Should You GNU?

What African Wildebeest Teach Us About Liberty, Economics and the Internet

Is This Really GNU? 

I've come to think no community on earth is more free than the African wildebeest or gnu (pronounced “new”). Gnus are a large species of antelope native to the plains of East Africa. Their community unites once a year to travel ~1,800 miles alongside zebras and gazelles in search of water and the freshest grass. To do this, millions of individuals use a primitive communication method, a grunting sound from which they get their name, “gnu, gnu”. They collectively overcome big cats, hyenas, and crocodiles with no central leadership and no governing authority. While some are taken from their herds, no one farms the gnu. Researchers studying the migration from space describe it as a classic case of emergent behavior — order arising from each animal following simple cues. The same cannot be said for humans on the internet. Though Facebook users number some 3 billion humans spread across the planet, our ability to collaborate using the most sophisticated communication system ever produced is interrupted by algorithms designed to make us a product. Applied to the gnu community, the end product would be milk and beef, making us a massive community of “cash cows”.

The Magnificent 7 (Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta Platforms, and Tesla) represent roughly 30–35% of the S&P 500 (Daly, 2026). Within 30 years the 7 have transformed not only the US, but the global economy through technological innovation. How did they do it? What the 7 deploy isn't a product — it is a business model. Attention in exchange for service, with the user as inventory. That arrangement now runs through commerce, media, and political life.  Prior to the 7, the “Nifty 50” held this role much more loosely, producing everything from soft drinks (Coca Cola), to retail stores (JC Penney, Sears), electronic appliances (General Electric) and printers (Xerox). What I find staggering is the consolidation of 86% of our herd’s leadership in business in a handful of decades, allowing the 7 to tighten their grip on society in ways the 50 could only dream of.

When the 50 dominated the market their customers benefited from their for-profit stance. Copyrights protected their name and products helping them establish brands worth identifying. Software, especially “free software” changed that. Myspace and BlackPlanet were among the first platforms to engage in data harvesting, though not always for tracking individuals as a packaged product. As a teenage user myself, I spent ample time learning how to structure my page the way I wanted it and they gave me the liberty to do it in HTML and CSS, the coding languages of the entire internet. Then came Mark Zuckerberg who insisted users shouldn’t need to learn coding, but the platform should (and could) produce the perfect experience for everyone. Daily, users of Facebook answer the question, “what’s on your mind?”. For the most part these answers contain much more information than a simple “gnu, gnu” and are posted for the whole planet to see without direct charge from the Facebook brand. The brand supports these posts with trillions of dollars in IT infrastructure. So how did they make all that money so quickly, without charging their users? The answer is advertising but more recently and lucratively, selling user’s answers and tracking our interactions on Facebook.com and the broader internet. We are 3 billion domesticated cows ready for milking by the highest bidder. 

What’s GNU? 

There are alternatives to the user farming model. The ironically named GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL-3), has absolutely nothing to do with the African antelope, and everything to do with actual free software. The license’s creator, Richard Stallman, describes free software as “free as in speech, not free as in beer,” and “a matter of liberty, not price” (Free Software Foundation, n.d.). Where platforms like Windows, Facebook, and iOS either charge users for the right to use their software, or sell data about how they use it online, AGPL-3 licensing software gives users in both cases the freedom to inspect, edit and redistribute the software’s code– a criminal activity with copyrighted software. AGPL-3 software is copyleft. Even if a designer creates software for money making, a savvy developer can copy it and do the same. This requires equipment, knowledge and continuous maintenance work, but essentially works the same as observing a taxi service, then deciding to go into taxiing for yourself. Before Uber, taxi protocols were essentially open — you could read how a New York cab worked and stand up a Mumbai cab on the same logic. Uber locked their protocol behind proprietary code, and local taxi infrastructure collapsed everywhere it landed. The 40%+ that Uber extracts from every ride is the price of that enclosure. LibreTaxi, distributed under AGPL-3 on the Signal network, returns that margin to drivers and to the communities they serve. It isn't slick, and it isn't safe in the way an audited corporate platform is safe — but it's theirs. That's the choice AGPL-3 makes possible. At the Network Theory Applied Research Institute (NTARI), where I serve as president, we license everything we build under AGPL-3 for exactly this reason. 

I interviewed the Vice President of NTARI, Calvin Secrest to ask why the Institute employs AGPL-3 as the license of choice. He’s a 20 year veteran of software development with Churchill Downs. “I think the reason NTARI chose AGPL-3 is so everyone shares improvements back. For instance, if the goal is public infrastructure, federation, community ownership, or preventing enclosure, this allows users to interact with software over a network instead of receiving a copy of the program.” Under AGPL-3, software code becomes a living document that reproduces, evolves and cultivates the life of the user. While many seek to create living computer systems through artificial intelligence, the Free Software Foundation has already done it through licensing. 

NTARI isn’t the only organization adopting AGPL-3. The city council of Madrid, Spain used it to deploy a participatory budgeting and legislative platform called Consul Democracy which now serves millions of users worldwide. Similarly, Pol.is carries the license. Both of these platforms have been copied into distinct software built and shared on the same principles. Barcelona forked Consul in 2016 to create Decidim, which has since been rewritten and now runs independently in over 300 instances across 20+ countries. Taiwan adopted Pol.is as the deliberative core of vTaiwan, its consensus-building process, which has shaped 26 pieces of national legislation (Horton, 2018). The GNU family of licenses has been enforced in court. In 2009, Cisco settled with the Free Software Foundation after they sued over GPL violations in its Linksys products; the settlement required Cisco to appoint a Free Software Director to oversee Linksys compliance.

Who GNU?

One of the internet’s creators, J.C.R. Licklider imagined potential governance over the internet as a giant teleconference. Today, we know this is a pipedream, but it points to a fact about our ability to communicate at light speed. A massive electrical communication network crosses oceans to deliver information that would have taken weeks and months in the days when the representative republic was being designed. Communications architecture has gone from smoke and fire signals, to telegraphs, telephones and 5G. Governments have also evolved from elders and chiefs, to kings and nobles to parliaments and congresses. Each iteration was improved by the adoption of better communication infrastructure and improved collective intelligence, adding more and more people to the herd of decision makers while simultaneously adding more and more people in general.

As the global population approaches 10 billion, we might actually have the ability to add almost everyone in a global, asynchronous decision making process facilitated by elements like the GNU Affero General Public License. AGPL-3 is just one layer in the stack of collective coordination, but a crucial one that allows public commentary, innovation, entrepreneurship and testing with information infrastructure. Without it, we will have to trust a small technically literate elite to guide us into the future. While this is the pragmatic answer, it’s commonly known as technocracy, an oligarchical form of governance which some leaders like former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan, writer of the Network State, encourage wholesale. Others, like Divya Siddarth of the Collective Intelligence Project, and myself, president of the Network Theory Applied Research Institute see this as a step backwards.

Why should we give up liberty to people simply because they have knowledge and money? Why would we entrust our hard-won liberty to a bourgeoisie? Who is right? Who has (and can have) all our best interests at heart? The 7 or we, ourselves? The choice is laid before each of us daily like the prompt, “[User] What’s on Your Mind?”. I disagree with Srinivasan and side with Siddarth, and with the herd. 

Digital telecommunications is the most advanced collection of communication protocols produced by the planet earth, a far cry from “gnu, gnu”, but this technology is less than 60 years old, and the animals using it are still learning to cooperate. Our language-making capabilities put us far ahead of the gnu, but those who understand this tech and those who actively ignore it might divide into communities of cows and cowboys. If our collective history gives us any clue of how to deal with such divisive and important technological change, it is that we approach it as a community. A herd or a murmuration, flexing, changing in the face of all who would hunt us, including bad principles. It is only as a community we will be able to cooperate with AI, robotics and ourselves. Personally, I'd rather be a wildebeest than a cow. 

References

Daly, L. (2026). The Magnificent Seven's market cap vs. the S&P 500. The Motley Fool. https://www.fool.com/research/magnificent-seven-sp-500/

Free Software Foundation. (n.d.). What is free software? GNU Operating System. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

Horton, C. (2018). The simple but ingenious system Taiwan uses to crowdsource its laws. MIT Technology Review. https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/08/21/240284/