Phones Moved Toward Freedom One Concession at a Time, and So Does Power

I have watched one small technology move from total control to something close to freedom within my own working life, and the path it took is worth recording, because it is the same path I expect power in society to take.

Stage One: The Carrier Owns the Phone

Anyone who used a mobile phone before 2007 remembers what it was. The carrier chose the handset, the handset ran whatever firmware the manufacturer and the carrier agreed on, and the applications on it were the ones the carrier had been paid to preload. You could not install anything. You could not remove anything. A ringtone cost money because the carrier decided ringtones cost money, and the device you had paid for enforced that decision against you.

Nobody called this oppression, because nobody had seen the alternative. The phone was a terminal for the carrier's business, and the person holding it was the last thing it served.

Stage Two: A Different Master

Then came a phone that let you install software. That sounds like freedom and it was a real step toward it, but look at the structure. One company decided what software existed, what it could do, what it could charge, and what it could say. The carriers lost control and did not get it back. The user gained a store, but the store had a single owner, and the owner's approval stood between every developer and every customer.

This is an interim stage, and it is a recognisable one. The old lord has been displaced by a new one, the new one is genuinely better, and the improvement is real. A great many people concluded that this was the destination. It was not. It was a change of master with the shape of the arrangement intact.

Stage Three: The Rules Become Visible and Contestable

The next platform published its source code, let anyone build a store, let anyone install software from anywhere, and let manufacturers ship it without asking. It did not deliver perfect freedom; a company still steers it, and most people still live inside one store. But the rules moved from private to public, and the thing that had been a decree became an argument you could have.

That is what the freedom of a platform actually consists of. Not the absence of rules, which is impossible, but rules that are written down, applied to everyone, and changeable by people other than the ruler.

Each of these steps was resisted by whoever held the previous position, each was called impossible or dangerous before it happened, and each is now taken for granted by people who cannot imagine the earlier state.

The Pattern Is Not About Phones

Put the three stages side by side with the history of government and the correspondence is embarrassing.

A monarch owns the state the way a carrier owned a phone: the population is the last thing it serves, and it enforces the owner's business against the people holding it. Representative government is the phone with a store: a genuine step, a real gain in what you may do, and a single set of owners deciding what is on offer. The important thing about the second stage is that people mistake it for the end, exactly as they did with the phone.

The third stage is the one where the rules of power become visible and contestable by the people they apply to. That is what I mean by direct democracy, and the analogy tells me something about how it will arrive. Not by argument, because the arguments were all available at stage one. By the slow discovery that the next concession is survivable, made by people who were certain it was not.

What the Analogy Predicts

Three things, and I hold them with the confidence the analogy earns, which is moderate.

First, the movement is one way. No platform has gone back from open to carrier-locked, and no population that has argued about its rules in public has volunteered to stop. Reversals happen by force, not by preference.

Second, each stage is defended by the beneficiaries of the previous one with the same vocabulary: security, stability, the incompetence of users. The carriers said people could not be trusted to install software. The claim was false about phones and it is false about decisions.

Third, the stage after the one you are standing in always looks like chaos from where you stand, and like the obvious arrangement once you are in it. I have argued elsewhere that the current arrangement should be read as a spec rather than as a fact of nature. Phones are the small demonstration that specs change, and that the people who wrote the old one are never the ones who write the next.