https://www.singularityweblog.com/robert-steele-open-source-everything/ Robert Steele is a very interesting person indeed: in the 1980s Robert was a clandestine CIA agent who believed not only in secrecy but also in Reagan’s right-wing politics and trickle down economics. Today Steele is the author of The Open Source Everything Manifesto: Transparency, Truth, and Trust. So how does a former spy and CIA intelligence professional, and Marine Corps infantry officer, become an honorary hacker, open source evangelist and the top Amazon reviewer devoted to non-fiction? Well, I invited Steele on my Singularity 1on1 podcast to ask him about that, as well as a few other things. During our 82 min discussion with Robert Steele we cover a variety of interesting topics such as: whether humanity is making progress or not; failed states, regime change and ISIS; The Open-Source Everything Manifesto; smart cities and nature; shifting from secrecy to open source; producing more actionable intelligence than the entire US intelligence complex; collecting systems versus sharing and processing systems; capitalism, the singularity and true cost economics; industrialization, education and being a sheep; open source everything as a way to unleash our entrepreneurial capabilities; polarization and the preconditions for revolution; panarchy as extreme democracy and informed self-governance; ethics and integrity… My three favorite quotes that I will take away from this conversation with Robert Steele are: “The chasm, the gap between people with power and people with knowledge is now catastrophic.” “Open source intelligence is the application of the craft of intelligence, legally and ethically, to create smart cities, smart nations, smart companies and smart citizens. It’s about not being a sheep.” “Ethics is about the truth. And transparency. And trust. Ethics is how a civilization hands on the lessons of history, from one generation to the next. Ethics is the cultural code for getting the most out of any group and any situation with the least amount of damage and the least amount of waste. So ethics is an operating system.” Help us caption & translate this video! http://amara.org/v/HpW1/

Comments

1. no financial collapse in feb 2017....
2. as a former intelligence officer, I am so glad that you mentioned the Ukraine, and the position of poor Ukraine, and Russia picked on them. It was a coup and Russia protected it's assets with the base, and protected those that have been protected since the ataman empire.  Thank you for the open source, I use apache and my private open source intelligence company, and you would be surprised that when we take items to clients they at first questioned the information because it was not on CNN then days later CNN verified our findings and added creditability. Love you talks, slight disagreement on some things but that is just professional push back that makes us better. All the best for 2017 my friend
3. The USFG of WDC and it's bureaucracies angle to hop into any enterprise that emerges as indispensably useful and affordable to us Goy. It has certainly utterly destroyed Medicine, Insurance, and Education. They have made Alcohol, Tobacco, Gaming, Telecommunications, Cable TV and Internet, Utilities and Energy Companies as well as Commercial Transportation a bitch of their own to slap around. If you ain't part of their game or if you break away from the game, the thugs come after you.
4. I sure would like to crush the Window's XP out of my old PC in favor of anything else open source.
5. Great interview. Mr. Steele would be a fantastic person to have in politics after we clear out the corrupt cabal.
6. Very good interview ; )
7. Robert Steele is interesting. I went from aloof and skeptical to impressed and admiring. Even though the guy may have been a US marine and a CIA spook, he does have a heart.
8. Ethics as an Operating System.
9. ok, you are touching on the smart city initiative, didn't expect you would do that as soon as let my other comments to get through
10. COOOOOLLLL
11. IF I GET RICH, YOU BE SURE I WIL MAKE A DONNATION. RIGHT NOW I M JUST A BRAZILIAN WRITER AND A TEACHER, SORRY, NIC, KKKKK
12. your subtitles are atrocious ... can I help you out? Please?! If so, how would you prefer I do that?
13. WOW listen to it twice
    great talk
    
    p.s here is link to Robert blog
    http://www.phibetaiota.net/
14. I was pleasantly surprised about this interview. I liked it very much because it connected the dots on how important opensource content is and it made me realize it. I honestly didn't think this talk would be an eye opener.
    
    * I'm going to ramble on and on for my own sake. The short and concise point is written above.
    
    Everyday I hear on the news about conflicts of nation states, to ethnic clashes with in countries all around the world. What they all have in common is the the threat of their survival, identity, and way of life.
    
    Could there ever be mutual trust between US and Russia? Not when they both play into geopolitics.
    
    We need to stop the game. We can do that on two fronts. Gov't and Private. Gov'ts such US, Russia, China, Japan, Turkey, Mexico, S.Africa, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Poland, Iran, Spain, Argentina, and Brazil could setup a system to decide which technology is the most important to opensource and distribute among all respective Governments.
    
    A good example would be to distribute engineering blue print of a water purifiers or desalination plants.
    
    We need to start cooperating instead of competing in order to minimize the geopolitics and regain trust with one another.
    
    The second, a company that open sources technology to compete with commercial equivalents. A generic product with out the bells and whistles. I'm not privy on how the TPP works, but if a company could opensource designs of something cheap, perhaps a coffee mug. Would TPP company bother to build and send their products overseas when it could be made by an open source company, or in a 3d printer located in homes. Open sourcing alternatives of everything may be the best way to push back on TPP(Trade pact)
    
    I wonder if an opensource movement can inverse globalization where only things of intricate designs or patterns could be distributed via globally whether it be for commercial sale or free.
    
    While I don't think everything should be opensource for it's own sake, it's to ensure that there should an generic equivalent that is functional for the basics of our survival. (Water,energy, food)
    
    I still think there is a place for things that aren't open source, or thing that are for sale. I think it would be a reason to make better products that are more efficient than the standard technology that everyone has access to.
    
    We need to give countries, and their inhabitants stability by giving assurances that all entities should have basics needs so that our survival buttons aren't pushed.
15. Great :) Blueprints of smart communities & cities:
    http://envienta.com
    http://qetema.org
16. good job! good interview!
17. I live for working with people like Nicola and Robert to change things for better, to create amazing things together. No matter where you are from.
18. Two of my favorite YouTube people in the same video? Worlds are colliding!
19. Great interview as always. When Robert mentions open cities I immediately think of "The Venus Project" and Walt Disney's "Project X".
20. Most innovations happened either in the state run sector, from state universities to the military, or done by economically quite disinterested eccentric figures who loved knowledge for knowledge`s sake. Also, the basic ingredients of innovation are: science, curiosity, desire for knowledge, passion of solving difficult questions and puzzles, an intellectual urge to explore/discover/create/make possible - none of these require an external incentive like profit, they are the incentives in and of themselves. 
    
    
    Innovation is the consequence of those internal ingredients, cultivated in intelligent persons. Ideally what these types of persons need are facilities and concrete tools via which they can engage into doing science - and the result of doing science is innovation. Profit as an incentive is the poorest substitute for those qualities and personal ingredients mentioned. 
    
    
    The profit motive also tends to distort the process and joy of innovation, not only by subordinating research priorities to the needs of a market (a dumb market facilitates research in dumb gadgets) and a foreseeable return of investment (therefore limiting innovations which only offer long-term benefits or non-quantifiable, non-marketable benefits for mankind as a whole for example), but also tends to artificially limit the full dissemination of what gets discovered or created for the purpose of maximizing profits via dozing it out as if through a pipette, so that every inch of the innovated technology gets the maximum profit - so a technology that would be instantly available its rather commercialized in small steps. Furthermore, in order for generating even more profit, most technologies innovated under the profit-motive, tends to materialize in consumer technologies with planned obsolescence to generate more consumption, which generates more profits. 
    
    
    Also, since the profit incentive`s central item of care is profit itself, innovation, technology, science, curiosity, exploration are but variations of ways to make profit and are done not for their own sake, not for the betterment of humanity or reduction of suffering or even for the satisfaction of scientific curiosity, but for profits - which means that innovation itself is secondary for capitalists. 
    
    
    No self-respecting businessman would risk all his funds to chase a fool`s errand, something often required for great breakthroughs in science and technology. I can`t imagine a capitalist Magellan, risking limb and life to map up new, unexplored territories, or a capitalist Einstein/Tesla/Newton, etc (Edison is an exception, he was a capitalist pig, but he also managed to kill off Tesla), most of whom, like Einstein were so disinterested in acquiring profit, that they were almost always broke, wore the same costumes for decades and were only truly happy when they ENGAGED with their science. 
    
    
    Most innovation requires a desire for knowledge and a personality type which is obsessed with finding the right answers to certain questions, people who dare, regardless of personal gain to risk their own lives in pursuing exploration and learning.
    
    
    Science and technology also develops unevenly based on the profit incentive, some areas develop perhaps quicker because of extended popular demand, but other areas - potentially just as or even more important areas - get abandoned due to lack of foreseeable returns and thus funding. No wonder that most "innovation" in this capitalistic nightmare of ours happens in regards to gadgets serving social/communications aspects of living, like smart phones (quite a number of these "innovations" are but design tricks and apps, rather than anything groundbreaking or breathtaking), while technologies with civilizatory scope are less developed - given that there can be no market for them to bring in - especially short term - profits, like new sources and ways of producing energy, space-exploration, geo-engineering, etc. Ironically these things only experience innovation once the common will of people, manifested through state revenues get politically allocated to specific goals, where the aim really is to find a solution, expand a horizon, think long term, not profits. Thats why no private business has - though there is a lot of talk about it - really taken on exploratory missions in the last 100 years. Despite all the talk and bravado, it will be again, - apart from the military which is also a government sector - governments or other forms of popular forums which will launch the next truly historical innovation or feat of science, be it space exploration or infrastructure or energy-solutions.
    
    
    We have the same basic type of transportation, illumination, city designs we already had 100 years ago. If capitalism is good at innovation, then one of its most successful one is creating the illusion of progress while basically keeping us back from any real and major, civilization-scale change.