I love this article, because although it doesn’t offer too concrete a solution, it correctly poses the problem of software freedom and privacy, not in individualistic terms, but as a collective problem, that requires a collective solution.
And stallman is kinda the figurehead of the lifestylist approach to software freedom. We can’t pretend that just because free software exists, and a few people are enlightened enough to use it, that we’ve made much progress at all for software freedom. Capitalist software development, with all its adverse effects on privacy,is still the dominant way people interact with their computers.
As someone who is essentially a newcomer to Linux, GNU, and Free Software–are the FSF and all the other organizations that make up the FOSS ecosystem not the collective solution? The issue of outreach is certainly significant, so I suppose I struggle to understand how much more “collective” the ideal solution would be, compared to how it is now, outreach aside.
They’re essentially single-issue organizations that attack the symptoms (affronts to privacy, etc), not the root cause of the problem: capitalist-driven software development, and its endless drive for profit at the expense of all else, namely human needs.
By separating themselves from the wider political struggles against that system, the best they can do is criticize big tech, and suggest alternatives that have 1/1000th of the money and developers that capitalist software has. This hasn’t worked and will never work. We need political struggles not just for alternatives, but an expropriation of big tech, removing control of them from the profit-seekers, open-sourcing their codebases, and making transparent all the things they’re doing that we don’t know about.
These orgs should either create wings in, or absorb themselves into anti-capitalist political parties who after taking power can actually bring these software companies under public control and civilian oversight.
Thank you for the thorough answer! It is much clearer than the article above in illuminating the core of the issue.
I agree that collective approach would yield more results, but where is this collective to demand such changes? Honestly most people don’t care about their privacy and freedoms all that much. The outrage of Snowden stuff was forgotten in a few weeks and even the excellent GDPR protections didn’t really shift perceptions of the wider public all that much. People would care if the media bombarded them with “libre crisis” for a decade but that isn’t really going to happen because FOSS is dangerous to the most valuable companies of the most powerful country on earth.
What I think realistically can be done is pressuring EU with this issue or individual governments and demand change for the better.
The first comment there basically says “anticapitalist=immoral” :O right?
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I don’t think this is correct at all, personally. You’re saying that the article espouses the idea that we get a “significant number” of individual people to care about this seemingly fringe issue, but that’s the liberal response that this article actual argues against. The article says we need to achieve a systemic solution, and essentially ground the Stallmanist free software movement into the socio-political sphere even more than it already is, because at the moment it doesn’t go far past the individual. This doesn’t mean convincing a ton of people that they should use free software, but instead working toward the goal of making free software the norm so that the freedoms it holds be equally accessible to all and the material interests that people have in free software be understood.
It is crucial to understand and accept the class dynamics of politics, and to realize that our efforts should not lie in explaining people their interests, but rather organizing to best achieve them. Imagine if all those who were outraged by, for example, Windows 10 spying on them, were given an integrated political platform to properly understand the root cause of these issues and the proper way to resist them!
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