https://www.singularityweblog.com/robert-steele-open-source-everything/

Robert Steele is a very interesting person indeed: in the 1980s Robert was a clandestine CIA agent who believed not only in secrecy but also in Reagan’s right-wing politics and trickle down economics. Today Steele is the author of The Open Source Everything Manifesto: Transparency, Truth, and Trust. So how does a former spy and CIA intelligence professional, and Marine Corps infantry officer, become an honorary hacker, open source evangelist and the top Amazon reviewer devoted to non-fiction? Well, I invited Steele on my Singularity 1on1 podcast to ask him about that, as well as a few other things.

During our 82 min discussion with Robert Steele we cover a variety of interesting topics such as: whether humanity is making progress or not; failed states, regime change and ISIS; The Open-Source Everything Manifesto; smart cities and nature; shifting from secrecy to open source; producing more actionable intelligence than the entire US intelligence complex; collecting systems versus sharing and processing systems; capitalism, the singularity and true cost economics; industrialization, education and being a sheep; open source everything as a way to unleash our entrepreneurial capabilities; polarization and the preconditions for revolution; panarchy as extreme democracy and informed self-governance; ethics and integrity…

My three favorite quotes that I will take away from this conversation with Robert Steele are:

“The chasm, the gap between people with power and people with knowledge is now catastrophic.”

“Open source intelligence is the application of the craft of intelligence, legally and ethically, to create smart cities, smart nations, smart companies and smart citizens. It’s about not being a sheep.”

“Ethics is about the truth. And transparency. And trust. Ethics is how a civilization hands on the lessons of history, from one generation to the next. Ethics is the cultural code for getting the most out of any group and any situation with the least amount of damage and the least amount of waste. So ethics is an operating system.”