A review of Code Swaraj: Field Notes from the Standards Satyagraha by Carl Malamud and Sam Pitroda
Here at the Code for America Summit, my mind turns to Carl Malamud, who, to me, is a towering figure in our field, and who is chronically under-appreciated.
Carl recently published a book, Code Swaraj: Field Notes from the Standards Satyagraha with his colleague Sam Pitroda. In it, they present a the last few years of work in freeing up standards in India.
Carl is a central person to me. I first called him on the phone in the early 90s. I got his number from an engineer at Sun Microsystems when I called their office after seeing an article about video on the internet. Later, when I was at EveryBlock, Carl invited me to be a part of what ended up being The 8 Principles of Open Government Data. We hosted a convening, Independent Government Observers Task Force, that had some of the central strategies of citizen-based accountability, and included seminal people in the open government movement. While at Smart Chicago Collaborative, we participated in Carl’s campaign to look into issues with PACER, the system run by the federal judiciary that provides access to court dockets.
I say all of this because often when I see Carl laboring, scanning documents, hauling printed matter, and pounding the table for openness, I think to myself that he does what I would do if I had more guts. He’s a worker.
Code Swaraj is a chronicle of work. The book is organized as field notes— a simple explication. It’s a collection of nine speeches and essays delivered over the last couple of years in India and California, along with historical images, selected tweets, and a reprint of Aaron Swartz’ June 2009 essay on transparency.
Recently we’ve suffered sophisticated exploits of our most complex consumer technologies. Google searches polluted with fakeness, Facebook ads exploited with illegal voter pleas, and Twitter accounts with corrupted amplification. It’s complicated.
In contrast, Malamud and his colleague go simple: they assert that when we publish the prosaic standards, the most basic facts of our shared lives— how we build, what it takes to maintain chickens, all manners of egress— we form the basis of democracy.
Here’s the nub, from Carl:
Our world is in turmoil. Random violence and terror has spread to all corners of the globe, our world is facing a climate catastrophe if we do not act (and we are not acting), income inequality grows wider and hunger and famine continue to spread. What can one individual do when faced with such calamity?
The answer, I submit, lies in the teachings of those who are our leading lights, who fought for decades to right the wrongs they saw in the world. In India and America—the largest and greatest democracies in our modern world—we can look to them. In India, the teachings of Gandhi and Nehru and all the freedom fighters continue to inspire. In the United States, we can look to Martin Luther King, Thurgood Marshall, and all the people who fought so long and hard for civil rights.
The key to action for us as individuals is persistence and focus. Persistence means that changing the world has to be more than a short Facebook moment or a tweet. Persistence means that it may take decades to right wrongs, to educate ourselves and educate our leaders. Educating ourselves is what Gandhi-ji taught his followers in South Africa and in the Congress in India, to focus on ethics, morals, and character. It is a lesson all people who aspire to lead today should absorb.
Focus is also one of the big lessons from Gandhi-ji and from King in the US. Pick something specific that matters and try to change it. Do something real. Make the goal specific: removal of the salt tax, the right to eat lunch at a counter, the right to attend a school, the right to vote in an election, the elimination of sharecropping.
For a decade, I have focused on one specific goal, enhancing the rule of law.
The other concept that leaps here is the explicit international connections— seeing modern Indian history as a precursor and to their drive for rule of law.
In the face of Trump, in the stark light of such obstinate failure of democracy and freedom, Carl is forming international bonds to set information, and, ultimately, us, free.
Wikileaks and treasonous Americans and the NRA and Russian foreign intelligence seem to have bonded together in a common mission centered around white supremacy and personal grifts. They’re aberrant; abhorrent.
And then there’s Carl and his colleagues, lecturing across India.They just want to publish standards. And they understand solidarity.
When a fire in a Russian shopping mall kills 64 people because of safety violations, and the people of Russia resist the corruption and indifference of their executive branch, we should take a page from the NRA book and be in league with those in the Siberian streets— see their fight as ours.. But we are not in communion with them. We are separate, and weaker for it.
When hundreds of workers in Bangladesh perish in the collapse of their factory because the building itself lacked integrity, we can see why wrongdoers fight so hard against the publication of standards.
So here is a blueprint for workers. Set aside the ultimately useless fact-checking and emotional tsk-tsking and broken retinas from endless eyerolls. In an era where the most outrageous things keep happening, the approach long adopted by Malamud is the next right thing. The simplest expression of integrity is a building block. By publishing required widths of gypsum, we build trust and accountability. This is how we build.
Solidarity forever.