So, that Ed Zitron article is really good.
But.
11,525 words and not *one* mention of a 46-year tradition of fighting exactly the kind of thing he's talking about? Almost half a century of "no, actually, high information technology should empower the people who are forced to interact with it" and they don't get a single word?
I am not an FSF fangirl. I really don't like a lot of the people involved in free software, there are tons of problems with it, I'm not asking him to present FOSS or Linux as some panacea, but c'mon. A paragraph? A thousand words? When it's the locus of every serious attempt to avoid exactly the problems he's talking about, when people involved with it have been predicting everything he says since last century?
Apparently not.
This one, for the record. https://www.wheresyoured.at/never-forgive-them/
> Those who can’t afford $300 (at least) phones or $600 laptops are left to use offensively bad technology, and we have, at a societal scale, simply accepted that this is how things go.
Yes. Fuck that so much. Fuck the people who made it that way.
And. And you can buy a laptop for $100 or $150 on eBay and throw something decent on there. At least here, at least in North America, it's been the reality for fifteen years that you can, simply, step aside and choose not to participate.
I am not blaming the people who are saddled with the $239 shittop. I am not blaming the people who have to put up with garbage at work. I am blaming journalists who consistently pretend that there is *nothing else*. Zitron is just the tip of that particular iceberg.
> I realize this isn’t particularly satisfying to some, because you want big ideas, big changes that can be made. I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t know how to fix things. To quote Howard Beale in the movie Network, I don’t want you to write your Congressman because I don’t know what to tell you to write.
Then talk to the fucking people who do, Ed! Come *on*!
You want to know why people who use FOSS are annoying? This is part of it. There is a constant, feverish, frenzied conversation retreading the same ground over and over and over again, ground I read about Richard Dipshit Stallman walking in the 20th fucking century, and nobody ever learns a goddamn thing.
I spent my whole childhood with the options being either a) to learn how to patch together a working comptuer system from literal dumpster-dived trash, or b) not have any connection to the Internet (and, thus, my only friends, my only queer community, etc.). I was able to do that because of Debian, and local LUGs, and probably a thousand people's work, minimum. Every project that enabled that is chronically underfunded and unappreciated.
Not only *can* we build something different, we *already have*. And maybe that's not the right thing, but it's proof that we can make a different choice.
Ed and all his friends need to get the hell on board.
@noracodes are today’s shitty laptops actually worse than the shitty netbook we put linux on for my dad in 2010? because i kind of doubt it
@noracodes this said i think ed is a lot less focused on hardware and operating system software and a lot more on the Internet and Web
FLOSS, FSF, GNU, etc have historically been abysmal at the web. they haven’t had good ideas and they haven’t had successful projects. if the internet was good, the fact you were accessing it thru a shitty version of Windows on a shitty laptop wouldn’t matter, because the internet is designed to scale down to be accessible on even the slowest and worst hardware. that isn’t the case and nothing out of FLOSS has come close to changing that
@noracodes firefox / chrome isn’t why the web is full of bloat though. the web is full of bloat because no amount of free software can let you influence what somebody else's server sends you, or what requirements they put on letting you access their systems. (free software actually just lets somebody else's server send you even MORE code you don't want to run, because they don’t even have to write it themselves.) no amount of licensing can fix this. software projects built entirely around the four freedoms have no answer to this problem, and largely do not even recognize it AS a problem, or pretend that if you are running an open source browser, that somehow gives you power over what is happening on corporations’ servers. it doesn’t.
software CANNOT replace infrastructure and the free software movement has had ZERO interest in providing well-funded, reliable, maintained network infrastructure for everyday people. instead it is obsessed with an egocentric, libertarian model which concerns itself only with individuals and what they can self-host and what rights they have regarding their own machines.
@noracodes you refocusing this from a conversation about networked infrastructure to a conversation about choice of browser application used to access that infrastructure is exactly the kind of missing the point that FLOSS has been doing for decades
@Lady I see what you're saying, and I agree that this is a huge part of the problem with software freedom as an ideology, but I also think that software freedom, including free software that actually exists today, is an absolute baseline prerequisite for solving these infrastructural problems. It is insufficient, but it is necessary, and my gripe with the author here is that he doesn't mention that baseline work at all.
@noracodes i mean, i think it’s a baseline in the same way that marx thought liberalism was a necessary baseline from which communism would develop. absolutely, we would not be having this conversation if the free software movement had never happened. but also, it wasn’t the liberal countries which actually achieved communism first. it was the countries which liberalism was unable to serve.
Re Last Boost:
"no amount of free software can let you influence what somebody else's server sends you"
It absolutely can and it is doing it cosntantly, all the time for me, and many people:
* pieHole: block loads of adds and tracker at the DNS level, for every device in the house
* Privacy Badger, Ublock Origin: Stops loads of script from loading up, loads of ads, et.
* Firefox (even, if its about to go): stops 3rd party tracking.
* unhook: stops youtube advert to pop up.
The server is literally not sending me the files, files it hoped I would, but I'm not.
And this is also something that people like me install on many computers of people who do not have the knowledge to install it themselves.
Like one of me does that to dozen of people at least, maybe more.
And I'm saying this on a "web" social network that is so popular that twitter spun a new network for it, and even facebook is scared.
Like the whole web is based on open source, open standards, and even open data plays a big role here (see wikipedia for example).
The problem is not that Open* is no good for the web, the whole tech industry is built from it.
The people that do the Open* now have a day job and it is building the web (the 2.0 version) and you need a full time job to keep up with the technology churn.
Engineers do 8 hours per day, for companies that do shittier and shittier stuff with worsening labour practices, but human got to eat so what else to do.
@noracodes Read the Zitron article, he could have suggested Linux & FOSS to avoid the horrors he described. Worked as software engineer since 1970’s, in Bell Labs in 1980’s where I learned Unix & C, then in Switzerland & back in US before retirement. Switched to Mac in 2009 to enjoy Unix again, could do the same with Linux but I love the Apple ecosystem that includes the iPhone & iPad. You could use an older Windows computer with Linux & FOSS, though most people would have no idea how to start 🙁
@Lady I'm not really sure I agree. Currently, the big proprietary browser is heading towards blocking the tools people use to clean up the Web, even to the tiny extent that they can, and while Firefox is problematic for a lot of reasons, it *is* free software.