no sustainable way to make a way of life that leads us into a future.
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But anarchy is free association—having the freedom to meet the people that you want without persecution.
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Anarchy is non-hierarchical structures, the self-organization of everything.
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Some of these proverbs resonating in anarchy is mutual aid—an anarchist gift-economy, as they discuss at Burning Man.
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The gift economy at Burning Man isn't just about the exchange of commerce.
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In anarchy, you imagine a world without borders. The governments are failures. Nation-states are certainly an illusion.
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I am in Indiana and Ohio. That’s totally untrue. Sometimes there is a river.
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Even though it’s not much, for example, flat organizations—let's talk about that.
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That’s one way to look at it. In anarchist principles, there are no bosses or gods, no masters.
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There’s no hierarchy in our organizations.
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Talking’s hard. The web—it’s out there. There are web routes around censorship.
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The web dissolves every closed empire. There’s no one on the web telling you that you can’t do whatever the hell you want!
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And you know, networks are non-hierarchical. There’s no top, no center. Networks are sort of intrinsic to everything we do.
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We embody that idea in our actions almost every day in our lives.
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When we fork a project, if you decide you don’t like the direction a codebase is going, you can fork it!
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But that fork is not a four-letter word anymore! A fork is also this: it’s an enabler of free association.
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I mean, open-source software is anarchist. So when we write poetry, we are poets.
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When we sell boats, we're sailors. When we buy it in the street, we’re buying tips.
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When we participate in handy, we are anarchists.
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Regardless of whatever we think our politics are, everyone who participates in or writes or contributes to open-source is an anarchist.
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At least in those moments, we find ourselves.
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So, of course, punk rock is made of people, right? And open source is made of people too.
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That we make music or we make software and we share it with the world is just an artifact of the ideals we hold dear.
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It’s a kind of world that we want to make. So I know your time and attention—you meant it!
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Your attention is more precious than any other commodity. I greatly appreciate you giving me a few minutes of it.
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