Why It Must Be Open

A tool you cannot inspect is a tool you must take on faith. And faith, in the hands of those who build instruments of great power, has been the most reliably betrayed currency in the history of technology.

— The Coherence Thesis, Vol. II

We have argued that the measurement of presence must be federated — that the sensitive signal of a human encounter must never leave the participant's own device. That is a claim about where computation happens. There is a second claim, inseparable from the first and equally fundamental, about who can see how the computation works. The instrument that reads the body must not only run on hardware the participant controls. Its every line must be open to inspection. It must be, in the precise technical sense, open source — its full design public, auditable, and owned by no one.

This is not a preference drawn from the culture of software. It follows with the same necessity as everything else in this volume from the nature of what is being built. An instrument that reads the most intimate signal a human being produces — the rhythm of the heart in genuine encounter, the chemistry of trust, the tone of the voice as it moves between defense and openness — is an instrument of enormous intimacy and therefore of enormous potential for betrayal. The only way such an instrument can be worthy of trust is if it does not ask to be trusted. It must instead be verifiable. And verifiability, for a piece of technology, has a precise and demanding meaning that we must now make plain.