Essay: How GitHub Can Save the World

In the autumn of 2010, The Missionary Church of Kopimism (1) was founded by two Swedish activists; and the keyboard shortcuts for “Copy” and Paste”, “Ctrl-C” and “Ctrl-V”, were considered it’s sacred symbols. This was arguably the heyday for file-sharing activists, often centered around popular file-sharing sites, like The Pirate Bay. However, despite there being utopian examples in fiction, such as when Captain Janeway offers the Federation’s entire cultural library containing the literature and history of dozens of Alpha Quadrant worlds in exchange for technology, grand projects like Google Books (originally under the name Google Print) in 2004, conceded over time to legal backlash from organizations like The Authors Guild and Association of American publishers, or those advocating for the future of artists. In 2008-2011, Google attempted to reach a class-action settlement that would have created a commercial subscription library for digitized books. But when Federal Judge Denny Chin rejected the agreement in March 2011 on copyright and antitrust grounds, the dream of an all-encompassing, freely accessible digital library effectively collapsed. The project exists at books.google.com, but the experience is largely degraded to a snippet-only display.

When I attended college in the fall of 2009, it wasn’t uncommon for text books to cost around $250 USD each. To some extent piracy could relieve the financial burden, but it was common for books to release a new edition every year. The same information was mostly present, but it was shuffled around: page numbers and chapter orders could be rearranged, but so could exercises, terminology, illustrations, supplementary material, or small portions of the text. But while some revisions like new research or corrected errors are substantive, the important distinction I want to make is that improving the textbook and producing a new edition of it are not the same thing. Never mind the environmental impact entailed by reproducing physical books on paper.

Today the promise of universal knowledge that was once embodied in Google Books, file-sharing, or Star Trek replicators, has yielded to an economy where information is enclosed, expensive, and repackaged for profit. Why did I decide to host a philosophy blog using GitHub Pages? Because I see it as a better and more honest paradigm for knowledge and collaborative work, not merely a tool for programmers. GitHub offers us new possibilities: text as a collaborative, version-controlled process whose revisions, rationales, and authorship remain traceable. The history of ideas, every adjusted line or contribution, is tracked to immortalize a permanent intellectual provenance. Imagine a world where, instead of questionable new editions being released yearly for capitalistic reasons, textbooks converge toward more concise forms through iterative refinement: a calculus textbook hundreds of pages long might become a pamphlet, retaining all the essentials while eliminating redundancy. Besides, we humans have a long way to go before we develop warp drive; it only makes sense to boil things down to become easier to assimilate, especially given the amount of learning a person will have to do will only increase over time as the stockpile of human knowledge accumulates forever.

Markdown and LaTeX further permit mathematics to exist in machine-readable forms rather than being confined to static representations in PDF documents. It is easier to give a math equation expressed in LaTeX syntax to an LLM than it is to give it an image. Markdown also works naturally with Git: changes can be tracked by line, compared to previous revisions, and so on. Markdown source can also generate HTML websites, PDFs, printed books, slides, and other formats using tools such as Pandoc (2).

When does this save the world? When these same principles supporting this permanent intellectual provenance and version-controlled collaborative environment are extended to law and government. Proposals, amendments, contributions, and everything which constitutes political activity becomes legible in a way the world has never seen, rather than mere promises or posturing. Just as universities maintain authoritative repositories while competitors develop forks; governments maintain public-facing records for their enacted laws while people, parties, and special interest groups cultivate alternatives as authority is relocated into a structure where revisions, competing implementations, and their rationales become visible. Text becomes an evolving institutional artifact while the institutional syntax varies according to objectives, allowing the public to compare not only policies but the architectures through which institutions operate. As this visionary paradigm shift takes root, institutions become globally comparable and interoperable, such that one government could adopt others’ administrative and legal structures while tracking modifications for local implementation. On the one hand, textbooks evolve to become “super text” versions of their original incarnations through continuous revision; on the other hand, laws undergo a global process of continuous revision: obsolete provisions removed, complexity reduced, and institutional knowledge preserved. What emerges is revolutionary change through iterative refinement and maintenance rather than radicalist destruction: nothing is replaced overnight but instead the systems we have in place are allowed to run more efficiently as society transforms itself by systematically refining its intellectual and institutional machinery.