Most of the people who run Open Source projects are mortal. Recent history shows us that they will all eventually die, or get bored, or win the lottery, or get sick, or be conscripted, or lose their mind.

If you've ever visited a foreign country's national history museum, I guarantee you've read this little snippet:

King Whatshisface was a wise and noble ruler who bought peace and prosperity to all the land.

Upon his death, his heirs waged bloody war over rightful succession which plunged the country into a hundred years of hardship.

The great selling point of democracy is that it allows for the peaceful transition of power. Most modern democracies have rendered civil war almost unthinkable. Sure, you might not like the guy currently in charge, but there are well established mechanisms to limit their power and kick them out if they misbehave. If they die in office, there's an obvious and understood hierarchy for who follows them.

Most Open Source projects start small - just someone in their spare room tinkering for fun. Unexpectedly, they grow into a behemoth which now powers half the world. These mini-empires are fragile. The most popular method of governance is the Benevolent Dictator For Life model. The founder of the project controls everything. But, as I've said before, BDFL only works if the D is genuinely B. Otherwise the FL becomes FML.

The last year has seen several BDFLs act like Mad Kings. They become tyrannical despots, lashing out at their own volunteers. They execute takeovers of community projects. They demand fealty and tithes. Like dragons, they become quick to anger when their brittle egos are tested. Spineless courtiers carry out deluded orders while pilfering the coffers.

Which is why I am delighted that the Mastodon project has shown a better way to behave.

In "The Future is Ours to Build - Together" they describe perfectly how to gracefully and peacefully transfer power. There are no VCs bringing in their MBA-brained lackeys to extract maximum value while leaving a rotting husk. No one is seizing community assets and jealously hoarding them. Opaque financial structures and convoluted agreements are prominent in their absence.

Eugen Rochko, the outgoing CEO, has a remarkably honest blog post about the transition. I wouldn't wish success on my worst enemy. He talks plainly about the reality of dealing with the pressure and how he might have been a limiting factor on Mastodon's growth. That's a far step removed from the ego-centric members of The Cult of The Founder with their passionate belief in the Divine Right of Kings.

Does your tiny OSS script need a succession plan? Probably not. Do you have several thousand NPM installs per day? It might be worth working out who you can share responsibility with if you are unexpectedly raptured. Do you think that your project is going to last for a thousand years? Build an organisation which won't crumble the moment its founder is arrested for their predatory behaviour on tropical islands.

I'm begging project leaders everywhere - please read up on the social contract and the consent of the governed. Or, if reading is too woke, just behave like grown-ups rather than squabbling tweenagers.

It is a sad inevitability that, eventually, we will all be nothing but memories. The bugs that we create live after us, the patches are oft interrèd with our code. Let it be so with all Open Source projects.

The tactics that gave Labour its huge majority in 2024 were no preparation for government – and the prime minister has proved he has nothing more to offer

The mood among Labour MPs these days follows Edgar’s law. This states that the scale of any misfortune can only be measured against unknown future disasters. As Shakespeare has the banished son of the blinded Earl of Gloucester say in King Lear: “The worst is not, so long as we can say ‘this is the worst’.”

According to Edgar’s law, there is no opinion poll so gloomy for Labour that it can’t be followed by one even bleaker; no fiscal forecast so bad that the Treasury can’t aggravate it with contradictory signals on tax; no misgivings about Keir Starmer that can’t be amplified by malevolent briefing about a leadership challenge; no social policy so nauseating to the party faithful that it can’t be made grosser still with a relish of cruelty.

Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist

There’s a set of unspoken rules underneath the surface veneer of media coverage.

One of those rules is that an election victory by the populist right proves that they have an intuitive understanding of the instincts of the electorate which liberals must humbly try to adapt themselves to. An election victory by progressives, on the other hand, is a freak aberration which will inevitably be reversed, probably due to the hubris and naivety of those who just proved triumphant. Victories on the left are contingent and transitory while victories on the right are abiding and profound.

This was the tone after the election of Zohran Mamdani in New York this week, along with other Democratic successes in Virginia and New Jersey. It was also the tone after Holland’s liberal candidate Rob Jetten upset expectations and beat back Geert Wilders’ far-right Party for Freedom.

In fact, the triumph of the far-right is not inevitable. They can be beaten and they regularly are. Each progressive triumph at the ballot box provides a learning opportunity.

The media will largely ignore this information in favour of a set narrative. Many progressives will ignore it too, out of a tribal hatred of either centrism on the one hand or socialism on the other. Establishment Democrats tried to undermine Mamdani and have almost certainly learned nothing. The British online left, however, is obsessed with him, treating him as a direct continuation of Jeremy Corbyn, even though he reveals much more about Corbyn’s weaknesses than his strengths.

Let’s take a better look at these campaigns, without preconceptions. I’m going to put the policy to one side for a moment and just focus on communication. It throws up three vital lessons.

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Happiness

The first and most important attribute we saw this week was joy. Mamdani seems to have smiled for so long, for his entire life, that there are these permanent dimples on his cheeks. He has the face of a man who is going to age well, someone who is content within his soul. Similarly, I have never seen Jetten frown. I’m not sure he’s even capable of it. He seems to live with a permanent smile - a little more professional than Mamdani perhaps, but authentic, unforced, natural.

There is a jolliness test in politics. Does the candidate want to scold the voters? Or do they want them to have a good time? This is one of the reasons why Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter. It is one of the reasons why Boris Johnson beat Jeremy Corbyn.

It’s actually quite telling to see so many old Corbyn supporters insist on the similarities between him and Mamdani. It’s true that there’s some rhetorical overlap - both talk about billionaires and the one per cent, both self-describe as socialist. But in terms of emotional appeal, they occupy different universes.

Corbyn despised the press. He treated it like a conspiracy out to undermine him. He sneered and snarled, his every comment an appeal backwards towards his supporters, not forwards towards those he needed to convince. He looked angry, vigilant, desperate for the camera to be off him. This is a problem because when voters encounter the candidate they do so through the camera, and the hostility therefore looks like it’s directed at them.

Mamdani wants the camera to come in. He is pleased to see it. He wants to reach through it to those on the other side. I mean, my God. Look at him talking to Sky News - a delight - and tell me Corbyn would have been able to do that.

Corbyn supporters say this is because the press was out to get him and it kinda was. But that was the same for Mamdani. The press will go for figures on the left. It’s up to you how you choose to handle that. Responding with irritation allows their attack to be more successful than it might otherwise have been.

One of the things progressives most struggle with about Donald Trump is that he is ultimately on the party-guy end of the jollity spectrum. His manner is comedic. If you’re on the same level as him - in other words, if looking at him doesn’t make you want to vomit up your fucking soul - then there is something amusing about the fact that no-one, himself included, has any idea what’s about to come out of his mouth. At his most effective, Nigel Farage is also a party guy. The fags, the pint, the easy laugh. It is all tremendously mannered, of course, but well cultivated and effective.

Now however, it’s getting harder to remember the joke. Trump rules by paramilitary thugs taking people hostage in the street. Farage is having to straighten himself out to look prime ministerial. The background noise is increasingly bleak: stubborn inflation, economic instability, a generalised sense of national decline across the West.

Those easy genuine smiles from progressive candidates, that sense of warmth and optimism - it’s probably the most compelling emotional appeal you can make right now. It’s a promise. It says: We can make things OK. Things don’t have to stay this way. We can make it less miserable, less fraught, less poor, less hateful. More joyous. In the words of Jetten’s campaign slogan: “It can be done.”

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Tailored electorates

The Democratic party has tied itself in knots arguing about the relative advantages and dangers of Mamdani but the reality is perfectly obvious and perfectly comprehensible on the basis of this week’s results alone. In Holland, Jetten hardened his party’s asylum policy. In New York, Mamdani proudly projected a sense of diversity. Governor’s races in New Jersey and Virginia were won by establishment-backed Democratic party moderates. The mayoral race in New York could appeal to a different electorate.

We live in a terribly stupid world, so these results are met by people saying that their model - compromise or principle, moderate or radical - is the only one which works anywhere, as a blanket approach. In fact, the lesson is that you pick the right candidate, with the right message, for the right area. And you create local political organisations with the freedom to do that.

Would you pick a self-proclaimed socialist to run in a swing state in the US? Probably not. Should you be relaxed about a radical figure in a liberal city? Probably yes.

Progressives benefit by having lots of different variants put in front of the electorate. Jetten’s asylum policy aims at a middle of the road compromise involving out-of-country applications under the auspices of UNHCR as well as day one language classes. He says Dutch people “just want to decently host people fleeing war and violence, but also be strict with the rotten apples who ruin the system”. It’s not language that I like and nor do I approve of out-of-country applications, but you can see the effort to find a defensible middle position on the issue. It is superior to the moral and strategic muddle we see from Labour. Similarly, many of Mamdani’s policies would not be helpful in London, others may be.

The basic problem comes when progressives view their differences as weaknesses, not strengths. Mamadami runs by being proudly multicultural. I love that about him. I love that his family looks recognisably like mine and the world he inhabits looks recognisably like my own, at a time when those values and lifestyles are being attacked. I love that London Mayor Sadiq Khan emphasises the diversity and patchwork elegance of my city. But I am not under the illusion that this would be a sensible campaign approach in the North-East of England.

The national campaign, in any country, will naturally be a compromise of sorts. Local campaigns can have different flavours and textures. There is no need for moderates and radicals to insist that their preference operates best across the political landscape. It doesn’t. They don’t. Embrace the diversity of the progressive alliance, rather than sabotage it.

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Modernity

Both Mamdani and Jetten are something new. It’s not that they are politicians of the social media era - we’ve had that since at least 2016. It’s that they are politicians of the online video era. They’re Instagram and TikTok politicians. Jetten first changed from a routine cut-and-paste professional politician to a sensation after TikTok montages of a fictional romance in the Dutch parliament. His Instagram game is strong: professional, carefree, upbeat.

Mamdani is a social media triumph of simply unprecedented quality. He is a delight to watch and listen to, possessing that vanishingly rare quality of being a politician people actively want to hear more from. He was always going to struggle to get a hearing from the press or even TV, but he could sidestep that problem and go online, appearing on accounts that are the modern equivalent of Saturday night prime time for his demographic.

Whenever he did it, he emphasised the most valued quality in the modern information ecosystem: authenticity. Who else would say that Spanish is “kicking my butt” in a pitch to Latin voters, or show outtakes of him mangling the language? No-one. And that’s why he is brilliant, the perfect example of how to communicate politically at this precise moment in time. He makes everyone else look ancient.

We cannot train politicians into being as charismatic as he is or as comfortable in their skin or as nice to look at. But we can have communication strategies that are based on the 2020s rather than the 1990s.

Consider how far away any politician in the UK is from occupying this space. Farage performs best on Tiktok, but he is successful only in being better at it than everyone else, which is not hard. Green party leader Zack Polanski does OK, but like Farage, he gets his clicks by repeating a set of firm, slightly conspiratorial, political slogans. He still communicates in what is ultimately a fairly old fashioned way, as if he is doing a party political broadcast.

Labour’s communications policy is based on securing op-eds in newspapers which hate them, for a readership which does not exist. Everything operates according to a schedule which is so dated it is covered in cobwebs: a Sunday morning interview with Laura Kuenssberg, a place on Question Time, and a slot after 8am on the Today programme.

There is no fresh thinking about how to reach a new set of voters, there is no attempt to find the people who can operate in that space. There are millions of eyeballs online and yet the vast majority of British political attention is spent on the dwindling audience on TV and in print. It’s mad, on a basic mathematical level. It’ll be even more mad when the voting age is lowered to 16.

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There’s been an awful lot of nonsense spoken about election results this week - a sense of inevitable defeat cultivated in the overall media narrative, an intemperate battle of tribal animosity between progressives. But there are extremely useful practical takeaways from what we’ve seen. Joy and hope are powerful, even radical, in an era of doom. Moderates and radicals should be relaxed about which approach is best suited to a given area and try to learn from each other, regardless of their differences. Effective political communication is possible online, with powerful results, if we dare to think outside of the traditional communication structures.

We can learn all these things if progressives are prepared to learn from one another, rather than try to batter each other to death over minor differences. Is that likely? No. Why change the habit of a lifetime? But we can at least hold out some hope. It’s a good week for it.

Odds and sods

This week’s i newspaper column was on Rachel Reeves’ newfound honesty about tax and the urgent need for widescale reform of the system.

This week’s episode of Origin Story was part one of our epic history of the Labour party, from Keir Hardie to Keir Starmer. An endless tragicomic cycle in which right and left try to murder each other, succeed, fall apart, are murdered in turn, and then begin anew. 125 years of history made as breezy and effortless as possible, complete with pitch-dark humour and an abiding sense of the pointlessness of it all. What else could you ask for?

I’ll be doing two events next week. The first is at the Festival of Higher Education, where I’ll be discussing universities as a cauldron of liberalism. This is why the populist right despises higher education. It’s why even Labour doesn’t dare to defend it anymore. Because these institutions equip people to assess information critically, think for themselves, and question authority. No wonder they’re so hated.

The festival is extremely diverse, addressing every aspect of higher education, from policy to funding, values to practicalities, domestic to international. Skills minister Jacqui Smith will be there as will the chair of the Office for Students. If you’re involved in higher education in any way at all, it’s basically the place to be. Tickets are available here.

The other is Origin Story Live, where we dig into the weird, weird world of left and right. In part one of the show we’ll ask why conservatives are losing their minds by exploring some of the weird right-wing thinkers who have influenced the likes of Kemi Badenoch and JD Vance. And in part two,we’ll continue season eight’s story of socialism by looking at rising stars like Mamdani and Polanski. We’ll also rip into some of the misunderstood buzzphrases that are making our political discourse stupider by the day.

Culture pick this week is the new series of The New Gods by writer Ram V and artist Evan Cagle. I am a bit obsessed with Jack Kirby’s Fourth World saga. It’s my happy place. A lot of this is simply down to the names. How the fuck do you argue with names like the Anti-Life Equation, Big Barda or Granny Goodness? You can’t. How do you argue with their design? You may not.

The New Gods is essentially an anti-fascist parable in the form of a cosmic epic. Kirby was a veteran of the Second World War, but he was writing during the 60s, in defence of hippies and young radicals. He wasn’t one of them, but he knew who his allies were.

This latest iteration of the story has all the poetry and grandeur you could ask for, with masterful storytelling from V and scenes of impossible beauty from Cagle. The only flaw is that the ending is very, very abrupt. But then: what a small price to pay. One of my favourite bits of the comics universe is back and on form. I’m feeling properly lucky about it.

Right, that’s you’re lot - fuck off. Have a lovely weekend.

Geoff Mulgan has written a great piece on the shortcomings of a centrism which wants “to be thought of as practical competent problem-solvers, sensible, grown-up and realistic.” I agree that Mulgan is right to call this a dead-end. I want to argue, though, that it is a dead-end in its own terms: a genuinely realistic competence would see that a government cannot survive merely by aspiring to competence.

Charlie Munger once said something very wise and important:

One skill is knowing the edge of your own competency. It’s not a competency if you don’t know the edge of it.

And even the best politicians’ circle of competence is inherently small simply because human affairs are complex and unpredictable and our knowledge limited. They are confronted with what Thomas Homer-Dixon called an ingenuity gap: “a shortfall between their rapidly rising need for ingenuity and their inadequate supply.”

This is one of Reeves’ problems. Her fiscal rules oblige her to ensure that “the current budget must be in surplus in 2029-30” and that government debt be falling as a share of GDP then. This means that fiscal policy must be set on the basis of the OBR’s medium-term forecasts. But forecasts are usually wrong simply because the future is unknowable*. What’s more, a good forecast will change randomly. This is because it will embody all available information and so will change only because of unpredictable surprises which are by definition random - which in turn means that fiscal policy will change randomly. Any Chancellor therefore risks having to make policy reversals and appear to be not in control of events, as Reeves is now doing. Unless they are lucky, their claim to competence will thus be undermined by events. Which is an especial problem if competence is all you are offering.

You might think the way out of this dilemma is to abandon fiscal rules and instead set fiscal policy to control inflation. This, however, merely replaces reliance upon a forecast for the public finances with a reliance upon one for inflation. This is an improvement because inflation is less unpredictable than government borrowing, but it doesn’t solve the problem.

The fact that governments cannot predict and control extends far beyond economics, however. Adam Smith famously said there was a “great deal of ruin in a nation”. There will always be some hospital that fails, or some outbreak of criminality, or some mistakes somewhere in the public sector. A government that claims competence will get the blame for these.

Especially, of course, if it is not a right-wing one. For example, there were 377 prisoners wrongly released in 2023-24 and 2024-24 and an average of one a week in the years before then. Such incompetence under a Tory government got little publicity. But the release of two prisoners recently means, says the BBC, that the “buck stops with Lammy” in a way that it did not stop with Chalk or Raab or Lewis or Buckland or Gauke or....

I fear a similar thing will be true of immigration. This has fallen sharply recently, and is expected to drop much further. It is unlikely, however, that the right will give Labour credit for competently “controlling our borders” More likely, any crime committed by a migrant (and such crimes are statistically inevitable) will trigger a moral panic.

People mocked David Cameron for warning of “chaos under Ed Miliband”. But he was right. A paperclip going missing at the Department for Rural Affairs would have been “chaos” under a Miliband government. The Tories wrecking the economy and public services, on the other hand, was “drama”, which is what lobby correspondents want.

There’s something else. The competence that a government needs has changed, and is more demanding now.

In the decades before the mid-00s, the job of macroeconomic policy was mainly to avoid egregious errors** and so free-ride upon an economy that was growing by 2-3% a year and generating rising tax revenues.

But that world has gone. In a stagnant economy, competent government requires that policy-makers find measures to raise trend supply-side growth or to raise taxes whilst doing as little economic harm as possible. These are much more demanding tasks, perhaps even impossible ones. The bar for what is “competent” is much higher now.

In theory, the government could acknowledge all this: that there’s a great deal of ruin in a nation; that human affairs are unpredictable; and that capitalism isn’t working as it used to. It could, for example, abandon the utterly silly reliance upon point forecasts and instead base policy upon upon the range of possible outcomes; things like the Bank of England’s fan charts should be more politically salient than they are.

I’m not sure, however, that any government could actually do this. Part of politicians’ professional deformation is to be overconfident about their abilities, and to not know the edge of their own competency. Nor, of course, would such a recognition of reality be acceptable to our debased and moronic political discourse. And of course, talking about the failures of capitalism is well off the agenda.

What centrists offer, therefore, is not so much competence as competenciness - a claim to be in control founded not upon realism but instead upon centrist utopianism, a belief in a world that is perfectible if only the right people were making the right policies. This is of course a profoundly ideological position, and a mistaken one. A truly realistic and competent politician would see it as such.

* The purpose of a forecast isn’t to tell us what events will occur. It is to tell us how surprised we should be when they do occur.

** Something the Tories failed to do, triggering recessions in 1980 and 1990.

Everybody knows there are good ways in which the government might raise economic growth, such as rejoining the single market; increasing competition; not hitting one of our most successful industries with a tax on its customers; shifting tax from incomes to property; and so on.

Everybody also knows, however, that these methods are mostly incompatible with its ideology and so they are Not Serious. What we need therefore are measures which are compatible. Here, then, are a few.

First, we must build upon a model of proven success in creating create good, skilled jobs around the country: Bet365. It has created 6000 mostly well-paid jobs in previously run-down Stoke, which now has a larger tech sector than Cambridge. This suggests we should encourage the gambling industry, perhaps with tax breaks.

In the same spirit, we need a more complicated tax system. This would further increase demand for accountants and tax lawyers which are very good jobs indeed: partners at Deloitte are paid over £1m a year.

There are more options. To see them, remember what a skilled job is. Only a fool would think it is one requiring diligence and ability. No. A skilled job is simply a high-paid one. Fund managers who destroy clients’ wealth by underperforming tracker funds are skilled whilst care workers and support workers for people with special needs are not*. This tells us that we need to create more fund manager jobs, by giving tax incentives for stocks and shares’ Isas or stakeholder pensions - conditional on these not being used to expand the use of index-tracker funds.

If skillifying is one way to raise growth, another is commodifying - stopping people getting free stuff. Repair cafes, time banks, Lets and even Parkrun are all the enemy of economic growth and must be discouraged, perhaps by requiring their organizers to get expensive permits. Allotments too are the enemy of growth: people who grow their own food aren’t buying it from supermarkets. We must concrete them over.

Another form of commodification is to recognise that data is a product. And the government has a lot of it. The DVLA already sells drivers’ details. The NHS could do the same.

We can do more. Paul Samuelson famously said that when a man marries his maid he reduces GDP. So let’s do the reverse. We should discourage people from doing unpaid babysitting for friends or grandchildren, perhaps by requiring enhanced DBS checks. Economic growth requires that childminding be a paid job, not an exchange of favours.

Of course, a country cannot get rich by taking in each others’ washing. But in the GDP figures, it can appear to get rich. And that’ll be good enough for any minister appearing on the Laura Kuenssberg show.

There’s a third way to raise growth. Ordinary buying and selling gives customers something that doesn’t appear in the GDP data: consumer surplus. Everytime we pay £10 for something that we’d have happily paid £15 for, we get £5 of consumer surplus. This doesn’t show up in the GDP data but if companies could capture more of it for themselves, it would show up - voila! economic growth.

The textbook way of monetizing consumer surplus is price discrimination - charging some customers more than others, as when publishers sell a high-priced hardback to an authors’ keenest customers and a cheaper paperback to others. Another way is the use of digital rights management to stop people lending e-books they have bought, or even (as John Deere does) preventing them from repairing things they’ve bought.

Ther’s another way. If Lenin defined communism as “Soviet power plus electrification” we might define today’s capitalism as market power plus enshittification. As Cory Doctorow has shown, tech companies have enshittified their offering by, for example, selling customer data, plastering sites with adverts, or by taking payments from companies to push their product up search engines’ lists. The government can encourage this process; this, I suspect, is why it is still on Twitter but not Bluesky.

Another thing the government could do in this context is to strengthen intellectual property laws. William Nordhaus famously showed that “most of the benefits of technological change are passed on to consumers rather than captured by producers.” Flat screen TVs, for example, used to be expensive until lots of companies worked out how to make them, causing prices to fall - which meant more consumer surplus but lower profits. If the government could strengthen copyright and patents, it would prevent such knowledge spillovers and so allow producers to capture more consumer surplus - in effect converting something that isn’t in the GDP data into something that is. That creates economic growth.

By now you might be screaming: opportunity cost. If we’re paying more than necessary for stuff or paying bad fund managers or accountants to navigate a complex tax system, then we’re not spending that money elsewhere. To celebrate this would be like celebrating broken windows because they create work for glaziers.

Part of this government’s mindset, though, is to ignore opportunity cost. It claims that spending on pet projects such as Sizewell C or the military will raise growth because it ignores that such spending could go to other, more growth-enhancing projects.

And perhaps it is right to neglect opportunity cost.

One reason for this is that it’s much easier to expand existing businesses than it is to create new ones. We already have lots of fund managers, tax accountants and workers in the betting industry, so why not build on these strengths?

There’s also the politics. The thing about opportunity cost is that, as Frederic Bastiat said, we don’t see it. The counterfactual to a policy of commodify, enshittify and skillify might be a more dynamic economy that serves people well. But we’ll never see this, and so the government can deny its plausibility, just as Brexiters deny the alternative world in which Brexit never happened and the economy is doing better.

There is, though, something else. What I’ve described are trends that are already in place, and I’m merely advocating that the government accelerate them. The intelligent person might therefore ask: if British capitalism is stagnating even with the aid of these developments, what does that tell us about the underlying health of the system, and its ability to reconcile profitability and a healthy society? Luckily, though, people in politics don’t ask intelligent questions.

* Fund managers are mostly white men and care workers disproprtionately women and people of colour. Isn’t that a coincidence?