No One Knows Everything

Revision with unchanged content. Do media conglomerates produce monopolies in thought? Can principles from open source software be applied to resist such a closing? In his recently resurfaced and pointedly relevant 1943 speech "The Crisis in Public Opinion," Canadian political economist Harold Innis predicts that the centralization of government and media will become a liability to freedom of thought in Western Civilization. No One Knows Everything considers how to counter what Innis called "monopolies of knowledge" by looking at the history of the press since 1850 alongside open source projects like Linux, Apache, Wikipedia and others. In doing so, this book hopes to widen our understanding of the revolutionary open source process that has changed copyright law and which continues to define the Internet, quietly but comprehensively, to this day. This book is intended for bloggers, communications professionals, and the open source curious.