root@canta.com.ar

Disclaimer

    This article is a response to “Software Enshittification or Freedom? It’s not a hard choice!”, by Alexandre Oliva, and published on Techrights.

    I’m a daily Techrights reader since 16 years now, it’s my web browser’s home page, and with the course of years I even had the pleasure of exchanging messages with doctor Roy Schestowitz several times. I love the Techrights. However, my comments are frequently critical, and this time is no exception. For this reason I prefer to begin with clarifying my admiration for Dr. Schestowitz’s work, which I found exemplary, and that my dissents are not personal against him or his work but the product of contrasting his publications and my own experiences as part of the collective we share: the free software global community. Techright’s work is invaluable, and I recommend it every time I have the chance.

    In the same spirit, I’m aware that Alexandre Oliva has years of dedicated work on free software, by which he has earned the love and respect of the community. I’m going to be critical here about some aspects of his latest article, even going to the point of using harsh language, and I don’t wish such criticism to be understood as a direct appreciation about him or his work: I also believe what he does is neccessary, to criticize is much easier than standing up in front of an auditory full of people to defend your ideas, and there’s not even a comparisson point between criticism through internet and to dedicate decades on protecting and divulging an eminently social project as is the case with free software or even the very GNU. Trying to lower in any way the value of Mr. Oliva’s work could not be more far from my intentions.

    The point of this article is focusing on what I consider a very serious vocabulary deficiency, and thus also comunicational, philosophical, and political, of free software movement, around the word “freedom”. Which is something I’ve already talked about before, and been doing for years.

    I also must note that I speak spanish: english is not my first language, so this article may have some weird expressions and most likely lots of syntax errors. I expect it to be understantable for english readers nonetheless.

Context matters

    With all that considered, today is a very special day here in Argentina: it’s the second general nation-wide strike against the policies of the goverment that started barely 5 months ago. In that context I did not work today, by what I had some free time for my own interests, and I was thinking on using it to fix some of the several problems I have with my mobile phone using PostmarketOS. It was then that I accessed Mr. Oliva’s text through Techrights, during my morning coffee. And the first thing I felt reading it was a deep disconfort.

    Mr. Oliva tells us that, between enshittified software and free software, the choice is not hard. It’s the very article’s title, and it alone should scandalize anyone with minimal knowledge in the matter between its implicit lack of touch with objective reality and its close distance with hypocrisy, all that in a very light tone that even had the intention of being somehow funny. And this discourse wasn’t even in a divulgation context, with an auditorium strange to free software: it was for LibrePlanet, where most people use free software and knows its history and details. Considering that Mr. Oliva is a public and important figure inside the community, a referent, and also considering that I can very rarely participate in this kind of community events -because I have very little free time-, I immediately asked myself: is this the kind of stuff the community is talking about? Are this the discursive lines our references tell us to follow?

    No, Mr. Oliva, I’m afraid you’re deeply mistaken: choosing free software is hard. VERY hard. TOO hard, I dare say. And I have my serious suspicions that our leaders/references and the course of our communities has a lot to do with that. But let’s take a look at this argument by contrasting my context with your article.

The tip of the iceberg

    Mr. Oliva tells us about different types of software enshittification in different contexts, both historical and operational. Stuff we all know and hate like forced updates, software stores, remote policying, inability to go back to previous versions, and so on and so on. Please go read the full article, as in this regards is actually fruitful if you don’t know what we’re talking about here. I believe all of Mr. Oliva’s remarks are true: enshittification is a real phenomenon, he’s not the first one to mention it (as he adequately clarifies), and it’s an actual and important issue that we all need to pay attention to. That’s all fine, and the problem with his article of course is not there. The problem is how he talks about it, specially to force his interpretations as if it where some kind of “common sense”. So it’s important to take a look at his arguments.

    Let’s begin by this quote:

(…) It seems to me that it would be more advantageous to break that cycle, by choosing something that is not enshittifiable. When it comes to software, that means software that serves you, instead of being controlled by a third party, statically or dynamically, or that could lock you in. It means Software Freedom. (…)

    Really? “Software Freedom” protects us from enshittification? Just like that? That’s your argument?

    You see Mr. Oliva, that’s some tricky wording there. What “Software Freedom” are you talking about? Are you refering to the four freedoms, the GPL licence, and so on? This, basically? Because, let me tell you Mr. Oliva, that didn’t saved us from SystemD, PulseAudio, Gnome, Wayland, Snap/Flatpak/whatever, and lots and lots of other painful examples of people doing free software and aggressively pushing it into our lives as different kinds of “common sense” that rather sooner than later becomes de-facto standards: some of them based in the power their origin organization had over the GNU/Linux community, others using tactics like the ones Microsoft took from the illegal drugs market -a fake “it’s free, try it” first step, with later monetization in mind, while infecting the culture in the meantime-, others talking about the burdens of maintainance of previous software, others talking about the future in mobile devices… all “common sense”, even the drug-dealing stuff when you consider a profit point of view. All of that enshittified to the point of creating wars inside our own communities: from forks of forks of forks of Gnome since about 15 years ago all of them justified in “Gnome being enshittified”, to entire distros trying to avoid SystemD -emphasys on trying, not always succeding, which speaks volumes-. And what exactly did you mean by “[not] being controlled by a third party” in this context where RedHat or Debian or Canonical or whoever decide something and then we all need to adapt to it even against our will? Perhaps you weren’t talking about that kind of “Software Freedom”? If there is a way to be free from the problems of Free/Libre Software enshittification, please let us know Mr. Oliva, because we FLOSS people could really take a break from all of that crap we’ve been force-feeding on since more than a decade by now.

    The first problem with the article is that supposed “common sense” implied in its non-argumentation about FLOSS being unenshittificable, which is not “common sense” at all but rather an agenda. Telling people “FLOSS is unenshittificable” is an agenda related to some organization. SystemD, Wayland, those horrible container formats, and so on, were and are all agendas related to some organizations. This are all organizations with different interests in mind: economical, social, political, technical. The problem is not having agendas, which is something I encourage: the problem is telling bullshit to support such agendas. And half truths, without a proper context, are bullshit.

    This by itself alone seems nitpicking, so I’ll expand by giving proper context to such half truths, by constrasting such bullshit with my own story and experience, including my entrance by choice into the FLOSS world. However, as it’s most likely a long and boring text, you can skip all that personal context just jumping here.

The web

    I’m a programmer since the late 90’s, and back then we all knew there was this “linux” thing around but that was for some specialists and shit: real life day-to-day computing here in LATAM was done in DOS and Windows, so we all programmed MS stuff. Also, MS tools were cool: Visual Studio 5 and 6 were light years away from any other programming tool I ever had contact at that moment. It was easy, it was actually a pleasure to use such tools, and we were very productive with them. I made lots of amazing software in Visual Basic, from document managing stuff to online games automation by speech recognition or even full system remote control backdoors. It was fun, engaging, and it gave me a future in the work market that the rest of my family didn’t had -all of them without ever stepping into a campus in their life-. And I could have all of that by sheer force of will: all of it was self-taught using MSDN CDs and free time.

    It was also the time internet went online, and I was really into HTML and JavaScript. You see, it was the future: I’m talking about the time where you could buy homepages. With ActiveX I could do amazing web stuff, but I wasn’t so sure about it given that it didn’t worked the same in Netscape, and for cross-browser stuff had to deal with Java plugins, which in turn required better software training and using less productive tools… so I stick to JavaScript. DHTML promised so much! But I was smart, so instead of popular tools like some version of DreamWeaver for web, I used Visual Interdev to learn about the internals of every DOM available object by its fantastic “intellisense”. After a year or so using that, ActiveX and MS web stuff wasn’t that bad at all.

    If you take a look at what was the situation in Argentina at the turn of the millenium -when I was 18 years old-, you’d know that we were all really looking for a job here, and I was not the exception. Lots of stories comes to mind about that, but let’s focus on the one that matters here and now: I actually went to get my first non-gag job in the IT industry, as a web programmer. And let me tell you: I felt I knew my shit. I did some web works that were advanced even by today standards. Stuff like an entire desktop alternative to the one Windows offered by the time, using its IE+ActiveX integration to run custom software while rendering a web page as a desktop background taking designs from futuristic videogames with animations and interactions, adding speech synthesis and recognition to it, and some updatable database with stuff I frankly can’t remember anymore but DAMN it was cool and I was so proud of myself: my whole ambition was to make an entire 3D desktop that could load Doom or Quake maps, transforming the concept of “the desktop” into a virtual world with the “windows” being just another thing to interact to, but of course never got that far.

    I was so into the web possibilities, that I even had an epiphany once about the web. I realized the way the web was maturing, so fast and so powerful, there would be a time not long into the future when any UI would be possible to be done with only web pages. Basically, just replace your shell with a browser, and that’s it. If that turns out to be possible, then there would be no need for computers to be that powerful anymore as videogames were already demanding, as everything would be processed on remote servers: that would mean very cheaps computers for everyone, everywhere. So I had this plan: I was going to make a new operating system that would directly boot into internet, and a web browser would be its shell. And even pick a name for it: “Internet Operating System”, or “IOS”. So I convinced my family that buy me an assembler book in order to learn how to make an operating system. Didn’t past much longer from a “hello world”, and that was that.

    Whatever, eventually the web job interview came, and I was SO confident. And then they gave me a computer to complete an exam, but inside of it had no Visual Interdev or anything Visual Studio related but notepad, and at its side a very fat book instead of MSDN CDs. None of it was a big problem: I really knew my stuff. I was already in the “made with notepad” movement, so not having an editor was normal for me, and the interview tasks were all stuff I already knew how to do: some onclicks, some forms, some styling magic, all the basics. Yet, it had to be cross-browser. And my stuff wasn’t working well in Netscape. I loved Netscape, it was my browser of choice, and usually did my stuff cross-browser, so I was also familiar with it. But from some time to that point I switched to MS stuff in order to do weird dynamic webs like the one I told before, so I was kinda rusty on crossbrowseriness. And so my stuff kept working badly in Netscape. For those who weren’t there: there wasn’t a “javacript console” like the ones we have now. Netscape had a “console” of sorts, but I didn’t understand the messages it told me, and didn’t had much interaction to offer either; and IE didn’t even had anything close to a console without some added plugin not yet invented by that time. No, we debugged web pages by adding lots of alert clauses back then. And I had trouble even with my alerts.

    So time passed, minutes turned to hours, and I could not make it work on Netscape. I wasn’t familiar with the usage of the big fat book for documentation, had no proper training in programming so lots of concepts were out of my reach, and so the book made things worse. I even began to panic at some time, which obviously didn’t help. There was extra stuff going on that added stress to the situation, because the Argentina’s economical situation wasn’t the only thing pressing my head and soul to get that job: I needed to get away from my bad family environment so needed the job to pay a rent, I was in love with some girl that also happened to live near that place I was about to get a job, and other details of different nature going on in my life. It was a dream job. At the end of the afternoon I didn’t fully finished the exam, Netscape never worked well with my code, and went home with a broken heart knowing I wasn’t going to get that job.

    When I got back home, I took a look at what the actual hell happened. And quickly I was reminded of some nasty detail I forgot during the exam. As part of the browser wars, MS implemented its own broken version of JavaScript, named JScript. It looked the same, but had some “upgrades” and “improvements” that made it “easier to use” and “easier to read” and stuff like that. One of those marvels of software engineering was direct DOM access by naming convention: in JScript, instead of something like “document.getElementById(‘thing1’).property”, I could just do “document.thing1.property”. So much better! So intuitive! And so non-standard at all, by which it silently failed in Netscape or gave hard to understand messages in its console, given that it was syntactically proper JavaScript but pointing to nowhere. I’m not sure if JScript also was case-insensitive, by which I believe was also bitten that time. Whatever the case, had I just stick to proper JavaScript it would have worked out great, and maybe I would have gotten that job.

    That was the first time I was angry at Microsoft. It was the first time I felt it was not my friend. Before that, I LOVED Microsoft products. But after that experience, I never EVER again deviated from proper/native/actual/vanilla JavaScript, and actually used Netscape as my testing ground, which in turn got me away from ActiveX and Visual Studio and everything else MS had to offer for the web.

    First important note: take a look at how the browser wars impacted on real people’s lives. Not getting a job in times of crisis is no joke, and we’re talking about really serious crisis here: we had 6 presidents in a week, we had riots, looting, people killed in the streets, we had 20%+ unemployment, we had a totally destroyed industry, we had several different currencies in different regions… the country was about to dissolve. Imagine the kind of stuff families were talking about in everybody’s homes: crying and screaming was usual, nobody knew what to do, parents couldn’t guarantee a plate of food for tomorrow or even tonight to their children… I was dealing with a total absence of future and my programming skills were the salvation, then my salvation failed me. Have you any idea of how that feels? The levels of distress, of anguish it involves? The powerlessness? I was 18, and so dealing with lots of emotional stuff just by my age, but no matter if you were 40 or 50 let me tell you: suicide was always on the table. In my case I survived of course, and got away from the 90’s with only alcoholism. But that kind of stuff is absent from the usual browser wars tale: they talk about Microsoft vs Netscape, about who won and who lost and why, about business or even technical stuff, but almost never about what it did to people.

    So life went on, and at least on the web I learned my lesson and took a step away from Microsoft embracing standards. I was one of those people loudly fighting against Internet Explorer with nails and teeth: not because of any clear ideology, but because of experience. It can happen again I said, it can happen to you I told other people. Yet that other people didn’t care, and truth is we all kept using Windows. Funny thing: I stayed in Windows 2000, and then used Server 2003, but never XP. XP looked like a fraud to me, as it had little to no difference to w2k (if you disabled its new UI styling), it used more resources, and with no benefit whatsoever. It was already a known issue that version changing for the version changing (since w95) but using more resources: “fatware” was called back in the day. Whatever, IE6 stayed there for a long time, and with everybody using Windows it was a de-facto standard. Also, I knew very well the w2k internals, so was comfortable with it: knew how to tune up to my liking, had my “portable software” in a booteable CD (back then it was just “software”), and felt safe against an already out of control malware scene by not using IE and not installing crap.

    I tried a “linux” back in 2001. As the country collapsed, computer sellers couldn’t afford to legally include Windows in the computers, and so computers started to be sold with “linux”. Can’t remember which distros. Tried a redhat CD that came with a magazine. It was kinda cool, having multiple environments to choose from, and having a package manager: I was all about tuning the system and changing the visual environment in Windows. But didn’t had any games nor MS Office, and even if it had Netscape truth is most web required IE already, so the appeal faded fast. Also, it was cool to make work my 14400 bauds modem with “linux”, but I also broke it somehow by triggering some background connect/disconnect infinite loop that didn’t even faded away after a reboot, so went back to w2k.

    I kept doing gigs and small -but amazing- programming stuff until I could finally get a formal IT job in 2006. I was so happy! I was already in my first year studying Linguistics, and could pay for a room with my salary, so finally lived my own. And went to linguistics because A) I still was in that “self-taught is enough” mindset regarding programming, B) I wanted to mix programming with narrative -science + arts- to explore my own theories about artificial intelligence -I was the only one I knew with fantasies about that-, and C) I wanted to be with people with a kin mindset, looking for having both friends and sex adventures. So I was a strange guy talking about technology and programming in a place where people was mostly thinking about books and social science, or even a strange guy talking about books and social science where people was talking about technology and programming.

    Whatever the case, I was fighting every fight I had the chance to make the web browser-agnostic, and to make it more and more powerful as I knew it could be done. It was the “web 2.0” age, before HTML5. By that time there was Firefox in web, Google already was dominant in search engines and avant-garde in web tech -Google wasn’t a variable during the browser war-, and it explicitly supported Firefox against IE6, so there was some momentum. Yet nothing Google made at the time was as revolutionary for web development as was something else that happened in Firefox’s ecosystem: Firebug. And for those who doesn’t know what I’m talking about: it’s the birth of what we know now as “developer tools” in any current browser. The pressure against IE6 was strong enough that MS had to do something, and that’s how IE7 saw the light. But no matter, we the “web 2.0” fighters did a good fight in order to make the web interoperable -thank you jquery! we still love you!-, big players also had their grudge with Microsoft, and by 2007 the mobile phones were changing dramatically, so stuff like home bankings and goverment agencies started to had their websites compatible with Firefox. Google eventually created Chrome by 2008 IIRC, and it took a while but by that time most of our common stuff could be made through websites somehow. The web, finally, was no longer the future.

The desktop

    2006 was also the year I saw another glimpse of “the future”. Some partner at my job tried a live version of some linux distro as his work computer, but it had something very important to show us all: this guy installed Compiz, and we could all testify the dark and unspeakable power of the cube desktop. People was all “OH!” and “WOW!” and “INCREDIBLE!”, but I was just like “meh”: I was already thinking about a 3D desktop many years before that, and my idea was much better. Yet, I confess it had its appeal though.

    And as much as I loved the web and worked with it and for it, the desktop status-quo was solid as stone. So we all kept using Visual Studio, given that programming in any non-Microsoft language had absolute no benefit over MS tools for MS desktops. Maybe Java, just for doing some web applet? Nah… Java was very ugly compared to flash on that front. However, there was a struggle with Java in the desktop too.

    By 2001 or 2002, can’t remember well, Microsoft stopped its support for “Visual J++” -their JScript-esque approach to Java-, and actually also to the whole Visual Studio 6, which by its next version changed dramatically: it was the birth of .NET. I was a self-taught Visual Basic programmer, so I had some trouble gasping the rigorous OOP guidelines both Java first and .NET later pretended us to understand and to implement. It felt overbureucratic and dogmatic, forcing us to do lots of extra work without any clear benefit. Also, it all reeked like fatware, like change for the sake of change again -remember the tiresome jump between W98, ME, 2K, and XP-, and that was a shared feeling between both workers and bosses around here. Add to that the economic crisis, where we couldn’t afford to be changing computers just like that, and you have a perfect ecosystem for technological conservatism: we all kept using VB6 for as long as we could, forever even if we could get away with it.

    But of course we didn’t had a very strong voice in the course of that from Argentina in the grand stage of things, and other stuff also kept changing versions: from players and their codecs to database engines, also going through the never stable MS Office, and lots of other stuff. The pressure to consider .NET was intense year after year. And by 2008 I had enough: it was about the third or fourth time Microsoft pretended to change the way we should connect to a database -from ADO to DAO to then something else I really don’t have intention to remember-, and this time I had to change computer in order to just install the newer Visual Studio. By that time the web made already normal to also use ssh -putty, of course- against some hosting server where you had php and mysql, so tired of Microsoft forcing me to change the way I was supposed to work I finally took another look at that “linux” thing.

    Truth is, my main problem was with my ability to keep my custom libraries working on newer use cases. I was productive using the code that I was keeping and improving since the 90s, and by that time even other people depended on it. And this is something that needs to be carefully considered, as it’s a two-sided coin. On one side, I had to keep my job to pay the bills and sustain my life, so I couldn’t suddenly just not-know how to do my job, while my software had to also work on newer operating systems and/or using different newer technologies. And on the other side, other people also depended from that in some way: my coworkers, my family, and so on.

    For example, I remember a coworker of mine was pregnant, and she had to take a license, and I can’t remember if this was also during an avian flu epidemic here, but the thing is I made the job’s systems accesible remotely and so we could do our job from our homes by just installing our custom software tools that I myself was developing. It was very rare back in the day to work from home, but it was possible thanks to my work and my ideas, so good stuff could happen to me and to others thanks to that.

    So, second important note: checking out “linux” wasn’t about “linux” at all. The thing was that Microsoft made me face job insecurity. It wasn’t about liking or not liking their newer tech: it was about sustaining my life, and even the life of others, and Microsoft constantly trying to get his newer stuff in the way. This is, again, as it happened before with that first job interview during the browsers war, nothing trivial at all. And so choosing to take a look at “linux” was a BIG DEAL. I was feeling SO BAD by that time that actually took a look at the alternatives to Microsoft instead of keep being conservative about it. I actually COULD NOT change to “linux”, as I was not productive using it: that change was a project more than a simple change, trying to eventually stop depending on Microsoft to live, and a project I was doing with more desperation rather than passion or knowledge.

    The big deal about “linux” back then was that it suppossedly worked better in older hardware -no need to change my pc-, it had more stable jobs -and better paid-, and had some tech still in use kinda older than myself -which is actually a selling point when you’re tired of dealing with constant forced changes-.

    So I had a CD writter, and downloaded some LIVE ISOs to try out. The best one was Dyne:Bolic. It was my distro of choice. It was beautiful, had great software installed, and worked fantastic. Except that out of the live cd, the network didn’t worked, for reasons I wasn’t able to diagnose. Today I would fix that myself for sure, but back in the day it was a huge problem. So eventually also tried Ubuntu, it was kinda uglier but close enough, and this time the network worked fine. So I started to do my web stuff in my home with Ubuntu, and that way was able to get familiar with the lots of details about changing from Windows to “linux”. Never found on any Dyne:Bolic community how to fix that network problem, but Ubuntu communities were massive in comparison, and had full of tutorials and people available to make the path to “linux” quite pleasant.

    It took a while though. Job’s was one thing, but there was also videogames. Wine was actually working quite well back then, but didn’t had the community muscle it has today, and so making stuff work could take some weeks or months. Then you had the drivers issue: linux gpu drivers sucked at the time. So had dual boot for a few years.

    So tried to implement “linux” in my job’s office. It would had the benefit of being free (as in gratis), and I believed that could make non-linux-available stuff with wine as I already made with a game or two. Also, tunning stuff with wine require some windows knowledge, which I actually had, so I even helped some people online. I felt pretty secure about being handling this “linux” thing. And what happened was that my boss hated it. He had this own business where I worked, but he also had some IT director position in some big argentinian enterprise, where they where “Microsoft Partners”. That guy was the first person anti-linux I ever met. That and other stuff going on eventually led me to change jobs to another one where I could work with linux.

    By 2010 I did that change. The interviews for the new job were about web techs, and I knew what I was talking about. They asked me if I had any trouble working with “linux”, and I said it was exactly what I was looking for. So I got the job, and it immediately got harder than I expected: It wasn’t just “linux”, it was entirely working over ssh. We had some dumb and minimal terminals where we could not install anything, and had to connect to an ssh environment where we would all use vi to work with perl. I was using “linux” for a year or two, but nothing like this: I was using “desktop linux”, and expected to work the same. But here I didn’t even had the ability to install some GUI text editor or browse files: it was natural for me to use console as I grew up with DOS, but I just didn’t knew the software this time; I didn’t even knew how to search a file in this systems without using some GUI. Had Firefox to test some web stuff, and a micro pc to connect to a windows server remote desktop if I ever had to test something in IE. I also had to be very disciplined in my programming: proper code guidelines, commit guidelines for a subversion server, had to write tests -a thing never did before-, had peer reviews… I knew web alright, but that was something else for me entirely. I even barely knew Perl at all outside of some tutorials.

    It was horrible. I lasted six excruciating months where my self-steem was completely demolished and had to desperately change jobs again, this time using windows and all the old tech I was really productive with. It was about both economic and spiritual survival.

    I kept using Ubuntu in my home, getting better and better at its inner details and learning all I could, hoping someday I would be able to have “a linux job”. Had a netbook by that time, and Ubuntu Netbook Remix was quite cool in it, so by the time Canonical launched its “convergence” initiative with Unity DE and Ubuntu Touch, I was fully engaged in the idea.

The mobile

    From 2007 to 2010 my job was helping make multimedia stuff for mobile phones: I was the programmer, making both administrative and operative software tools, while the rest of the people in the office were mostly multimedia fellas. But that’s LATAM mobile phones we’re talking about: we get a zoo of all kinds of little monster devices here, all incompatible with one another, all of them unwanted in the rest of the world. And we’re talking about pre-smartphone era. So you have NO IDEA the kind of mess it was.

    Here’s an example. We had to produce some files for some device I’m glad I can’t remember its particulars. But this was an audio file format exclusive for that device -and no other device-, and we had this typical windows GUI converter software from an input format to that particular output format. It was the only program in the entire world that allowed us to do that. We had it legally: it was bought instead of “just downloaded”, it wasn’t “freeware” or “shareware” either, and we had support for it. So one day can’t remember what happened but for some reason had to change something in that output format: we couldn’t get it to work in some situation, and needed to solve it ASAP. That software was working great for years, so it wasn’t the problem -I think it was a very specific version of the supposedly-same device-. Whatever, we wrote about it to the guy that made the software. He was in Australia or something: pretty far away from us. And the guy told us that he was unable to help us, because he had left programming and was now doing a life dedicated to surfing. We wrote him again about if, in that case, he could just send us the program’s code so I could patch it. We never had another reply from him.

    It was so bizarre that actually ended up being funny even when we were about to lose our customer for that -and you know what that means for a small business in a niche area-. But it’s very representative of the chaos it was dealing with all those infernal devices. And that was just software: hardware cables and drivers and spare parts were another dimension of daily suffering.

    In that job I did almost nothing web related. I was doing mostly automation: forcing operative rules to ensure our output’s quality, centralizing administrative data, dealing with all kinds of metadata and multimedia formats, and trying to make all of that work together and easy to use for non-IT people. This were mostly musicians and audio technicians, and what we were dealing the most was with ringtones: music companies sent us their original files, and we had to make different cuts of their tracks for ringtones -sometimes the chorus, sometimes some other part of the song like the intro-, as well as converting them to a lot of formats for different platforms. Selling music online wasn’t what we know today, and listening to it was a problem in itself. But working some years with it introduced me not only to the nasty details behind the multimedia formats -beyond what windows codec packs already did-, but also the music industry’s: we had to deal with “intellectual property” regulation too.

    You see, there were different legally mandated unique ids for every combination of cuts from a song and their respective formats. So it wasn’t just about discerning “chorus” from “intro”: a midi file for the song’s chorus had an ID, and the same chorus in MOD format had another ID, and so the 8 and 16 bit versions of the same audio formats, and so on and so on for every format, all of that for the other cuts too. We didn’t make the IDs: they came in a spreadsheet along with other fields. Those IDs were used to later pay “the artist”. But then you had “creator” and “performer”, whose names may not be always available, they may be written very different from file to file, they may be a band’s song but later played by some solist from that band, it usually was a cover song, it wasn’t strange at all that the actual creator was already dead, the spreadsheet’s fields usually didn’t match between IDs for the same song, and so on and so on and so on. Also, for midis and monophonic stuff it was usual that our musicians had to actually just make such files: not cutting and/or converting an input media file, but creating it from scratch, which added an strange gray area between “performer” and “creator”, and of course this fellas ever saw a single penny from that. The thing is, this system was extremely imprecise by default, and we had to do our best to even make sense of it. It was a chaos all in itself without the need of the incompatible mobile phones in the middle.

    And this was the era when “the smartphone” was born. I remember the whole iphone thing happening, and we were supposed to pay attention to it because it was our thing. I hated Apple for being the same crap we all know but refurbished for rich-ish people and adding extra problems for workers like myself when it was about software compatibility and multimedia formats, so I wished for it to die in a dumpster fire. Yet, it was finally a quasi-formal pocket computer -even when it wasn’t sold like that-, with proper web browser -instead of WAP browsers or tiny unusable screens-. So, my vision of about a decade before was becoming a reality: with the web mature enough, computers no longer needed that much power as everything can be remotely processed, so no need for big beefy computers anymore. Apple wasn’t particularly in sync with my approach to the idea -as I expected “no longer need beefy computers” to be translated as “cheaper devices”, not fetichized and expensive ones-, but the idea was there, working its way to reality. It was deeply ironic when I found out that they even named “iOS” their operating system -which, by the time, didn’t even had the ability to copy and paste-. Whatever the case, that same year Android was announced, and it also came with the word “linux” attached to it, so it added mass to the pile of reasons to try out that “linux” thing again.

    Android ended up being quite crappy when compared to “desktop linux”, and to be frank I didn’t had the money to buy smartphones as if they were something either mandatory nor particulary useful, so I kept my old non-smart mobile phone which ran fine by me. I kept an eye in Ubuntu phone, but it wasn’t reaching Argentina any time soon, and didn’t had any spare phone (even less a compatible one) to try installing Ubuntu Touch in it, so I stayed away from mobile phone ecosystems. That was until Firefox OS came out in ~2014. That REALLY was the proper way of doing mobile phones: it was basically a standards-honoring web browser as a shell, interfacing with the kernel and some other OS APIs for permissions and hardware access, but every “program” was a zip file with html+js+css inside. That’s the way cheap, accessible, interoperable computing should have been done since years ago from that time already, and it was none other than Mozilla taking that front. Not even that, but their phones were low end: exactly what places like my country needed, and exactly what I needed to get into mobile phones; I was expecting this since the 90’s, when Microsoft integrated IE4 to their Windows desktop.

Politics

    By the 2001 riots, my generation was screaming “que se vayan todos” in the streets. It means something like “everyone must leave”, and it’s refering to the politicians. All politicians from all parties were seen as corrupt incompetents, and politics itself was suffering a deep devaluation and total lack of credibility. “Que se vayan todos” felt like revolutionary, but it was actually synergic with the now decrepit neoliberal ethos -back then worldwide hegemony after the fall of the USSR-.

    Of course being 18 myself, having no education at all in politics -or anything else whatsoever-, coming from a poor uneducated family, and growing up in poor neighbourhoods where all families were like mine, I could not care less for politics: media said all politicians were corrupt mindless useless pieces of garbage, except for some very serious people -all right-wingers- that said again and again we had to get a job to fix all of our problems and had to suffer one way or another with or without a job, so politics was kinda predictable and boring. What I had in mind was having a happy life -sex, love, parties, and adventures with my friends-, and fantasizing possible futures like all the stuff I was writting before about software and hardware and stuff. Being rich was some kind of social mandate, but I confess I would have been satisfied with just being right, specially when it came to discussing stuff with grown-ups that never seemed to understand what was important in life from my point of view, and that always seemed to repeat whatever stupid crap media already said first. So I guess I was already an intellectual somehow.

    But 2001 was special. We were all furious: scared for sure, not knowing what to do, close to panic even, but unanimously furious. Being 18 helps in that regard. And when the total system crash came, grown-ups told us lots of bullshit as explanations. They talked a lot about corruption, yet again and again it was never their fault to put that corrupt people in charge; some of them talked about better times, all of those quickly turning into all kinds of negationism trying to explain how everything went from close to heaven to an absolute FUBAR situation -note we had things on our recent history like a genocide just about 20 years before that time-; most of them had to do some retorical contortionism in order to try to get away from the blame, and there even were the ones trying to blame “the youth” -being “lost” by rock music and violent videogames and stuff like that-. All utter unsustainable bullshit. My mind was a mess back then, but let me tell you: the most objetive, unobjectionable thing I felt, and that I defend up until today without flinching, is that I was innocent. 2001 was not my fault. I was a victim there.

    So, being the grown-ups a bunch of idiots, and having to deal with a messed up reality by myself, having a drink was pretty much the best way to pass the day. Thank god for my friends or life would have been a total hell. And that was Tuesday here in the 2001 era. That, and a 20%+ unemployment rate -and when you had a job you didn’t preciselly had a life sustaining income-, was the context when I was trying to learn stuff in order to get economic autonomy first, and any kind of a future later. That was the context where all the previous tale about web, and desktop, and mobile stuff, started.

    By 2003 we had Nestor Kirchner as president. He lost the presidential election to Carlos Menem, the 90’s neoliberal president and primary culprit of the 2001 crisis. But this time the election was fragmented, Menem had about 25% IIRC while Kirchner had about 22%, and so for the first time Argentina had a ballotage, wich Kirchner won because Menem deflected. But lets take a note about grown-ups being idiots, voting Menem again after having the guy 10 years in charge led the country to the trash bin. Whatever the case, good news was everyone else but that 25% was totally against the guy, and so he ran away from the ballottage.

    And this Kirchner guy had a keynesian mindset. That means forcing redistribution and employement rates from the State, against the previous free trade and deregulation neoliberal ethos. It doesn’t give you any proper life, but it’s certainly light-years better than neoliberalism for everybody except the 0.1% richer -and maybe also those 25% lunatics living their right-wing ideological virtual reality-. Yet, it was more complicated than just “keynesianism”.

    For starters, Argentina may had a rough turn of century, but the rest of South America wasn’t precisely disneyland either. We had Operation Condor in the 70’s, installing neoliberalism all around us by fire and blood. Our societies were demolished by the time the cold war ended, and Chile coup against Allende was actually instrumental in spreading the neoliberal ideology all around the world: Chile was the first neoliberal country -in direct and violent opposition to also having the first democratically ellected socialist goverment-, and for decades was shown on TV as an example of progress because of their macroeconomical numbers disregarding its inequality levels. But by 1998 there was Hugo Chavez in Venezuela fighting that “end of history” claimed after the USSR collapse, and then other players came all around South America with all sorts of explicit anti-neoliberal and anti-colonial agendas. So the 2000s was suddenly a Patria Grande oriented decade.

    And in such a context, beyond keynesianism and internal market, Kirchner’s agenda was to revalorize politics. He did lots of gestures to distance himself from previous neoliberal spaces, including bold moves like removing a totally rotten Supreme Court with only a 22% aproval rate, continuing the trials against the 70’s military junta, and even refused the FTAA in the face of Bush.

    As I said before, I couldn’t care less, and had my reasons. I grew in a neoliberal world, so “if I got a job it was all because of my own skills, that I made all by myself and nothing but myself”, and everything else was the same: Thatcher was right, society was all about individuals. Not that I knew shit about Thatcher, but if I did I would have agreed with her. What Thatcher and her friends didn’t tell you is that, when you realize you’re not some kind of super-hero nor a world champion at anything, and you begin to suspect that maybe the good stuff happening to you wasn’t all about yourself being neither special nor right at all, then you feel like a useless piece of crap while trying to keep believing “your own ideas”.

    Yep… realizing our own idiocy doesn’t feel good at all. It’s very painful actually. And as I started to suspect that Microsoft maybe wasn’t my friend back in the browser wars, when I saw my family had stuff like better food and better health and several of them actually got a job, and stuff was actually more stable and riots went away and life was kind of livable, maybe politics could have had something to do with that. But even with all the empirical evidence of the world, it was difficult to turn away from “my own ideas”. Nope, empiricism wasn’t enough: I needed something else.

    What I was lacking after being raised in a neoliberal world was some basic human empathy: a thing I luckily depeloped after years of therapy, having some good friends that actually cared about me, loving some people without knowing how to deal with that, and realizing how hard could life become as one tries to just live it. The less alone you are, the more important politics become; you could call that “the inverse Thatcher equation”. So being mostly alone in my ways of life didn’t helped to get a better contact with the social reality around me.

    Around 2005 I got a job attending a friend’s brother business, with that money I was able to rent a room close to my university of choice, and so I was also able to begin my lingüistics studies, all the same year. And I was SO HAPPY!. It was all very precarious, but… what wasn’t, really? We had 2001 four years before that, and all kinds of trouble everywhere, so having a job and renting a room near the faculty was an absolute triumph. That feeling lasted some time, until I realized university was much more difficult than my previous schools, and what I previously considered as being smart there it felt more like being close to a neanderthal: around the other people studying with me my behaviour felt unsophisticated and primitive, my aspirations about technology and artificial intelligence felt totally disaligned with my peers, and they were so much smarter than me! University was full of people coming from a lot of other places, many of them not just not-poor but even actually rich, and their cultural baggage was so big compared to mine… I felt a big cultural shock.

    It took me years to adapt to that. I struggled between not being culturally up to the task, as well as trying to keep my jobs: by 2006 I was already working for a big enterprise as a programmer, eventually went from that room to a proper appartment, as years passed I began to have more responsabilities to handle, and studying lingüistics was always a steep demand. But I kept trying. Being working all day and then studying for being up-to-date with my jobs techs and problems and just then being able to begin studying for my very complex and disconnected from day-to-day basis lingüistics courses was, at the end of the day, very alienating. I had to see my friends less and less, had some love interests and it was also frustrating when not painful, job ridden stress was common, and I dealt with all that mostly by drinking alcohol.

    But it was in the university I finally had a proper contact with politics. There was all kinds of activisms there, and eventually found my way into a group I felt I could be useful. You see, we had to deal with lots of texts there. Many of them were expensive, many didn’t have available editions in any market and had to find used volumes by luck, and so we studied by photocopies of photocopies of photocopies coming from the 80’s to our time. It was a mess. But there was a small group of young people trying to build a digital library, for the students and by the students, by digitalizing -and OCRing if possible- and uploading all of our courses texts and have a proper index and search engine, so we could download all. It was a mix of Intellectual Property, access to knowledge, and R+D into library tech, all in the same activism. This people were really something, but they weren’t programmers, and I was. I was actually in the same page as them: I believed in the same principles they were trying to push into society, and also had some ideas about it all. But it was really energizing that my own experiences in the software, multimedia, and IP fields were actually really valuable for them, even fascinating. For the first time, me being rare was actually a happy thing. But also I think that was the first time I felt “a valued member of a community”.

    By that time I was already a web expert, but I was also using Ubuntu, and knew my way into all kinds of problems with computers. They were so surprised I was actually able to made ad-hoc software! Just like that, in front of them! And I was surprised of all the amazing work they already had been doing without knowing mostly anything about computers but using some software. They already had thousands of digitalizations, most of them made by hand by several students and recopilated by using tech like web forums and free storage websites. We quickly became some kind of elite group everybody heard of and loved: we gave free texts to anyone.

    By being part of that group I had my firsts contacts with Free Software as a political organization. There was the Via Libre foundation with Beatriz Busaniche doing lots of activities, as well as all kind of weird groups of all sizes dealing with all kinds of problems: from communal radios to people fighting to save pumpking seeds passing through medications legislations or international women organizations. And there was also us, all talking as equals. This people also loved us for doing the right thing with books. It was very strange for me, but even then it was actually a happy thing.

    Between “linux” and getting away from Microsoft was that I found Techrights online. First searching for this or that about Microsoft sucking at something, during my first steps back in 2007 or 2008, but then it started to show up every day in my newer searches about “gnu” or the FSF, and suddenly I was recommending it to everybody: “the people making this website are really well versed and organized”, I remember saying, “they must have a pretty big organization behind”.

    And it was in those contexts I met RMS for the first time. I believe it was 2010 already. He came to Argentina and gave some talks, and given that we were somehow close to the organizers we ended up having dinner after the talk: everybody orderer pizza, but RMS prefered some pasta. And, man… it was a weird talk. He said stuff like that it’s wrong for us in Argentina to have a unique ID per every argentinian, because that’s a database that gives too much power to the State and to any rogue agent stealing the DB. And that was with a right-winger senator sit and smiling at his side. Bizarre. I get it, I already knew about databases and what to do with them -unlike the politicians listening to the talk-, but dismantling our public ID system was… good for what, exactly? It was clear RMS was all around freedom up to any tiny remote corner he could mine it in order to raise awareness. Weird guy. But he was one of the good guys, so it was fine.

    Whatever, that matched the same time I struggled to survive in my “all linux” job, the one that didn’t end well. And at the same time, politics quickly became quite toxic when it wasn’t about just being nice with people and doing nice things. That year came out Conectar Igualdad (“connecting equality”, a goverment plan to give every kid in the country a netbook for free) for example, and RMS called it “Conectar a Maldad” (“connecting to evil”) because the netbooks had dual boot with Windows and Ubuntu, and then we suddenly had to defend Free Software and RMS against all the progressives in this country as well as the right-wingers calling us communists and pirates.

    Oh, but that wasn’t even the beginning. Then RMS began to talk against SIBIOS, telling everybody that he will not come back again to Argentina until that evil system was shut down. Then again he actually came back, and when somebody asked him about the SIBIOS argument he just said that found a way in a frontier where he didn’t needed to check in so then he could come. So, it wasn’t about SIBIOS but about he being tracked himself? Some years already passed by that time, and in the meantime RMS and others were again and again and again talking shit about Canonical because Ubuntu didn’t had all the freedom it should, and it seemed that if I wasn’t using some obscure distro running in some even more obscure and inaccesible hardware then I was a fool giving away my freedom.

    That kind of stuff was no accident: it was totally normal in the Free Software ecosystem, from the top at RMS’s chair down to the bottomless pit of places like “linux gaming”. Gnome was great according to RMS: no matter somehow it had a dozen forks and holy wars were ravaging communities while their devs behave like assholes, it was fine because it’s free software. Systemd? No problem: it’s free software, and so it’s ethical. While everybody was discussing -jockingly or not- about the future of desktop linux, computers were less and less in use and suddenly everybody had a “smartphone”: devilish devices aparently only useful for tracking people and nothing else, specially if you asked RMS. And in the same decade news went from trash to septic giving us from literal terraplanism to people like Trump as presidents: but just ignore all that internet media stuff and those mobile devices because it’s bad for your privacy, go get some absolutely-total-free hardware with holy freedom respecting software, and that’s basically all you need to consider about technology in society. Freedom, Privacy, that’s it. Even when our champions of old like Mozilla took the fight and made interoperability possible between mobile and desktop and old computers with newer computers, and at the same time all of it being easy to program and using langages that already had millions of programmers all around the world with also millons of libraries already existing and working (not putting workers in a situation of brutal change, but on the contrary caring about them), and all of it with third world countries in mind, and simplyfying distribution by just putting some files inside a zip and that’s all you need, no sir, that was also bad: because Mozilla was receiving money from Google, and mobile phones are a distraction and an evil, and the web is also evil because is “javascript encumbered” and “has DRM”, there was evil javascript because it was obfuscated by minification, and so on and so on and so on.

    By the end of the decade, about 2017 or so, I had the chance to ask RMS about it all. He came to Argentina again, gave another talk, and I asked him in public why the FSF waited for projects like Ubuntu Touch or Firefox OS to die before putting “mobile OS” as a top priority in the FSF’s list (which they finally did). He kinda accepted the timeline I was describing, but in the end just told me that don’t use mobile phones if I could, and if I must just use Replicant as OS. Of course didn’t said a word about where to get any Replicant compatible device, let alone talked about any Replicant software. In the same night he told the audience about how he uses their friends and close people’s mobile phones from time to time, because that way “the system could not know it was him using it”, and so in such case it was fine. Didn’t took long after that to get cancelled in the US.

    I did my best that decade to spread awareness about free software, to actually make free software, and to try to keep on the right side of history by avoiding non-free options every single time I had the chance. Eventually left lingüistics and went for robotics: I got into all kinds of trouble trying to defend Free Software there. I didn’t used crap like Uber, avoided having sex by not using Tinder, up to this day didn’t ever sign up to any software that demanded a mobile phone number as ID (which includes whatsapp, the only way to contact some people and even institutions this days around here), all of that while trying to keep my job and my health and my family’s well being… And I’m still fighting for Free Software ideals and against all its enemies to this day. But FUCKING HELL, it is SO ALIENATING sometimes…

On bullshit

    Mr. Oliva, please take a good look at the next picture. That’s the face of “freedom” around here this days.

    That’s what you get by saying bullshit again and again about freedom.

    Which kind of bullshit? Mostly half truths, like saying that some politicians being corrupt and/or useless morons means that ALL politicians are the same, or even that politics itself is bad: “you need to break free from all of that”. Or doing the same operation with the figure of the State, then telling that all problems are fixed by private business mindsets and operations: taxes, rules, regulations… “free yourself” from all of that shit. Or saying that, because here and there are problems with some freedoms, then you have no freedoms at all and then you need to fight with nail and teeth against dictatorships, whatever that may be: sometimes it’s the goverment, other times is the leftist agenda, suddenly is the pope or some celebrity, etcetera. I feel confortable we all know about this by now: we had the seventies all around the world so every adult knows about it, and now we have Trumps and Bolsonaros and Orbans and Boris Jhonsons and so on and so on everywhere in the world, so Milei shouldn’t surprise anybody with a minimum contact with reality and more than 20 years old. Yet I can’t but facepalm every time I see another half-truths-based article inside the FLOSS community. Take a look at this for example:

Banking institutions have sought to automate customer service through websites and, more recently, through TRApps.
    https://www.fsfla.org/anuncio/2023-03-TRApps

    What these banks are saving in offices and staff, we customers are paying for with security and freedom. They are morally bankrupt.(…)

    Is this some kind of joke? This looks like some cynical brainwash attempt rather than any ethics argument. What the hell does “morally bankrupt” even means?

    Mr. Oliva: my family is dying because of poverty and diseases, and I need to send them money for food and medicines. This is not rethorics: it’s a fact I have to deal with. I have my mother and a sister with Lupus, a grandmother with Parkinson’s disease, an uncle with prostate cancer and cardiac problems, and my sister’s husband had a stroke about 3 weeks ago and he can’t work anymore, all while they also have two young children struggling to end the school instead of dropping it for some informal job. It’s a disaster situation, all while we have a neoliberal goverment with no interest in fixing any problem for any poor people anywhere but literally hoping they just die. So I have to step up. And I was using web-based home bankings since about 18 years, up until every idiot in the world began using “apps” that are not web based but native to some different operating systems than the ones I use and so since months ago I was forced to use an Android device in order to be able to do online banking transactions; can’t remember why I wasn’t able to use the Android emulator for this. During those 18 years long of using the web fully interoperable thanks to Mozilla and others, from the FLOSS community I’ve been told again and again that that’s bloated and unethical and “javascript encumbered” and that I’m a fool for giving my freedom away using obfuscated (minimized) javascript and that Mozilla was corrupt and/or idiotic, without ever take a single fucking look to what are my real choices or my real needs. Again and again insisting in some fantastic ideal situations that supposedly I’m going to be able to achieve by myself by just having the right mindset and doing some efforts and sacrifices: exactly the same bullshit neo-liberalism offers to the world since decades ago.

    Banking is actually a really good example, and that article is quite eloquent. Mr. Oliva quite lightly says that banks lays off people and closes offices, yet his argument implies it’s a moral problem regarding some technical detail in the FLOSS corporate agenda: “Banks are behaving evil by attempting against our software freedom”. Oh, you don’t say! We didn’t knew about it Mr. Oliva, thank you very much for telling us! Everybody spread the word, banks are not ethical entities! Yet, “morally bankrupt” or not, banks are obscenelly filling their pockets while entire countries like mine fall into a total FUBAR poverty scenario, and FLOSS people like me have no power at all to change anything and are forced to adapt to such unethical practices or literally face death: from ourselves, or from our loved ones. Let’s not even say a word about the people that lost their jobs by being replaced by software, as if we programmers had nothing to say about that, or as we didn’t also have an “ethical capital lost” by turning the blind side to the liiiiiiiitle fact that we’re part of the problem. No matter at all: all we need to think is “privacy” and “freedom”, exactly as the neo-liberal ethos mandates.

    I see you had your deal with banks and consummer protection, Mr. Oliva. I had mine too. And do you know where TRApps are widely used other than banking? Health services. During the pandemic, I actually did a legal claim against both, my private health service provider and my bank, in both cases because they were forcing me to use “apps” instead of a web site. They both had websites, but suddenly stopped working in favor of “apps”. Of course such “apps” are only for Android or iOS, and I have a PosmarketOS mobile phone, so it doesn’t even matter if I even want to use the apps: I had to change my device’s operating system to begin with. And in both cases, the bank and the health business, the “app” turn was justified by this word: “security”. There’s this thing called 2FA, and this other thing called OTP, and it involves some remotely generated token, and they don’t do that web so you need an app. Security is another whole deal of technocracy inside our field, as if somehow they knew better than ourselves how to be secure in our lives no matter the context. But let’s not lose focus and come back to the TRApps debacle. So I had this conciliation sessions with both “private business” representatives in the context of “consumer protection”, and I told them I demanded to be able to use web sites instead of “apps”. I said lots of things: “I never agreed to be forced to use Android or iOS”, “we have a national ID system which works fine and that’s more than enough for 2FA as it has been since its very existance”, “this was working fine before the pandemic began and you’re now forcing me to do extra stuff while we’re all in quarintine”, etc. Of course at the end any argument matter little and they can do whatever they want because I’m powerless in my “privacy” and my “freedom” and neither interoperability nor the web were part of the goverment agenda at all. So, the legal system failed me, and even if it didn’t I would be most likely still legally fighting for this stuff while not being able to use my operating system of choice in my devices of choice, all of them very “freedom respecting” and very useless in real life. So, I finally throwed the towel and for the first time installed an app for personal usage in my job’s providen mobile phone, which has Android, in order to be able to go visit a medic. And we’re talking about the time when you could die or kill some family member by just going to the streets.

    So, this organizations may be “morally bankrupt”, but they’re winning every single fight they fight while we have to use big chunks of our lives to just make things work even for them to be broken again the next week by another arbitrary system change. I understand the resistance rethoric and ethics, but that quickly turns into lunacy when others depend on us, when we’re not alone in life and we can’t just “fight for ourselves”. I never stepped into the FLOSS bandwagon “just for myself”: it was always about a better society, about “others too”. The “myself” part was about “what to do with what I know how to do”, “how to do my part”, but everything else was social, with others in mind. So I’m very tired of trying to turn my experiences into some kind of epic tale and tell people that making some software or hardware work in a marginal situation is the way to go, as it’s clearly unsustainable for the real people (like me) doing such efforts: I can’t tell anybody “FLOSS is great” if FLOSS involves dealing with all this crap. A different thing would be telling people “FLOSS needs help”, “FLOSS has things to say about tech problems”, “FLOSS people knows about what’s going on with your devices”, “we want FLOSS to be the way to go, join us”. That’s cool. But any of that can never, EVER, come with the word “easy” attached, or otherwise is utter bullshit.

    Now let’s look at your guidelines, Mr. Oliva:

Don’t overlook programs that are nominally freedom-respecting, but that are deployed in settings in which someone else controls them, such as WWWRApps, SaaSS, and even Tivoized or remotely-controlled CRApps and TRApps.

    Bear in mind that these programs are disrespectful of your freedom to begin with, so it would be naïve to expect them to be nice and not engage in enshittification. It’s an irresistible strategy for profit- or power-seeking suppliers, so when you device what you’re going to use to avoid enshittification, you have to think no so much of how attractive its honey looks like now, but how stinky it’s going to get later if you don’t stick to your freedom.

    See what I mean? Such unbearable bullshit…

    First of all, you speak of future stink yet you say nothing about the reality that every user already know all around the world: “in the future I’ll just switch to the next honey-looking stuff, and that’s it, I’ll adapt as I always do”. They know pretty well they’re mostly powerless the day they want to keep something but they have no idea how to do it, because they’re not fools but mentally sane people that knows their limits: “life goes on, no big deal”. It’s just some of us that get salty about this, and ever fewer of us wanting to do something about it. But is not about “us smart and them fools”, specially when we consider all the sacrifices we do in our path of FLOSS martyrdom.

    Secondly, you speak of FLOSS here as implying that it lasts forever, when clearly it doesn’t: FLOSS is also full of stinky rotten carcasses of “the next big next thing” and “the great standard” from decades ago. FLOSS dies because big business controls not “privacy” but “publicy”. FLOSS dies because most of us do it for ethical reasons, and every real-life economical turn we do gets bashed by idealists and purists: Canonical and Mozilla are fine examples, as the FSF let them die in a fire before recognizing their death signature projects (Firefox OS and Ubuntu Touch) as top 1 in importance. FLOSS dies when we keep telling each other half-truths as if they were context-free final words of wisdom. FLOSS dies with no FLOSS society.

    And thirdly, is not “an irresistible strategy for profit- or power-seeking”: it’s most likely a necesity for survival. It’s all nice and happy for us programmers to fantasize about all the free stuff we can do, all the systems and software we can design, all the ways we can change society or even do fun stuff with our skills, until money gets in the way and we need to pay the bills. We’re real people living in the XXI century, not some imaginary monks in a happy green field or snowy mountain with some idealistic computers that somehow we make work all by ourselves: we need infraestructure, we need a spare time we don’t have, we need to deal with real life non-computing problems too, all of that immediately breaking the idealistic bubble and facing us with survival problems.

    Yet, here are the closing words for that very LibrePlannet talk:

    After you flush and get rid of all the crap, deshittifying or disenshittifying your life, you may aim for the royal straight flush through eternal vigilance, to block future threats to your freedom.

    Keeping control of your computing is a choice of pushing enshittification away, and embracing freedom, by avoiding enshittifiable crap. Interestingly enough, that’s exactly what this man, shown in the picture modded by my daughter for a speech of her own when she was 13, has been recommending since some 4 decades before enshittification was coined. Maybe it’s time people start listening. As usual, Stallman was right.

    Now, even if all software we use is free, sometimes programs are abandoned and we can’t find a way to maintain them ourselves, sometimes hardware dies and we can’t find a replacement or port programs to run elsewhere. It’s also good to have backup plans, so cultivating programs and communities that can offer alternatives for features we rely on can help avoid making regrettable choices and getting back in the enshittification cycle.

    Unlike disenshittifying, that amounts to cleaning up after a (sewer) flooding, unshittifying to me is preventing the flood. If you succeed at that, and manage to live an upright ethical life, you can even become a saint like Saint IGNUcius.

    Oh, for the love of god… I don’t fucking want to fucking control fucking everyting I touch just because I have tech skills: I want to trust some organization (not “person“) that shows an acceptable-enough degree of skill and good faith to my liking, so I can be part of them and recommend their work to others. I don’t want to fucking have to do everything myself: it’s not epic, it’s demanding and tiresome and a titanic waste of my very little spare time; I began writting this in May and it’s August already because I have spare minutes daily.

    My family with some GNU/Linux distro in the computer I’ve sent them doesn’t control shit: they just trust me, and because of that they keep using GNU, period. They don’t have the technical knowledge to control anything about their computing, and that’s absolutely fine considering their context. Eventually they get and realize the benefits of software freedom as years pass and every else’s computers turn into crap while my family’s keep working as fine as day one, and as they have zero security problems, and as they see how business try to change that from them by pushing TRApps and they don’t like it. It’s a matter of time and experience, and not about instantaneus undestanding nor agreement of some ethical guidelines that somehow should be “the smart way to go”. That control bullshit is for a very little kind of users, and for some of us programmers, and that’s it: the rest of the world is thankfully different from us.

    But that’s me and my family, which is a very simple organization. Organizations tend to be very complex beasts, and to also change a lot over time: they will never be silver ethical bullets in an always changing context. And the four freedoms cannot be about “me being smart”, but about how we relate to technology. I want a healthy relationship with technology, both between myself and tech and between tech and society, and for that interoperability standards are the first step. Like the web, for example. Or like POSIX. Yeah, Stallman was right, of course, in lots of stuff: he’s truly visionary. Yet he also was very, very wrong, about a lot of other stuff, and keep trying to idealize him (or anyone else for that matter) just hurts the impression we give to any rational being paying attention to us: he’s a man with an agenda, and there are lots of figures like that. If you end up mixing our inability to choose software alternatives with the power big business have over us, and close that tale telling us that we can be some kind of saints by the magic of context-free ethics, then I’m sorry but I don’t want to have anything to do with FLOSS at all: it’s deeply discouraging. I don’t want you to tell bullshit to my family and other loved ones about ridiculous ethics that if they somehow listen to you would most likely end up in somebody dying a very stupid death. I’m not that kind of FLOSS champion you seem to try to describe Mr. Oliva, and certainly I never told anybody that I aspire to be any kind of saint: I’m ok with being good enough.

    All of which leads us to the general FLOSS agenda problem I wanted to talk. First of all: we need money to live, Mr. Oliva. Money is in the “morally bankrupt” banks, Mr. Oliva. The question is not about banks being ethical or not, but what the hell are we supposed to do about them: the financial system, top 1 worldwide problem since the seventies. And secondly but no less important, that other thing about people being laid off by being replaced by software, all while we actually make software. There’s nothing wrong about preaching ethics. But it’s absolutely unacceptable to try to even imply that context-free ethics is enough.

    I believe that quoted paragraph before about guidelines should have said something in the lines of “don’t decide yourself which software to use just by its functionalities, its easyness of use, its practicality: there are other serious things going on with software, talk to FLOSS people about how the software work and what are its inner and social problems; try to not feed a community of software that gives too much power to bad agents because consequences are a big deal”. Something like that let us talk to people without telling them they’re smart by using funny acronyms or asking them to repeat like parrots bullshit stuff about freedoms.

    And speaking about money and banks, can anybody please explain to me when are we going to discuss openly the obviously unsustainable relationship between FLOSS and capitalism? I dare say context-free ethics are always bullshit when speaking about real life, and I very rarely see capitalism mentioned in such preachings even when such ethical guidelines usually imply big things about our relationship with money. Or forget the so controversial and divissive money: let’s just begin with the current political institutions and all the phenomena they involve. I’m so fucking tired of FLOSS referents talking shit about the State, yet they always end up going to the legal system to sort stuff out: from the very GPL existance, to Mr. Oliva’s tale about consumer protection. Yeah, in case somebody has any doubt about it: the legal system, as well as many other currently irreplaceable parts of our societies, are the State itself. Yet, FLOSS referents keep taking distance from the State again and again, as if it were somehow our enemy as well as the big business (or even worst), and no matter rather sooner than later we’re gona need it involved in the problems we fight and on our side of the battle. The State is the modern (as in “modernity”) social institution that representative democracies and republics all around the world articulate in order to sustain the concept of rights. Did you see how little FLOSS referents use that word, and instead of it keep using the word “freedoms”?

    Mix the idealistic ethical hypocrisy with the forced distance from “rights” by using “freedoms”, and what you have is called liberalism: the people that all around the world seem to hate the State, glorify privacy and personal choices over almost anything else, and can keep talking for days about personal ethics but very rarely consider nor question current real-life capitalism as a context. Thankfully liberalism is old and diverse, so there are many ways of living it: I love Rorty’s take on it for example. Yet, today liberalism is a horrible problem thanks to neo-liberalism.

    Is it so hard to think about national states funding FLOSS projects as part of rights-granting initiatives? It’s only hard for people who abhor the figure of the State, or people so far away from real life politics that shouldn’t be listened to when talking about society. Is it so hard to think about inter-national governance institutions funding and standardizing software, and by that vector also enforcing compatible hardware? I see lots of folks talking shit about organizations like Mozilla becuse they “sold out”, yet rarely see anybody talking about how to solve that problem: they talk about money going to CEOs, and pointing the obvious that such money should be used somewhere else, but that other place is never equally obvious; it’s easier to drop the web and talk about gemini than thinking how to protect the web against the current corporate forces aproppiating it (as they do with everything else since the early days of capitalism): as if gemini woulnd’t be also appropiated the same way in the future should it become popular; and in case it never become popular, what was the point of it anyways, other than fetichizing niche tech and/or trying to save oneself from being part of some other decadent environment by alienating from society. Of course it will be hard to think about saving the web with a mindset focused on private freedoms, avoiding javascript, and/or trying to get away from bloated media, instead of thinking about sustainable interoperability without breaking existing and working social links (like having a fully productive workforce and considering its needs, instead of forcing them to also adapt to yet another tech): any standarized subset of HTML beats gemini any day in any fight, and we just need to focus on standards enforcement instead of technocratic ethical principles. And what about other institutions? Why is it that FLOSS leaders always talk about “privacy” and “freedoms”, but almost never about public software infrastructure? Where are the workers unions, almost never mentioned by FLOSS people, in all of this mess? Why can’t we have some social network, some hosting, some identity providers, some communication infrastructure, some homologated software, all granted by our unions? Why not even political parties? Why is it always about individuals and never about unions or parties when it comes to software? What is this “apoliticalness”? I say all of this is a clear liberal bias towards individuals and against political organizations in general, as well as the state regulations in particular: when not explicit, at least implicit.

    Did you ever consider that some of us actually want to be tracked from time to time? Ask any woman calling a car by night: they always turn tracking on in case they become victims of all kinds of abuse, including kidnapping. They share a link so others can track them in real time, and that’s actually a good thing. Did you ever consider that some of us prefer that the one tracking us is the State instead of some “private business”?. And, yes, I already know how dangerous it is when some bad actor gets elected, when data gets stolen, and about the impact of corrupt elements inside goverments: we’re already being hunted down here with Milei’s terror tactics, and we know very well about state terrorism. Now, did you know there’s something called “right to identity”? Yes, a right, those enforced by the National States and international governance institutions. In my country in particular we have desaparecidos: people abducted, their bodies never found, its children appropiated by the kidnappers; it’s a very big deal, where our national identity and biometric systems have a huge humanitarian role: yet RMS says in public talks “it’s evil, but if I can just tell the system I’m somebody else then it’s ok to use it”, like some bigmouth antisystem teenager, while people gives its biometric data to “private business” willingly anyways and the State gets weaker every day in terms of enforcing rights by giving people’s power to “the market”. I’m ok with the ability to turn tracking off when I decide: something that can only be enforced, by the rule of law and never by “honesty” nor any kind of ideal ethical “purity”. Yet, I believe that makes me a fool that knows nothing about “freedom” if I speak about it with any common FLOSS folk.

    In the same sense: do you want me to tell my friends “don’t have quick access to sex using Tinder and such apps, because if you do you lose freedom”? I do tell them, by the way, that the reason I don’t use any “app” is because my ideological principles regarding technology, and so I don’t use Tinder and, yes, that way I actively drop the chance of having quick access to sex and other human relations through that way: yet I would never tell them “you’re a fool” for it, because I don’t suffer from any mental illnes and so I can clearly realize I’m the one against the current here and they’re no fools at all: they’re human beings enjoying the fulfillment of basic human needs thanks to popular technology, which is actually a wonderful thing. The problem here is not them being fools, but us tackling the issues with the wrong lenses (if at all).

    Every basic human connection is being replaced/interfered/augmented/refactored by technological means, and so the one controlling such technologies is a big deal. That’s why I use e-mail for communications, which give me the ability to control myself my own server, and reject almost every other way of internet contact with me. Yet today I find that common folks don’t know how to send an email: they never fill the “subject” field (I suppose because of the mobile UI they use), they don’t even understand such concept as it’s not part of their lives, they seem to feel that writting an e-mail message is a different congnitive operation than writting a chat line in whatsapp or instagram, and they don’t even know the concept of “e-mail”: they belive that by that I mean “g-mail”. I’m talking about people already in their 30s, not just kids. During the pandemic, I had to fight in order to receive my COVID tests results through e-mail instead of through whatsapp: they didn’t understand the possibility of someone not using whatsapp, and that was already years ago. So I started to push for Delta Chat: it’s basically an e-mail client, but using whatsapp-and-the-likes UI. My family and friends talk to me through Delta. Yet, when I see my FLOSS referents talking about this kind of issues, the most common comment is “mobile phones are not neccesary, they’re evil because they’re tracking machines, don’t be a fool and stop using it”. It’s like talking with someone still living in the late XX century.

    “TRAPps are bad”, oh you don’t say… The problem is TRAPps are mandatory, thanks to “the market” and the “private business” leading everything in technology, and us political activists and intellectuals who think and care about technology keep thinking in terms of “privacy” and “private freedoms”: we’re like neo-liberal market zealots, encouraging the problem, empowering big business, telling dissidents to go live like an ascetic monk while fighting all of this with “hard work and happy thoughts”. “The others are the fools”, we seem to tell again and again to ourselves. In the meantime big business are stronger than ever, to the point even national states can’t seem to be able do shit about them.

    I refuse to be an accomplice of neoliberalism. I refuse to talk about freedoms instead of talking about rights. I refuse to preach that the State should have less power to enforce rights. I refuse to give away the concept of rights. I refuse to give away the power granted to me by democracy to be a part of the State and thus try to decide its direction on society: I AM the State. I refuse to fantasize that the problems in this text are all about personal ideas or all about personal sacrifices: I care about others too, I don’t want them to suffer, and I want a different society for them as well as for me, where technology is a force for good. We’re talking about social systems here, with complex agents and forces intertwined, and we need sophisticated organizations in order to tackle its problems. And I want RIGHTS, so I want the State there to grant them.

    FLOSS people needs to check its liberal bias ASAP. Because today we are a political frontier in the absolutely critical field of software in particular and technology in general, and the second we became irresponsible by being acritical or dogmatic (“too critical”) we become a big part of the problem of technology in society. This days, being responsible is not done with context-free ethics but with social/human sciences knowledge that let us speak to our peers without talking bullshit, and with explicit political agendas that allow us to build activist communities, unions, parties. We can’t empower only very selected individuals: we need to empower social classes, etnicities, genders, minorities, majorities, nations. We need FLOSS as part of a bigger newer humanist movement that, in its complexity, could be able to actually tackle the financial system and capitalism as a whole. We need FLOSS integrated with our production systems and into our superstructures. We need to stop talking so much about the private and start talking about the public, specially publicity. We need FLOSS targeting global governance systems to enforce interoperability instead of fighting against working standars because “they’re encumbered” by promoting niche tech that will never solve all the problems the previous tech already do; we need FLOSS to solve real-life problems and not try to sell some self-righteous bullshit by telling everyone else that they’re fools because they don’t think or behave like us.

    FLOSS is already successful at technical level, and it’s already on the proper side of history: FLOSS is right. It’s up to us that its political potential don’t get wasted, or worst: appropiated by big business. So please guys, I beg you: cut the bullshit about freedoms, and start talking about rights already.

Posted on 20240810 at 172724 in Política, Software | rss feed for comments| Leave a response, or trackback

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