From Chess to Open Source: Can Our Stories Become Universal?

What connects Yuval Noah Harari’s book ‘Sapiens’, ‘The Queen’s Gambit’ show on Netflix and Open Source?

Perhaps, but only perhaps, it is the elusive idea of a universal in-group story. A story about us, that has no out-group. One that has no need for a ‘them’ to define or promote ‘us’.

How many such stories do you know? Virtually all religions have an out-group. So does every national story. So does any class-based society.

A universal in-group story is a bit of a holy grail, as big aspiring stories go. And yes, they’re in extremely short supply. The book “Sapiens” is one such story. And although chess culture and Open Source are not, and may never become such a story, for reasons ranging from access to interest to identity, each overcame an obstacle that brought them a significant step closer. Mid-20th century chess culture overcame an identity hurdle, while open source pulled down the access bar.

Whether these two ever become “universal in-group” stories we all identify with isn’t the point. Probably not. But it’s what we can find in them, an ingredient, a pattern we may wish to look for in the other stories too, that this article is about.

Yuval Noah Harari’s book — Sapiens, tables what is possibly the biggest “universal in-group” story of our day. I use it here to set a high water mark. In it, Harari shows what it means to be human. Us sapiens — and no other species — use fictions we believe at the same time, as a tool to cooperate in large numbers. We’ve been doing that for some 70,000 years. We do it flexibly. Unlike bees, whose cooperation is hardcoded in DNA, we adjust our stories and respond to change. In the Q&A sessions following Harari’s talks, an interesting comment gets made again and again — people from all over stand up and just tell him “the story you told here — I feel it’s mine”. Our stories — of nations, corporations, religions, money, even road rules — enable millions of strangers to work together. I won’t go any deeper into these ideas, but rather, explain why people from President Barack Obama to Bill Gates vocally promote this book. The reason? The universally relatable, novel, evidence-driven story about how we actually roll. He did it not by creating some new religion, but by simply pointing out what any bundle of ideas — religions not exempt — really are (in a good, meaningful way), and made everyone scratch their head, look at their church or national flag, soccer club or car brand, favourite ancient civilisation or Harry Potter books, and go “Shit. He’s right. That is us”.

Rather than elevate Sapiens onto some ‘big history’ pedestal, reserved for grand narratives and global ideologies, we’ll look at it differently — a story that achieved a black belt with something to teach, facing numerous other stories that aspire to something (perhaps not that grand) themselves, and may wish to learn.

Let’s jump to ‘The Queen’s Gambit’. I have a personal connection to concede. I come from a Russian home. My mum reached “Pervi Rozryad”. Quarter finals. National. In what was then Leningrad, USSR, 1975. Because reasons — health complications and emigration, that would be the end of her bout with competitive chess. I am not competitive, but I saw many a chess board growing up, and watching the Netflix series brought it home for me. This does translate into some sense of identity, and that positionality does bias my views.

“The Queen’s Gambit” is a fictional story set in the chess culture of the 1950s and 1960s. Hidden in that chess culture lies a story not only with universal access aspirations — we will talk more about access when we look at open source — but an identity story too. A story I wholeheartedly feel is mine as well. An identity that seems to be about a board game, but really isn’t. It’s really about what one can do armed with the human mind, not about pieces of wood.

Let’s take a minute to acknowledge the faults of that culture that made it less universal. To its credit, The Queen’s Gambit does not avoid them. The elitism in the sport was probably worse in real life. The show peppers it in, though it smoothes things off, offering an entire buffet of ways to gain admiration, by showing true grace on the harsh stage of defeat. You know, should anyone in 2020 happen to need one.

Elitism wasn’t the only major barrier to universality. Sexism was, too. While Beth Harmon, the heroine of The Queen’s Gambit does her victory lap in that white queen suffragette dress, no such heroine actually existed — the real person around whose struggles Beth was modelled was Bobby Fischer, who, according to all accounts, was not a woman. The show makes for good “time-machine catharsis”, in that very “Inglorious Basterds” way. We send an agent of present thinking into the unjust past, and watch them fix history and win. In ‘Inglorious Basterds’, Quentin Tarantino sent a squad of ruthless Jews to make the Nazi war machine regret its life choices. Similarly, The Queen’s Gambit sends a 9 year old budding female chess grandmaster into the 50s to overcome misogyny, the prejudice of low expectations women got from the closest people in their lives, ultimately to face off the Russians at the thing they are notoriously best at. Cathartic. But fiction. Reality wasn’t like that for women, not in the US, and by my mum’s account, not in the USSR either. In the last episode, The Russian female champion drives it home, when it’s revealed she doesn’t play the men. Chess, back then at least, left women behind.

But look closely, and you notice something that did actually happen. Chess culture is a small identity story — a game, not an ideology. Yet it penetrated through not one, but two divisive identity barriers, the iron curtain, and an extreme rich/poor class divide. How?

“Hang on”, I hear you say. Didn’t, like, all sports do that? The Olympics? Soccer?

Yes, they did. And no, not like that they didn’t. The difference? The fruits of physical training can‘t be shared. Knowledge can. Two types of actors in the chess community — those running competitions, and the masters winning games and writing books — despite all the competitive elitism in the world — did systematically share knowledge. And it was shared not among friendly team-mates. It was shared across cold war borders. Between the most bitter of enemies. Using government money. It was shared with everyone who had access to a medium-sized library. An outline of an us starts to appear…

What was it the chess community was sharing with this in-group? What did it mean to be us? And is there an us here, that doesn’t need a them?

Unlike many other sports, chess action doesn’t all happen in the game itself. The competitive chess players don’t play, win and party. They play, meticulously recording their moves. They don’t just want the outcome at the end. Like an algebra teacher, they seek the method, not just the answer. They want a way to go back and change it. They want the source. The Queen’s Gambit does this justice. Time and time and time again, they go back to games they played, and play them again with variations. Study each other’s past games. They learn, from teachers or literature, known sequences and strategies — openings, mid-games and end-game plays. They analyse the open recipes precisely describing past games, the sharpest looking for a place to diverge, improve on their predecessor, for a better outcome. And when they succeed, reaching fame and glory, their accomplishment is put back, sharing those recipes. Sharing them with us.

Chess culture cracked an identity problem. It did so through a system that provided its broad base of non-competitive players a universally shared purpose — the mastery of a tool we all have — the human brain. A public good provided by the competitive sphere — recipes for games, was knowledge any one of us could use to hone our own mind. I want to identify with such a group. Many of us do.

If you come from the open source world, you’ve already spotted the shared DNA that chess world has with your own. It dovetails into our third story. Our third story. Who is we this time?

Anyone who wants to create something with technology. Anything. Anywhere. Whether you’re the CEO of Microsoft or a bright 19 year old entrepreneur in Bangalore, the implied, free toolbox you start out with says Open Source on the cover. What you’ll find in it are not the world’s poorest tools. They are the world’s finest, never mind those developing most rapidly.

You, and I. What can we do? Just the two of us? For absolutely any combination of us?

We can prototype a billion dollar solution with a bill of materials that has 3 figures. We can install an enterprise-grade operating system on virtually any computer. Run an enterprise-grade web server. Write a computer program, and compile it in any number of computer languages. Run distributed computing technology like Kubernetes or Hadoop — technologies that undergird Google’s infrastructure. Automate work that used to need an army to do. And that’s not where you and I are going. That’s just where we get to start. Today that is. Pop the lid open a year from now, there’ll be even more.

I said open source solved an access problem. That wasn’t strictly true. Like with chess, where we had to see the full system — normal people using words like we and us, while competitive elite openly share knowledge — here too, we need to look at the big picture, and acknowledge what role open source plays in the wider system.

In recent decades, not one, but many things beat down the access barrier to technology everywhere. x86 compatible hardware. Standards. Moore’s Law. One Laptop Per Child and similar projects, putting tech in the hands of millions of kids for a price developing nation governments can handle. Skills acquisition on Youtube. Massive open online courses. First Sourceforge, then Github and friends. Kickstartr. Raspberry Pi and other ARM computers. Microlending. The list goes on and on. Are we there yet? Have we finally solved the problem of them who simply don’t have access? Not by a long shot. And the complexity of what we are trying to give everyone access to just keeps increasing, moving the goalposts further and further afield.

Did you notice I didn’t mention open source in that list? Not because it doesn’t have a role, but because its role is unique. It didn’t just give everyone with youtube tuition and a cheap device access to highly complex software. It gave us something to do with it all once the bar got low enough. Open source helped establish demand for all those other things, by making the One Laptop Per Child projects, the Raspberries, the affordable phones mean not “a device” but “all the things open source software can already do”. At scale. “Open unlocks the world’s potential” we say where I work. That’s literal. Open source closed the circuit, sending the entire system into a positive feedback loop in overdrive. That’s a very big part of how we got to where we are today.

Let’s come back to universal in-group stories. What does it mean for us? If we drag that access bar way down, where every new thing done by those who now have access, stands not at the foot of some immense commercial competitor, but on the shoulders of our collective software achievement, at scale, for every starter upper in the world?

All our societies push forward entrepreneurs, movers, disruptors, challenging them with our nastiest problems. We all have some big problems we want solved, right? Our soldiers are only as effective as the tools we send them into battle with. Well, so are our entrepreneurs. A lower access bar means more starters, more battles won, oh, and a bigger collective pile. I signed up.

I wish we had more universal in-group stories. They are not just emotionally empowering, they help — directly, by helping achieve a purpose, and indirectly, by doing away with out-groups, and in doing so reducing antagonism, conflict, friction and resistance. They don’t have to be perfectly universal, even part way goes a long way, so long as they’re headed towards, rather than away from, universality.

Can you think of more?

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Thank you to Dr Julia Richardson for peer review and editorial help with this article.