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.

    This article was kindly translated to english and published by Dr. Roy Schestowitz, here: introduction, part 1, part 2, part 3.

 

    Hace algunos días me encontré con un artículo que me llamó la atención por varios motivos: https://sysdfree.wordpress.com/2020/12/12/330/

    El artículo, originalmente de la gente de Sabotage Linux, y concentrándose en el software libre, nos muestra ejemplos de cómo a veces la idea de progreso se transforma en exactamente lo inverso. Y entre las conclusiones, les autores sospechan de las oscuras manos de “shareholders” detrás de tantas decisiones problemáticas. Es a la luz de este artículo, y de los comentarios que generó, que me gustaría articular algunas reflexiones propias.

    Adelanto mi línea de lectura: en una abrumadora mayoría de los casos de conflicto dentro de las comunidades de informática en general, las discusiones parecen tender hacia groseras simplificaciones de orden técnico. Y también pareciera que unánimemente se concluyen diagnósticos de problemas con la única idea de purezas degradadas: la constante sombra de la corrupción, o bien de gente que no entiende los principios rectores en tal o cual situación (y por eso se le llama “idiota”). Considero todo eso síntomas de una profunda inmadurez política gremial, que debemos aprender a considerar con seriedad de cara al rol actual de la informática en la sociedad.

    Pero como articular mis argumentos al respecto puede llegar a ser intrincado, muy largo para los estándares actuales de internet, y en diferentes momentos diverger de nociones simples hacia generalidades problemáticas, prefiero comenzar con un pequeño índice de ideas:

     1. Tecnocracia, y tecnocracias contemporáneas, en el ejemplo de la economía.
     2. La condición filosófica de la idea de progreso.
     3. Informática, sociedad, y Software Libre: algunas conclusiones.

 

1. “Es un problema técnico, estúpido”:

    La frase que sirve de título para este apartado, hoy es un meme legendario. Pero ya sea en su iteración meme, como en su versión original de inteligente concepto condensado para una campaña electoral, la frase viene al caso de instalar un sentido común inmediato que adrede reemplaza un debate con una conclusión.

    Odio esa frase. Considero a su éxito como meme un síntoma de buena parte de nuestros problemas contemporáneos mundiales. Eso, y el hecho de que sea tan popular la idea de que no se puede pensar más allá del capitalismo. Y es que la economía está en el corazón de nuestra era. Todo el siglo XX se organizó alrededor de la pelea acerca de cuál es el sistema económico definitivo de la humanidad. Y así nos fué.

    Esa frase, además, presenta al sombrío mal de la tecnocracia tras un manto de simpatía e inteligencia. Pero a esta altura es tan equivocado encontrar a eso gracioso (o peor, acertado) como lo sería el confundir al Ku Klux Klan como gente alegre en alguna festividad de fantasmas. Esa frase se usa para impartir violencia, someter pueblos, y apropiarse de un poder que le corresponde a otres. Vamos a repasar esto, continuando con el ejemplo de la economía, que hoy por hoy es uno de los referentes fundamentales de tecnocracia en todo el mundo.

    Creo que todes estaríamos de acuerdo en que necesitamos planes de producción y distribución estrictos en tiempos de escases, de modo tal que no se desperdicien recursos y no tengamos que padecer situaciones espeluznantes como hambrunas. ¿Verdad? E imagino que de hecho también estaríamos todes de acuerdo en que tales planes deberían ser una prioridad en la planificación de una sociedad. Frente a lo cuál, la economía ciertamente tiene cosas para decir, y bienvenida sea.

    Sin embargo, todas nuestras crisis modernas fueron de especulación y sobre-producción. Y no sólo eso, sino que en ningún momento se dejaron de padecer problemas de escases, aunque literalmente sobren cosas tales como alimentos, y literalmente haya tecnología que resuelve cualquier problema logístico. La novedad es que las escaseses modernas son sintéticas: fabricamos escases donde no la hay. Es interesante que en rigor hacemos eso para sostener el “sistema económico” que generó aquella sobreproducción en primer lugar. Pero, más allá de eso, sucede que al ser un problema de producción, entonces incluso por sentido común ha de ser un problema económico. Y así cualquiera rápidamente concluye algo como lo siguiente: “pues bien, entonces se han hecho malos planes económicos, o bien malas implementaciones de los mismos”. O incluso cosas como “entonces hay que cambiar el sistema económico”, y la discusión pasa a ser sobre cosas tales como capitalismo versus comunismo. De una manera u otra, así nuevamente la economía repone su infinita centralidad en la reflexión sobre la sociedad.

    Y sin embargo, una y otra y otra vez los planes económicos se ven sometidos a fallas sistemáticas catastróficas, al menos para amplios sectores de las sociedades mundiales. Y al caso cabe destacar tres cosas. La primera, es que un fragmento absolutamente marginal de esa población mundial en ningún momento dejó de beneficiarse económicamente por esos fracasos escandalosos e innegables de los “sistemas económicos”. En segundo lugar, se insiste con alcanzar hipotéticos estados de pureza (en la planificación, en la ejecución, en la honestidad de quienes participan del sistema, etc) que nunca se alcanzan, y sin embargo allí es donde frecuentemente radica la esperanza de un futuro mejor donde esas cosas ya no sucedan más. Y la tercera perspectiva a destacar, es que tanto en el capitalismo como en el comunismo (los dos “sistemas económicos” antagónicos del siglo XX) se vivieron las mismas escenas de fracaso: pequeños sectores de la sociedad privilegiados por un lado, con gigantezcos grupos de personas perjudicados a niveles escandalosos e inhumanos por el otro.

    Así sucede que, como pasa siempre con las ideas que se pretenden demasiado abarcativas, más temprano que tarde comienzan a hacer agua, y de repente el antes sentido común inmediato pasa a requerir importantes esfuerzos racionales y especialistas muy bien formados para sostenerla. Es el caso con la economía hoy en día: al mismo tiempo se nos pide que sea una cosa más o menos obvia, de sentido común, especialmente a la hora de votar; mientras que también se nos exige que no opinemos al respecto porque no somos especialistas. Y también al mismo tiempo sucede que entre especialistas se traten unos a otros de imbéciles e ignorantes cuando simplemente no coinciden sus especulaciones acerca de qué está sucediendo o qué hay que hacer. Por supuesto, sin importar quién hable ni qué diga, con argumentos economicistas siempre se dice “objetivo”, y siempre tiene al “progreso” como horizonte.

    Con todo esto, antes que seguir preguntándole a la economía qué hacer, más bien es necesario revisar sus credenciales.

    La trampa es que los “sistemas económicos” no son tal cosa sino órdenes culturales. Es absolutamente ridículo pensar hoy por hoy a la economía como una cosa aislada de condiciones geográficas, biológicas, históricas, políticas, físicas, accidentales, y muchas otras más. De hecho, prácticamente nadie habla hoy de economía cuando habla de economía: habla de política. Nadie dice hoy cosas como “comunismo”, “capitalismo”, “socialismo”, “libre mercado”, “intervencionismo”, etc, como si fueran meras condiciones técnicas de producción y transporte de bienes y servicios: se menciona a esos conceptos como banderas en un campo de batalla ideológico que insiste desde hace más de 150 años, y que el siglo XX llevó hasta la guerra.

    Y la razón de ello está en qué dicen ambos “sistemas económicos”, comunismo y capitalismo, acerca del ser humane. Sucede que, aunque digan cosas diferentes, la centralidad de la economía es una coincidencia entre ambos. De esa manera, nadie dice algo como “no sé, probemos unas décadas, y después evaluamos en detalle”. Ningún país ni estado parece ponerse de acuerdo en cosas como “esta región pruebe este sistema, esta otra región pruebe este otro, y vayamos comparando las experiencias”. Es más: esa idea suena ridícula, idealista en el mal sentido, o hasta extraterrestre, aún cuando el más elemental uso de la razón fácilmente permite considerarla como una obviedad. Y al mismo tiempo que sucede eso, parecemos estar obligades a pedirle permiso a la economía para opinar sobre mundos futuros posibles.

    Lo que sucede es que la economía es apenas un componente más en un sistema social muchísimo más complejo que los parámetros económicos. La fantasía de que “todo pasa por la economía”, o bien que “la economía es la madre de todos los problemas”, es simplemente eso: una fantasía. La economía no es más o menos importante que la física, la biología, o la sociología, per sé: depende de qué se esté hablando. Todas esas disciplinas son herramientas para resolver problemas. Pero de ninguna manera la economía tiene autoridad objetiva alguna por sobre los demás componentes del sistema. Por eso está en constante e interminable conflicto con básicamente cualquier acción que se pretenda realizar en una sociedad moderna: porque todo cuestiona a los puntos débiles de la economía, que una y otra y otra vez se mete donde no le corresponde, mientras que al mismo tiempo deja de atender cosas que debería estar atendiendo.

    Todo eso que acabo de mencionar acerca de la economía en la actualidad, en rigor es un mapa bastante general de lo que constituye una tecnocracia: un sesgo ideológico, manifestado en un área burocrática central de poder, en la que sólo participan aquelles quienes exhiban ciertas credenciales al caso, y a la que todes les demás se someten. La economía como centro del debate social, es ideología. La calificación técnica como condición del debate social, es ideología. La necesidad (en lugar de deseabilidad) de tecnicismos cultos para interpelar a la realidad, es ideología. Y la ideología es política. Eso hacen les economistes y empresaries en las sociedades contemporáneas: política, y ninguna otra cosa. Y es así como la economía no sólo no está resolviendo ningún problema real de ninguna sociedad, sino que además está generando un profundo desprestigio de la política al hacerse pasar por ella.

    Por si quien lee este texto todavía no se dió cuenta, las comunidades informáticas están llenas de estos sesgos tecnócratas. Invito a cualquiera a que vaya a leer los comentarios de cualquier discusión sobre cualquier tema que atraviese al IT en general.

    Por supuesto que podría poner aquí infinitos ejemplos, especialmente en las cuestiones más polémicas, que suelen generar décadas de flamewars y conflicto. Pero permítanme dejar apenas uno menor, corto, pequeño, que considero bastante ilustrativo de lo que estoy hablando. Se trata de un artículo del 2015 acerca de por qué alguien considera buena idea dejar de hablar mierda de php, y dejar de hablar mierda de los demás en general. Observen las respuestas en reddit, donde hasta se acusa a la gente de php de ser “anti-intelectualistas”, llamando a la objetividad como credencial: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/4z6vjv/contempt_culture/

    Todo nuestro gremio está funcionando así, desde hace tiempo. Y para sorpresa de nadie, durante la última década, nuestro gremio comenzó a caracterizarse por generar problemas donde no los había, afectar comunidades enteras con cambios forzados que les usuaries rara vez pidieron, generar escaseses sintéticas aplicando obsolescencia programada (como es el caso escandaloso de la deprecación compulsiva de i386), someterse vertiginosamente a intereses corporativos como si no tuviéramos historia al respecto, renegar de condicionamientos políticos pero al mismo tiempo ponerse títulos políticos como “democrático” o “abierto”, y tantas otras cosas nefastas más. Y todo esto siempre con las banderas de la objetividad y el progreso.

 

2. Acerca del progreso:

    Siguiendo el ejemplo de la economía, tanto en La Riqueza de las Naciones como en El Capital se encuentran ideas de progreso que marcan el camino de la humanidad: desarrollo de opulencia, sociedad sin clases, y todas las cosas buenas que ya sabemos. Y es que era el clima de aquella época: revolución política en Francia, y revolución tecnológica en Inglaterra. Claramente el mundo estaba cambiando. Y en el corazón de ese cambio estaban el antropocentrismo primero, y la ciencia luego. El Hombre le ganó a Dios, y de repente era dueño de su propio destino, que ya no estaba escrito en las santas escrituras ni controlado por les sabies; y al mismo tiempo, la ciencia era la herramienta para las verdades definitivas y la certeza absoluta. Y ese espíritu aventurero que mezclaba innovación con ingenuidad dio lugar al nacimiento de un nuevo aspecto ideológico en las sociedades del momento: el optimismo tecnológico.

    Con el paso de las décadas, los desarrollos científicos y tecnológicos dieron poco lugar al debate, y casi que el único límite para el ser humano era la imaginación. Y no es que no existieran voces críticas ni problemas nuevos: era que la tecnología introducía cambios tan radicales y espectaculares que difícilmente se podía debatir contra las virtudes de su uso adecuado. Por ejemplo, al ver la exclusión y miseria que generaba la propagación de la tecnología, Marx no condenó a la tecnología sino al cómo era utilizada en esa sociedad; y de hecho afirmó que el desarrollo tecnológico para ese entonces era no sólo deseable (ese sería, según él, el camino hacia una sociedad sin clases) sino incluso inevitable.

    Pero, aunque Marx fuera más explícito que otres, llegando al colmo de decir que la Historia sólo conducía en una dirección, lo cierto es que en aquel momento la tecnología (y su madre, la ciencia) ya habían escrito clandestinamente el nuevo destino de la humanidad: el progreso. La libertad de las santas escrituras le duró poco a la humanidad, que se inventó otras escrituras sagradas diferentes, con nueves sabies que las cuiden. Me estoy refiriendo al mismo momento histórico donde asomaba el positivismo como escuela filosófica científica, y donde comenzaban las carreras entre naciones para resolver viejos conflictos identitarios en el campo de batalla por la supremacía científica, tecnológica, y económica; ese mismo momento histórico donde generación tras generación el mundo comenzó a moverse más, y más, y más rápido, incrementando la escala de toda acción humana.

    El optimismo en eso duró hasta la primera guerra mundial: un conflicto tan escandalosamente devastador, que ni siquiera entraba en las pesadillas de la gente de por aquel entonces. Una generación entera quedó traumada por ese conflicto. De modo que, como dicta el más elemental uso de la razón, se llegó a la obvia conclusión de que al menos eso habría de servir como parte del proceso de aprendizaje del mundo, y seguramente no volvería a pasar; nuevamente, progreso, aunque esta vez el costo fuera francamente demasiado alto. Aunque ya todos estaban avisados, y el mundo entero comenzaba a sospechar de la supuesta bondad incuestionable del desarrollo científico y tecnológico: la carnicería inconmensurable que fue la primera guerra mundial hubiera sido imposible sin la intervención de la ciencia.

    Por supuesto, todes sabemos que luego vino una segunda guerra mundial, todavía peor que la anterior, y como si fuera poco terminó con el desarrollo de la bomba atómica: un dispositivo tecnológico, hijo de la ciencia más pura y avanzada, que por primera vez en la historia permitía fantasías verosímiles e inmediatas sobre la extinción del ser humano y de la vida en el planeta tierra en general. Y como si no fuera suficiente, también nos dejó 50 años de guerra fría, que sin mucha vergüenza podemos argumentar que tranquilamente no terminó nunca.

    Lo que dejé en esos párrafos anteriores no es otra cosa que una breve historia de la modernidad: un momento histórico de la humanidad. Y la idea de progreso es hija de la modernidad: nació con ella, y murió con ella.

    Tomen por favor nota de eso último: el progreso está muerto. Hoy nadie cuerdo y que haya leido algún libro alguna vez puede hablar de “progreso” sin titubear al menos un segundo. El progreso fue literalmente la bandera de los momentos más oscuros de nuestra historia, y generó heridas profundísimas que todavía no han sanado. Hoy hablar de “progreso” en abstracto, aislado de la sociedad en general, es sencillamente negacionista.

    Pero además, sucede que la historia de la modernidad y del progreso es también la de las tecnocracias cientificistas. De hecho, el término “tecnocracia” es un término moderno. El auge de la economía como pilar y mandato central de las sociedades modernas fue consecuencia del mismo sesgo ideológico que dió lugar a las otras cosas: el antropocentrismo del renacimiento, unido al optimismo tecnológico moderno. Con esos dos ingredientes, eventualmente fue elemental entender cualquier cosa que exista como un objeto de estudio científico esperando ser explotado por las fuerzas productivas humanas.

    ¿Y quienes más calificades que les científiques para organizar esta tarea? Está claro que, teniendo a su alcance conocimiento objetivo e incuestionable, les científiques saben mejor que nadie más qué hacer, siempre. Y si les científiques acaso hicieran algo incorrecto, sólo puede explicarse por desviaciones subjetivas de les mismes: como ser la ignorancia de tal o cual detalle, cuando no directamente oscuros y corruptos intereses personales.

    Así llegamos hasta aquel artículo, “when progress is backwards”, donde la gente de Sabotage Linux se pregunta si no será por “la corrupción” que las cosas no progresan y más bien van al revés.

    Sucede que la informática es una disciplina nacida en el siglo XX, y que en los últimos 40 o 50 años no deja de acelerar su “progreso tecnológico”, emulando de manera vertiginosa todos los pasos que el resto de las disciplinas supieron dar en los siglos anteriores: primero ingenua, luego optimista, y eventualmente positivista y tecnócrata. Y así hoy nos miramos incrédules, unes a otres, mientras discursos terraplanistas son cada día menos marginales, centenas de miles de personas en todo el mundo reniegan de las medidas sanitarias durante una pendemia en nombre de una libertad que parece tener prioridad por sobre cualquier otra cosa, lunátiques amenazan a la nación más poderosa del mundo con un golpe de estado amparades en conspiraciones demenciales, y no parece existir un sólo lugar en el mundo que no esté cada vez más polarizado y al borde del conflicto social. Desde nuestro gremio francamente me parece… corto de vista, si bien tal vez un paso en la dirección correcta, preguntarse en ese contexto por el progreso en gtk o python, mientras las telecomunicaciones son nuestros tanques de guerra desde hace décadas, e Internet es ahora nuestra propia bomba atómica.

    Tal vez es momento de que la informática también aprenda a cuestionar la idea de progreso en general.

 

3. Software libre y sociedad:

    Los dos problemas que mencioné anteriormente se dan por una toma de distancia equivocada con la sociedad. La tecnocracia es el abuso de una tal vez entendible especifidad, mientras que aquel progreso tan nefasto es sencillamente cerrar los ojos a las consecuencias sociales de lo que hacemos. Y frecuentemente siento esas distancias, incluso incrementándose, dentro de las comunidades de la informática. Además, ambas cosas suceden también de acuerdo a cuál es nuestra idea del límite de nuestras comunidades, y por lo tanto nuestra relación con otras. Todo esto es la razón de este texto. Me gustaría anotar algunas alertas que deberíamos tener como comunidad, y tenerlas en cuenta para explicar también nuestros problemas internos.

    Pero retomando la cuestión de la bomba atómica, una observación. ¿Saben en qué derivó ese asunto? La declaración universal de derechos humanos. Es muy interesante recordar y reflexionar acerca de ese evento de nuestra historia reciente, apenas hace 70 años atrás. Piensen un segundo en este concepto: la Unión Soviética, DURANTE STALIN, firmando un pacto que dice “todes tienen derecho a la propiedad”, al mismo tiempo que los Estados Unidos, DURANTE EL MACARTISMO, firma un pacto que dice “todes tienen derecho a comida, ropa, vivienda, salud, y servicios sociales”. ¿Entienden lo que tiene que haber sido el estado del mundo para que una cosa como esa fuera firmada por esos dos monstruos? En serio, tómense unos minutos para considerar la magnitud de lo que tiene que haber sucedido en el siglo XX para que esa escena haya sido posible.

    Hoy es absolutamente impensable un tratado así, aún cuando definitivamente se muestra urgente. Y eso es sintomático. Al mismo tiempo, hoy no es la física quien está en el ojo de la tormenta sino la informática: esa ciencia jóven que nació al calor, precisamente, de las dos grandes guerras. Hoy desde la biología hasta la astrofísica se entiende al mundo utilizando el concepto de “información”, mientras en los diarios de todo el mundo se puede leer sobre los conflictos entre GAFAM y los estados naciones por el poder de las empresas informáticas. Hoy nosotres, informátiques, somos responsables.

    Es injusto hacernos responsables como individuos de semejantes problemas. Claramente estas cuestiones son más grandes que cualquiera de nosotres. Pero no me parece pedir mucho tenerlas en cuenta a la hora de tomar decisiones, destacando además que esto es especialmente crítico frente al proyecto político del Software Libre. Y dentro de la informática eso se traduce en cambiar muchos comportamientos que actualmente parecen inmutables. Veamos algunos ejemplos.

    Una vez RMS llamó “ético” a systemd “porque es software libre”. Esto es un caso de ambas cosas: ser demasiado técnico, y desacoplarse absolutamente de las consecuencias del software. Mientras RMS se acota a un aspecto particular del problema, systemd fue y es un vector de absoluta discordia en las comunidades de software libre en particular, y del ecosistema GNU/Linux en general. Esto pudo haber sido una contingencia menor en el hecho de, simplemente, estar respondiendo un e-mail, y ser esa la manera que tiene de responder; todes sabemos que RMS no se toma las cosas tan a la ligera. Pero si vemos el faq de GNU al respecto de systemd (y estoy seguro de que hay unas cuantas preguntas frecuentes vinculadas a systemd y su relación con GNU y el software libre), lo único que encontramos es un breve comentario acerca de la convención de nombres: https://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-linux-faq.en.html#systemd

    No podemos dar la espalda a los conflictos sociales: ni los conflictos exclusivamente técnicos internos a la informática, ni los de nuestras comunidades de técnicos y usuarios, ni los de nuestras sociedades en general. Lo mismo que sucede con systemd ocurre con wayland, con ejemplos como el que dí de php contra otros lenguajes de programación, también ocurrió antes con debates a todas luces estériles como gnome vs kde, y ciertamente va a seguir ocurriendo. El disenso es bienvenido, pero hacer de cuenta que alguna objetividad escapa a las condiciones sociales y aisla a los argumentos de parámetros subjetivos ya debería ser una idea superada. Y tristemente no lo es.

    Del mismo modo, sin importar el conflicto, la conclusión parece ser que alguien “se vendió”: o la FSF se vendió cuando cancelaron a RMS, o RMS se vendió cuando no criticó a systemd, o RedHat compró al gobierno de Debian para que systemd sea estandarizado de facto, o Canonical se vendió a Microsoft, o tal o cuál corporación es responsable de infectar el proyecto en cuestión con su dinero, etc. Cuando no se espera pureza de principios, se espera pureza económica, o hasta pureza de alma. Y la objetividad ciertamente no ayuda a humanizar esos debates. A veces pareciera que se pretende que quienes trabajamos en informática ignoremos nuestras fuentes de trabajo, y si tal o cual entidad nos paga el sueldo entonces somos impuros (o sea, corruptos). O incluso es como si los argumentos hicieran de cuenta que quienes hacen software libre fueran una especie de mártires cuyo único compromiso en la vida es con… cualquiera sean las ideas que quien se queja en ese momento interpreta que deben ser las del software libre; y, por supuesto, que son inmunes a las condiciones económicas del mundo real. El punto debería ser que estamos perdiendo batallas políticas, no que la pureza sigue sin aparecer.

    Otro caso típico de inmadurez política: la cuestión de los códigos de conducta. Los movimientos políticos vinculados a los racismos, los feminismos, y los géneros, por dar algunos ejemplos que todos conozcamos, tienen mucho camino recorrido en términos de organización, derrotas, y triunfos. Son movimientos con varias generaciones encima, a diferencia de los informáticos que tenemos apenas una o dos. Y esos movimientos aprendieron a construir poder político real: elles tienen mártires de en serio, con vidas enteras dedicadas a sus causas. Y, coherentemente con su militancia humanista, intervienen en todos las esferas de praxis humana: tal y como hace la economía desde hace siglos sin que a nadie parezca importarle. Si tiene algo qué ver con seres humanes haciendo algo, entonces elles tienen algo para decir, porque discuten lo que significa ser humane. Y en informática les hemos recibido, y seguimos recibiéndoles frecuentemente, con hostilidad y desprecio: no leemos sus libros ni participamos de sus charlas, pero hacemos de cuenta que tenemos cosas profundas para decirles, o bien que debatimos cuando en realidad sólo les ninguneamos. Frecuentemente hablamos sobre la especificidad de lo que hacemos, pero cuando nos corresponde hacernos cargo de que no estamos formados ni en raza, ni en género, ni en feminismo, en lugar de eso les negamos autoridad y hasta intentamos llevar las discusiones hacia un sentido común que atrasa décadas. No nos gusta que desde otras áreas nos digan cómo comportarnos: nos creemos aislados de “toda esa boludez social”. Nunca decimos algo como “la verdad que no sé una mierda sobre género, ni racismo, ni feminismo”: pero eso no es un problema cuando se trata de responderles que cambiar palabras es una idiotez, o que moderar el lenguaje que usamos es censura. Demasiadas veces hacemos de cuenta que nuestra intolerancia está justificada en alguna objetividad que el otre ignora o corrompe, y en estas cuestiones queda evidenciado. Y en todo caso, nuevamente le damos la espalda a cuestiones que la sociedad impone. Lamentablemente, esto es especialmente notorio cuando aparace la palabra “libertad” por algún lado.

    Pero además, el velo de la supuesta objetividad nos hace fantasear que somos inmunes a la influencia ideológica, cuando estamos lejos de serlo. Demasiadas veces he visto debates en informática que hablan de pretendidas meritocracias, competencias virtuosas, o hasta directamente críticas a la idea de estado, las cuales coinciden todas con premisas neoliberales. Por supuesto jamás se hacen cargo de tales coincidencias en esas discusiones, ni reflexionan al respecto: ni siquiera cuando desde el feminismo o el anti-racismo se les llama la atención.

    Lo que logramos al pretender darle la espalda a la realidad, ya sea pretendiendo que sea más sencilla de lo que realmente es, o bien pretendiendo que cualquier cosa que no se adecúe a nuestros estándares sea considerada alien, es delegar el poder político de esos asuntos a otros actores. Y allí es donde las relaciones públicas corporativas se hacen un festín, aprovechando todos estos espacios que dejamos vacíos para ejercer elles poder político en nuestro nombre. Hoy claramente estamos siendo usados por corporaciones que hacen de la informática un lugar peor para usuarios y desarrolladores por igual, y además están haciendo un daño estremecedor a la sociedad en general, mientras hizan nuestras banderas con hipocresía y de esa manera nos avergüenzan.

    Y es doblemente trágico cuando todo esto afecta al Software Libre en particular, porque es un espacio desde donde tenemos mucho para ofrecer a la sociedad. Así como las militancias del racismo o el feminismo se meten en el mundo del software, nuestras reflexiones sobre la naturaleza del intercambio, del conocimiento, de las prácticas comunitarias, y de la colaboración, tienen profundas consecuencias una vez propagadas en la sociedad, y trascienden por lejos al software. Tenemos la capacidad de, como elles hacen, confluir en movimientos heterogéneos y masivos de poder político, para así establecer agendas de cambio social. Mientras tanto, GNU/Linux ganó la guerra de los servidores pero nunca en los escritorios, GNU no tiene injerencia en móviles, Linux es cada día más corporativo, systemd cada vez está más cerca de reemplazar a GNU por completo, las corporaciones tienen cooptados a les usuaries, y nosotres como comunidad hacemos esfuerzos por seguir discutiendo quién es un idiota.

    Quienes trabajamos en informática no deberíamos pretendernos aislados del resto de la sociedad. Pero quienes además llevamos adelante iniciativas políticas, como lo somos quienes formamos parte del movimiento Software Libre, tenemos la obligación de reflexionar sobre estas cuestiones y hacer nuestro mejor esfuerzo para encararlas con inteligencia y responsabilidad. Pero lo más importante de todos: hacemos ideología, y tenemos que aprender a abrazar esa idea de una vez por todas. Les propongo entonces que hagamos ideología con honestidad intelectual y sensibilidad, ya que nuestra militancia hoy tiene mucha más necesidad de empatía que de objetividad.

 

    Hace un mes atrás, David Teller publicó una entrada en su blog explicando con tranquilidad y en detalle el polémico proceso detrás de la deprecación de XUL+XPCOM, el mecanismo que utilizaba Firefox en su interfaz de usuario hasta su versión 57, de Noviembre del 2017.

    Aquella decisión, decía, fue polémica, porque implicó perder el enorme ecosistema de agregados (“addons”) que tenía Firefox, y que constituía una de las razones principales para usar ese browser en lugar de Google Chrome. Y tan polémica fué que todavía hay gente enojada al respecto, además de gente que directamente dejó de usar Firefox. En mi cámara de eco prácticamente todes vieron a la iniciativa como un tiro en el propio pié de Mozilla. Y las razones detrás de esa iniciativa fueron aquellas a las que ya nos tiene acostumbradas la informática contemporanea: “velocidad”, “seguridad”, y “lo que quieren les usuaries”.

    Eso último quizás sea un poco injusto, porque buena parte de las justificaciones para el cambio estuvieron también sostenidas en las muchas dificultades de Mozilla para continuar sosteniendo Firefox. Pero mi punto es que esas dificultades van a existir elijan el camino que elijan, razón por la cuál las excluí de la lista. Quizás haya otro debate en esto, que no es el que me interesa en este momento, así que lo dejaré apenas en esta mención.

    El post de Teller relata detalles históricos de XUL+XPCOM, cosas que fueron sucediendo alrededor de la web, y los problemas que enfrentó Mozilla a la hora de sostener Firefox, frente a lo cuál se terminó decidiendo migrar hacia otro sistema conceptualmente diferente. El post es excelente, y de lectura recomendada: tanto es así, que se hizo popular y objeto de discusión, llegando a que la sección de comentarios en la entrada fuera todavía más interesante que el post mismo. Y hace varias semanas quiero tomarme el tiempo de escribir acerca de esas discusiones.

    Para no hacer un texto infinito, voy a ir al grano: Teller habló de “competir con Chrome” en su publicación, y diferentes personas aparecieron a discutir contra eso. Tanto es así que eventualmente Teller terminó editando el artículo (con una mención explícita a este hecho como nota al final) para reemplazar “competir con Chrome” por “tan rápido, estable, y seguro, como Chrome”. Y es que, me parece, esa cuestión dá en el punto neurálgico de un problema muy generalizado.

    Se puede observar, por ejemplo, que el primer comentario es de Jeremy Andrews, que se ocupa del mantenimiento de Pale Moon (un fork de Firefox pre-57) para el sistema Solaris. Y, debatiendo con el artículo, y precisamente contra la idea de “competir contra Chrome”, plantea un argumento respondiendo a la pregunta “por qué alguien haría algo como esto”, en el sentido de “por qué alguien haría otra cosa que no sea competir contra chrome”. Y dice lo siguiente:

(…) I’m doing it for the people that have been left behind since about 2007 when the iPhone and Facebook changed the world. The people that still mostly use their desktop PCs and like being able to tweak or customize everything. People who largely feel that they’re being asked to accept that the freedom and choice of the early Internet is being phased out in favor of security, top-down decision making, centralization, and lack of real choices. (…)

    Daniel Eriksson le responde esto otro:

(…) Up until 2010 I was always excited about new technology since it always gave me new possibilities and made it possible to do more in a way that suited me, and then that changed. Now I worry about new releases of software, fearing what useful function or option might have been taken away this time. (…)

    Eso se parece mucho a lo que comenzó a suceder en el ecosistema Windows a finales de los ’90. ¿Quién no comenzó a guardar instaladores de versiones anteriores, o incluso versiones portables de algún programa (que por aquel entonces era simplemente copiarse el directorio de instalación), porque las nuevas versiones eran contraproducentes en muchos sentidos? Todavía debo tener un Winamp 2 en algún CD, configurado como a mí se me antojara, porque las versiones posteriores se colgaban y pedían más recursos. Y esta práctica comenzó a entrar en crisis cuando mil cosas pasaron a tener dependencias online, y entonces los chequeos de versión o los cambios de protocolos hacían que simplemente dejaran de funcionar, dejando ninguna otra opción más que instalar versiones nuevas. Y son cosas que están sucediendo en el mundo del software libre, hoy mismo: Gnome cada día más “user friendly” y con interfases o hasta nombres de programas más y más tontas, dependencias demoníacas inesquivables inyectadas en el corazón de los sistemas más grandes (te estoy mirando a vos systemd), QT volviéndose privado, x86 siendo deprecado por todos lados como si ya no se usara… y, lógico, una web obesa que ya no permite ni leer blogs en una netbook de tanto javascript de notificaciones y trackeo.

    Pero la mención a “competir contra Chrome” suscitó un debate largo, lleno de intercambios, que les recomiendo revisar. A mí me interesa la justificación detrás del “competir contra Chrome”: telemetría. Es el nombre, no sé si técnico o comercial, para “los datos de actividad del usuario”. Descartemos la cuestión de la privacidad, que me parece secundaria para mi planteo (alguien ya dice en los comentarios “ningún power user tiene eso activado”): acá hay un tema político y epistémico.

    Epistémico, porque los criterios para evaluar la realidad están siendo constantemente constrastados con nubes de datos que la reemplazan. Político, porque sospecho que esto está en el corazón de todos los cambios para mal en las comunidades de software en general, y software libre en particular.

    Como programador, y persona de ciencia, entiendo el valor de los datos. Pero como activista, y persona de arte, también entiendo sus límites. Los datos son apenas un ingrediente a la hora de construir un mapa de una realidad. Hay otros, y cualquier proyecto requiere tenerlos en cuenta al menos con la misma prioridad. Hoy, en todo ámbito de la tecnología, e incluso de la ciencia, estamos viendo una tendencia espiralada y recursiva entre el acto de recopilar datos y de generar cualquier idea de futuro mundo posible alrededor de ellos. Y esto es seductor, no sólo por ser un recurso poderoso y una novedad de época, sino porque cura y hasta revive nuestra desvastada búsqueda moderna de objetividad: aquella seguridad en alguna verdad incuestionablemente legítima que pudiera guiarnos en ese océano de incertidumbres que es el futuro. En los datos hay una forma muy particular de verdad, que es especialmente estimulante: la aleteia.

    Pero es un espejismo, que generaciones anteriores ya conocieron, al mismo tiempo que supieron redescubrir cómo los mundos y futuros posibles también pasan por las esperanzas, las éticas, o los principios, que bien pueden tomar distancia de esos datos en lugar de abrazarlos. Ahí es donde la política y el arte tienen lecciones qué enseñar.

    Está el tema del sesgo. Pero, frecuentemente, el sesgo es evaluado como “un defecto”, que tiene como consecuencia “alejarse de la objetividad”; y yo más bien pretendo reivindicarlo. Pero para eso primero hay que comprenderlo. El sesgo existe, y si bien tiene paliativos, eso no se traduce en una objetividad plena ni mucho menos. Cuando a esa situación le sumamos que quienes hacen software no necesariamente hacen ciencia, cabe ciertamente la pregunta de a qué viene la pretensión de objetividad en los datos, o incluso los datos a secas.

    ¿Qué hace Mozilla? Con su software, con sus usuaries, con sus datos. ¿Para qué quiere una “telemetría”? Y mirando aquella situación de “competir contra Chrome” desde esta perspectiva, mucho más que “lo que quieren les usuaries”, lo que se desprende es que las respuestas a las preguntas iniciales de este párrafo se responden con “Mozilla pretende comportarse como Google”. Y esto es muy preocupante. Pero no por “la seguridad de los datos” (el cuco del progretariado informático contemporáneo), sino porque resulta políticamente aberrante para la historia de Mozilla.

    Mozilla se supone que sea una fundación sin fines de lucro, que supo ser campeona de una web libre y empoderadora de usuarios. Mozilla fue quien se levantó y peleó contra Microsoft, logrando el por aquel entonces improbable triunfo que hoy es absolutamente invaluable: hacer que la web no quede centralizada alrededor de Microsoft. Firefox luchó contra Internet Explorer, dando una batalla de resistencia durante una década entera, hasta que la injerencia de Apple y de Google terminaron por enterrar las esperanzas de Microsoft por controlar internet. Y, recordemos, cuando todos debíamos hacer nuestras páginas web compatibles con IE6, cuando nuestros bancos y organismos estatales exigían IE para realizar operaciones, cuando buena parte de internet no funcionaba sin plugins dependientes de Windows, lo cerca que estuvo de suceder ese final tan nefasto, lo lunático que parecía plantear cualquier otro futuro. A Mozilla le debemos nuestra eterna gratitud y respeto por haber dado esa batalla de la manera que lo hizo.

    Al principio (y ese “principio” duró años), Google recomendaba usar Mozilla Firefox en sus sitios web, des-recomendando así internet explorer. Eventualmente surgió Google Chrome, basado en el código de Safari, para después basarse en su propio código algunos años después. Los negocios de Google llevaron a centralizar más y más sus operaciones en el uso de Google Chrome, siendo hoy el nuevo internet explorer de-facto. Pero hoy en día, a diferencia de lo que sucedió con Microsoft, Mozilla parece querer seguir los pasos de Google en lugar de combatirlo: toma a su browser como una referencia en lugar de con una postura crítica. Y en el centro de ese fenómeno se encuentran los datos: algo que en su pelea anterior no existía como hoy lo conocemos.

    Y es que los datos, efectivamente, indican que les usuaries prefieren Google Chrome. Pero eso es así de la misma manera que hace 20 años los datos hubieran indicado lo mismo sobre Internet Explorer. Muy probablemente también hubieran recopilado datos que indicaran a Internet Explorer siendo más rápido en algunas tareas (como el startup, por estar integrado al sistema operativo), o incluso que los infinitos problemas técnicos de Internet Explorer no podrían importarle menos a la gente (ya que lo siguieron utilizando por muchísimo más tiempo del que debió tolerarse, y no precisamente por “la experiencia de usuario”). Seguramente todos tenemos amigues que utilizan internet sin adblocker, y que esa internet la viven como el estado natural de las cosas, del mismo modo que utilizan para ello Google Chrome. Y, claro, eso genera datos.

    Sin embargo, mi problema con esos datos no es que puedan ser sesgados, en el sentido de “interpretados de diferentes maneras”: mi problema es la interpretación actual que hace Mozilla. Porque hace 20 años, Firefox hubiera interpretado “tenemos que hacer algo contra Google Chrome, porque caso contrario va a centralizar la web imponiendo su cultura”, mientras que hoy interpreta “tenemos que ser como Google Chrome”.

    Y aquí es donde tenemos que ver a Mozilla tomando un poco más de distancia. Porque aquella entrada de blog apareció en la misma semana que Mozilla anunciaba cientos de despidos, del mismo modo que esta entrada mía de blog aparece la misma semana que Mozilla anuncia la desactivación de servicios. Y esto, por supuesto, está profundamente relacionado con los costos de desarrollo y mantenimiento que se mencionan en el blog de Teller.

    Mozilla se está comportando mucho más como un negocio que como organización sin fines de lucro. Mira a los datos de la misma manera que cualquier empresa: buscando réditos económicos. Su sesgo interpretativo se parece tanto al de los privados porque está siguiendo la línea de dónde se puede obtener dinero, y esa lógica siempre apunta a las hegemonías y en detrimento de las periferias (con la notoria excepción de las elites).

    Y es que el problema es real. Este problema del financiamiento, y los costos que surgen una vez alcanzada cierta escala de operación, no son un problema exclusivo de Mozilla. Es el mismo problema que lleva Canonical a hacer tratos con Microsoft, a RedHat a venderse a IBM, y al deplorable estado actual de la Fundación Linux. Todas las comunidades de software libre se encuentran cada vez más asediadas por cuestiones de financiamiento, debido a que creció enormemente su escala de operación. El software libre ha ganado batallas y hasta guerras enteras, y este es el costo de esos triunfos: esta es la lógica de la centralidad en el capitalismo, que las comunidades de software libre en general no parecen querer enfrentar formalmente.

    Sin embargo, de Mozilla espero un poco más que esto, y ahí es donde empiezo a preocuparme en serio. Porque Mozilla es un referente, y claramente no le está encontrando la vuelta al asunto. Permítanme desviarme unos segundos, para dar algunos ejemplos de lo que estoy hablando.

    No conozco a nadie que apague su modem de cable o adsl durante la noche. Es decir que, aunque no se esté utilizando, a diferencia de con el dial-up de antaño, nuestras casas están todo el día conectadas a internet. O sea que son, básicamente, un pequeño datacenter en potencia. ¿Qué nos impide servir contenidos desde nuestras casas? Tecnológicamente es una tontería que requiere muy poco trabajo agregado a las cosas que ya existen; la limitación es enteramente cultural. Y esa cultura nos lleva a que el común de la gente, e incluso usuaries avanzades, hoy no tengan una idea clara de a dónde ir si quisieran levantar un sitio web en algún lado. Del mismo modo, frecuentemente se argumenta que la “internet gratis en realidad no es gratis”, y se habla de todos los costos de infraestructura que tiene la internet que conocemos: rápida, 24/7 online, accesible desde todo el mundo, etc. ¿Y por qué tiene que ser así internet? ¿Por qué no puede haber sitios web que funcionen a diferentes horarios, como cualquier otra operación humana del montón, que precisamente se acota para abaratar costos y respetar condiciones de trabajo sanas? ¿Por qué no podría mi sitio web personal funcionar sólo entre tal y tal horario, que básicamente es cuando yo prendo o apago mi computadora en mi casa? ¿Por qué debería garantizar que alguien desde Hong Kong o Noruega o Emiratos Árabes pueda conectarse a mi sitio web, cuando no podría importarme menos si no lo hacen? ¿Por qué mi sitio web no podría estar disponible sólo a cierta comunidad más inmediata y cercana, teniendo entonces la posibilidad de ir a hostear mi sitio internacional en Amazon o Google si así lo deseara? ¿Y por qué tiene que ser todo rápido? ¿Qué problema hay con que quienes leen esperen 30 segundos o un minuto a que se cargue la página, si lo importante es el contenido y no su velocidad?

    Más ideas: la web está obesa, háganla bajar de peso. ¿Por qué no generar otros lenguajes de hipertexto, que sean más livianos y menos costosos de mantener (para alguien que hace un browser) que HTML? ¿Por qué no lenguajes concentrados más en texto y estilos que en “estructura” o scripting? ¿Por qué no tener como parámetro “que ande bien en hardware del tercer mundo” o “en hardware de hace 15 años”, en lugar de apuntar a la novedad? ¿Qué no hay acaso millones y millones de personas interpeladas por desarrollos como esos, ya que Mozilla busca “datos” o “mercado”?

    Fíjense que son preguntas muy inmediatas, con respuestas muy sencillas, que hacen a diferentes ideas del futuro de la web. Apliquen las mismas preguntas a nuestros servicios de mensajería, a quién recopila qué datos para qué fines, a cómo nos informamos de qué cosas, etc. Sin embargo, Mozilla, uno de los otrora campeones en la defensa y creación de una web para les usuaries, que podría estar trabajando en cosas como esas y de hecho lograr resultados muy rápidamente, hoy pone todos sus esfuerzos en ser como Google, en buena medida porque tiene gastos qué pagar. Pero además de los gastos, también tiene mucho qué ver con la gente que conforma al equipo de Mozilla, y la gente que forma a nuestras comunidades; porque en los últimos 20 años hubo mucho recambio de gente, y se sumó gente más jóven, cuyos anhelos y formación cultural y política son muy diferentes a las generaciones fundacionales de las mismas comunidades. Allí empiezan a operar muchos factores humanos, y allí también aparecen muchos vectores de influencia cultural corporativa. De repente hay millones de personas creyendo que Microsoft “ahora es bueno”, que incrementar la velocidad de las cosas “es una necesidad” (en los múltiples sentidos del término “necesidad”, y aún sin darse cuenta de que eso significa diferentes cosas), encaran la política con un ímpetu frenético que deja muy poco espacio a la reflexión crítica (y ahí entran desde la ultrapolarización hasta fenómenos como la cancelación de Stallman), y que frecuentemente confunde “novedad” con “progreso”.

    El caso Mozilla es representativo y sintomático: está concibiendo a la web como un espacio de mercado antes que como espacio cultural; o, peor todavía, reduciendo la idea de cultura a la de mercado. Cuando uno hace eso, lo que ese sesgo elimina son muchos hechos absolutamente cruciales a la hora de pensar una mejor internet, e incluso una mejor informática en general. Hechos como que muches de nosotres no realizamos nuestras actividades con animos de lucro, y que buena parte de la informática como la conocemos funciona gracias a eso: está lleno de gente en el mundo que está dispuesta a colaborar en miles de iniciativas, si las condiciones fueran las adecuadas, y sin que eso signifique costos importantes para Mozilla; y esa es la lógica del artista o del activista, no la del “empleado” o el “productor”. Hechos como que el rol de internet hace 20 años y ahora es completamente diferente, y hay otros actores involucrados: hoy el acceso a internet es considerado un derecho. ¿Por qué Mozilla no se concentra en trabajar más cerca de los estados nacionales como una fuente de ingresos, llevando adelante iniciativas vinculadas a derechos digitales, y generando otros datos distintos desde esa perspectiva? Apliquen eso a Latinoamérica, y estamos hablando de centenas de millones de personas (para nada un “mercado” chico) que no tienen los mismos problemas que la gente de Estados Unidos (el origen fundamental de “los datos” hoy por hoy), y que también necesitan soluciones. ¿No era que Internet era internacional? ¿Por qué incluso no apuntar hacia la ONU, que ya le presta atención a Internet hace tiempo, y Mozilla tiene un currículum qué presentar? Y esto es una crítica que se aplica perfectamente a todas las organizaciones de software libre en general. Desde este punto de vista, la necesidad real de dinero se parece más a una excusa, y el problema es la línea política que están adoptando mucho antes que el financiamiento.

    Y aquí cabe aclarar también una salvedad importante. Pedirle a Mozilla que venga a arreglar los problemas informáticos de Argentina es absolutamente injusto y fuera de lugar: en todo caso, las organizaciones políticas de Argentina deberían ir a buscar a Mozilla. Pero también es cierto que el ímpetu por “competir con Chrome”, que Teller necesitó terminar aclarando a qué se refería, es una línea política que se aleja mucho de la posibilidad de un diálogo con ningún actor que no sea un leviatán económico: porque contra eso está pretendiendo compararse. Cuando el enemigo era Internet Explorer, si bien es cierto que Firefox funcionaba mejor, esa no era la razón por la que muchos defendíamos a Mozilla, sino su rol de cara al futuro de la web. Hoy, que no me consta que Chrome funcione mejor que Firefox (“mejor” es muy diferente a “se ven más rápidas algunas animaciones”), pareciera que “funcionar mejor” es la única métrica a revisar. Y no es así: eso, de hecho, está mal.

    Lo que sucede con Mozilla, entonces, es para preocuparse, porque me parece lo mismo que le pasa a muchos otros referentes de décadas anteriores. Y esto se resuelve con política antes que con software o dinero. Nuestras comunidades necesitan referentes, que tengan una visión política clara, que determinen las discusiones, y que marquen un rumbo: cualquier financiamiento y evaluación de iniciativas tiene que estar sometido a esa clase de parámetros. Necesitamos a nuestros referentes para poder guiar a las juventudes expectantes de participación en los cambios que les involucran: una guía absolutamente necesaria para que no suceda de nuevo lo que sucedió con Stallman (la brutal tergiversación de sus dichos por parte de medios financiados por enemigos del software libre, sin que haya una rotunda respuesta de referentes en su defensa). No pueden ser tan permeables a la influencia corporativa nuestras organizaciones políticas, y mientras eso siga sucediendo no hay debate sobre ningún software ni ningún dato que pueda protegernos de la próxima operación corporativa en detrimento de nuestros derechos. Necesitamos guías para la organización y la resistencia, mucho antes que financiamientos.

    Para cerrar, apenas una observación. Aquel post de Teller lo leí durante mi horario de almuerzo en mi trabajo, e intenté esbozar una respuesta rápida. Cuando intenté responderle en la sección de comentarios, sucedió que el blog utiliza Medium para gestionar comentarios; y si bien tengo una cuenta de medium (que si mal no recuerdo creé exclusivamente para responder a otro post de otros blog de un empleado de Mozilla), no recordaba mi contraseña. De modo que intenté recuperar mi contraseña, y dejé el asunto para otro momento. Dos días después, luego de reiterados intentos, Medium no me enviaba el link para recuperar mi contraseña. Por esta razón decidí utilizar algún login con servicio de terceros. Tengo una cuenta de Twitter, que nunca uso, de modo que elegí esa credencial; pero cuando fuí a loguearme, Twitter me dijo que Medium “necesitaba” acceder a datos privados, que no recuerdo cuales eran, pero que me escandalizaron; cosas como “mis mensajes privados”, o “mi lista de contactos”, o algo por el estilo, que de ninguna manera permití. Entonces probé loguearme con una cuenta de gmail, que tampoco uso salvo raras excepciones: y allí me ofreció dos links con políticas de privacidad y de recopilación de datos, que ya no leí y simplemente resigné. Para cuando hice eso, el post ya tenía edits vinculados a lo que yo iba a observar (aquello de “competir contra chrome”), por lo cuál tuve que modificar mi comentario. Pero como si todo esto fuera poco, cuando luego al otro día fuí a revisar si habían respondido a mi comentario, resulta que no aparece: publiqué mi comentario, pero evidentemente ha de estar shadowbaneado de alguna manera.

    Entonces: si para dialogar con alguien de Mozilla tengo que entrar a un blog hosteado en Github (Microsoft), poner mis datos a disposición de otro tercero (Medium), para encima tener que loguearme con credenciales de otro tercero más (Twitter o Google), y que encima todo eso pareciera haberme censurado… si en todo eso la gente de Mozilla no vé un problema político… en ese caso me temo que debemos preocuparnos por el estado de la política en nuestras organizaciones activistas.

    2019 was a dark year for Free Software. Its enemies grow stronger every day, the once clear lines that show where are its allies are slowly begin to blur, but more importantly (and tragically), its leaders are falling from grace. And all of this is happening even when GNU/Linux is running everywhere, being used more than ever, and monsters of old like Windows or MS Office are suffering the rapid loss of relevance in the IT world. Their souls somehow manage to flee from their rotting carcasses and into their enemies bodies, and so today we have RedHat as a little software toy for IBM, while Mozilla keeps on losing user base behaving like if it were a for-profit company and Canonical keeps on working closely with Microsoft from years now. That list of fallen champions is long, and techrights is full of data about it. Yet, 2019 marks the year even our institutions are crumbling, with a quiet and polite Trovalds getting older faster than ever, and Stallman socially cancelled and out of its chair: not even the Linux Foundation or the Free Software Foundation are safe places for us anymore.

    Many of us don’t know what to do about it, and so we struggle in uncertainty to find some solid ground where to take a breathe and think calmly for a moment about the future. But it all feels like quicksands everywhere, and standing still feels as dangerous as moving.

    However, if one takes some distance from all the mess, this is actually some kind of worldwide trend about mostly anything you can imagine. The world itself is in crisis, and in every sphere of human praxis we walk between ghosts of the past and shadows of a gloomy future. It doesn’t matter if you’re a physics theorist or a plumber, you most likely gonna deal with the current crappy state of affairs around you: be it financial, sociologial, environmental, or any other kind. Few things are really ok this days.

    There are several reasons why I start by saying all this. The first one that comes to mind: this is pandemic, and not really anybody’s fault (in the sense that is bigger than ANY of us). We’re just people, doing people stuff, and shit happens to us. Nobody of us has all the variables in its mind, or have all the time in the world to think about every move. That’s how life works, and what we do about it is keep on going: as simple and as difficult as that. So, in a way, we also know what to do with our loved movement, with or without the FSF, RMS, or whatever we decide to use tomorrow to mark the path.

    But there’s another, more important reason to bring all that up. Last days, there were two guest articles published in techrights (“Plans that worked“, by figosdev, and “FSM out of the box“, by Jagadees) which I want to add a few things in response. And what I want to add is some political aspects of the Free Software movement for us all to discuss. Yet, I don’t want a point by point response, but a more conceptual one. I would like to give some perspective about the future of Free Software, from a political point of view. And that’s where the rest of the world comes in.

    See, discussions about Free Software usually go over either technical aspects of software, technical aspects of FSF’s four freedoms, or technical aspects of licensing. Obviously those issues are tightly coupled themselves, and so it’s expected to happen. And I believe Jagadees was right when she/he said “we have to think from a user’s rights perspective and mobilise users of Free software”. However, I also believe she/he was wrong about the characterization of users rights, and I’m actually against her/his claim of “no need for new laws or regulations”. It’s important to explain why. And for that I’m gonna take a few detours. But we’ll be back on track later, I promise.

    As said before, there’s crisis everywhere. The world is a mess. The status quo is crumbling no matter where you look at, and so everybody embraces their ideologies of old as lifeguard rafts in the middle of the ocean. So much is like that that even capitalism itself is taking lots of punches lately, and suddenly we have the ghost of socialism floating around the cities of even the most powerful countries in the world, as if the cold war had never truly ended. Some see this ghost as China and Rusia gets stronger and smarter, but others as capitalism grows tiresome day after day for whatever the reason. Seems that having no alternative system is not really helping to get any peace anywhere. And when somebody brings that up, with all the problems it carries, from the left or from the right there’s always some people happy to tell you with a smug and disapproval face: “It’s the economy, stupid”.

    Here’s my answer to that people: “tell that to Chile”. Go on, take a look at what’s happening there, in that capitalist oasis created in the 80’s as example for the world. Their economy is great: at least from the macro indicators. And yet, 1.5 millon people go to the streets in a country of 15 million, because “fuck that, life sucks anyway, we had enough of this”. Leftist people tends to celebrate what’s happening in Chile this days. Then’s when I also say this: “tell that to Bolivia”, where they live the most groundbreaking economical achivements of their history, with non-interrupted growth for more than a decade, and all that under a socialist flag. Yet, no matter how prosperous it may be its economy or social investment, Bolivia falls under a coup like nothing, and hateful people fills the streets in a maniac racist and anticomunist spree. Then all stop smiling, and we can say: take a look at Brazil, what they did with the former presidents and what they have now; the same stuff was done in Paraguay years before. Take a look at Colombia, Nicaragua, Guatemala. Go check it out. Remember Maduro and Venezuela? Remember their imminent fall, with the US and the EU and the UN against them? They’re still there, while others have fallen. Try to explain what’s happening with your old-school economical tricks. Then you may say “well, that’s LATAM, that’s how third world works”. But if you go take a look at France, you find her full of conflict. Take a look at England, with all their brexit crap. Take a look at the extreme right-wing movements growing in France, Italy, Spain, or even the very taboo Germany. Is that the third world? And they’re not even the ones with their ex-reality-show-runner president ruling from Twitter like if the world were some kind of videogame! Have you not seen those videos of the skinny polar bears? Even the artics are a mess. And please, PLEASE, I beg you, let’s just not go to the Middle East or Africa…

    My answer to that people is quite simple: “no, it’s politics, you god damn insensible brute”. It was never about any technical issue: not economical, not ideological, not sociological, not religious. It’s always a mix of it all, and much more than that. It involves everything that has remotely to do with people interacting with each other; which is the very basic definition of “politics”. Unless you’re nomad somehow, you live somewhere, and so even if you fart is a political issue. Hell… you’ll have that problem even if you’re not living anywhere! And that’s how modern life works. Whatever you do, the other is the limit. Which is a VERY problematic limit, as everyone is different; and we already tried all the tricks in the book to try to generalize people, without success.

    Modern life also had to deal with its own inherited crap from ages before her. The discourse of method is one of those things. See, if you take a look around, everybody seems to be looking for a definitive way to mine some truth from reality that help them keep their sanity. Since Science was invented, everybody wanted a piece of its security and reliability. But that kind of truth is also what gives people faith, hope, and direction in life, so Science is really sexy. And so we HATE SO MUCH lies and being wrong in modern life: it make us feel powerless fools. However, modern life has lots of proven wrong ideas. Science itself has its own share of big bad crimes, and with all our achievements we’re still trying to figure out how to deal with each others. And guess what: there was no ultimate method for anything.

    Ideologies are probably nothing but that: another instance of science ideals taken too far, mixed up with that old need of controlling others. They (the ideologies) are of course part of the problem. Yet their role of explaining how we should behave make them special. Today, we cannot escape to think if this or that is “good for the market”, or “good for the people”, or “good for the nation”, as if those where crucial parameters. And we’re now stuck in that when we think about society.

    But enough random ramblings, let’s take from that and go back to Free Software. I remember once RMS saying that people usually asked him if Free Software movement were about left-wing or right-wing politics. And he answered this: “it actually has things of both”. Which is weird to think about in a polarized world. Yet, he was a weird man with weird ideas. In that same meeting, he explained to all of us present that our country (Argentina) was wrong about using a single unique ID for all of their citizens (“DNI”, “Documento Nacional de Identidad”, “National Identity Document”). It was really weird, as I used my DNI for my whole life, and none of us could imagine a life without it. Then he told us, whithout us asking: “I know for a fact it’s not necessary to have a single unique ID, because I come from a country that doesn’t have such thing: we use many IDs”. He explained us that the DNI was a tool that gave too much power to the state over us, which is a wrong thing in itself.

    And that was unexpected: we were suddenly talking about the power we give to the state, in a meeting where everybody was asking if this or that distro was ok to use, or if this other software was good or bad. It wasn’t unexpected for my friends and I, as we were from an humanistic university and politics is very much what we deal with every day: but for other lots of people it was strange. RMS always knew, and obviously still knows, that Free Software Movement is a political movement before any other characteristic. And yet, even when my friends and I were no stranges to political debate, RMS words were still weird, and even kinda silly: he was trying to address Software Freedoms in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which by us was too much and actually ridiculous.

    That was about 2009, maybe 2010. I myself always had all sorts of ridiculous political ideas, so I didn’t cared too much about that. But others did, and finding something ridiculous was important for them: they considered their activism a very serious thing, and so didn’t wanted to be looked at as silly crazy people. That alone caused distance from FSM and other movements there. Can you imagine trying to explain the importance of Free Software to people fighting against local hunger? We’re talking about a target people with barely access to clothes. And even speak to them about Human Rights from Free Software? Trust me, the polite ones just smile a little in disbelief and just walk away.

    A decade later, the world is full of noise. Bad noise. And Stallman “silliness” is no longer funny. And so this decade finds us troubled about the future of FSM and what to do about it. Jagadees tells us to focus in users rights, and I fully agree. But there’s a problem: that “rights” thing… I don’t think that word means what you think it means, Jagadees. See, there are big operational differences between “freedoms” and “rights”: freedoms are practiced, while rights are enforced. And in modern life, the enforcers of rights are the States, and they do that by the body of local and international law. You don’t have any “right” regarding the four freedoms whithout the GPL working as expected; which is by itself also kind of a response to figosdev.

    Rights are not the same as Freedoms. They may look alike, but they’re not the same. Here in LATAM we know the difference very well, as a result of our XX century history. Here, “freedom” means “free market”, and we have learned to hate that word. “Freedom” is written with glowing ink in the banners of neoliberalism militants here. Shitty people use that word here to justify hunger policies. That alone should be enough, but sadly is not all. Freedom’s also the very slogan of the other side of that coin: the guerrilla. All LATAM had their freedom fighters, battling oppression with militaristic tactics. I don’t exaggerate when I say “freedom” here may mean sorrow and despair. For us, the feeling over that word is the same as the one with any other lie in modern life: it makes us feel powerless and fools. And so we also have this tendency to give the state more power, so it can enforce our rights over the freedom of the people much more powerful than us. We don’t want freedoms, we want rights.

    The State is our modern tool for real power. Neoliberalists say that’s the root of all of our problems, and we (as in “me”) anti-neoliberalism say otherwise. Those are two poles of an unsolved worldwide debate. One of several, but a very heated and central one today. And the very concept of “rights” is in the middle of it. But it wasn’t always about neoliberalism. Before it, “rights vs freedom” was in the very core of the cold war, and even before there were just two poles but three: fascism was also an option during WW2, and people discussed the same thing. XX century was a giant struggle about human nature that we’re still dealing with. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights came out of it, but just after two nuclear bombs, and not before. So, the only true certainty we’ve found so far is that any spark can spread a global fire, and so we beter handle politics with care: but other than that we’re kinda left to our instincts.

    There’s a great conceptualization of it all in the videogame Civilization V. There, when you reach modernity, you are forced to choose (sic) one of three ideologies, all of which affect your game. But the ideologies doesn’t have the same name we know for them in the XX century: they’re called “Freedom” (for Capitalism), “Order” (for Socialism/Communism), and “Autocracy” (for Fascism). I’ve found this conceptualization to be amazingly helpful to explain many things on politics history, without having to end on the question of who was right or wrong. And I’ll make a little change to it: instead of “autocracy”, I’ll use the word “autonomy”.

    See, as I’m telling you about our local sensibility to the idea of “freedom”, other cultures have their own sensibilities, and so their different priorities. Today fascism is a bad word, but the idea of having autonomy is not. In the same way, if you say “capitalism” or “communism”, it will most likely trigger somebody: but if you change it for “freedom” or “order”, it reeeeealy make things smoother to talk about.

    As I was telling figosdev in a comment to his article, I believe Free Software Movement is entering the main stage of world politics, as other movements have done before: gender, race, environmentalism, animal rights, etc. And so FSM deals now with this kind of very, very complex issues: they’re, at the same time, historical, political, and philosophical issues, all mixed together. Then add local culture to that and see what happens. That’s where words matters.

    So back to Free Software, the whole systemd debate, for example, calls for an autonomy question, much more than order (as systemd and the distros has their rules of govern and core principles working fine) or freedom (which is the very deal FSF and RMS are failing to address on systemd, given that “is free software, and so is ethical”). Or the old “freedom” issue regarding what can and cannot be done with software: “if I’m forced to share my modified code, how’s that freedom?”; some acceptions of the concept may not be compatible with others, and it has very much to do with your political priorities (market economy over or under social development economy). And ethics is made of those not-so-solid principles.

    And here we get to the point where it all crosses with science. That “truth method” thing… that’s not how society, and thus politics, works. We’re sick (as in disease) with the idea of knowing the very true concept behind what’s going on, and that’s how we turn everything ethical into ideological. “Systemd is an attack on user freedoms!”, we say. Well… maybe. I personally hate the systemd ecosystem. But if asked politically about it, I would answer the same RMS aswered about “left or right”: “it’s a little bit of both”. It depends of how you look at it.

    Going on with this ideological “left or right” metaphor, I also look at systemd with the autonomy and order lenses, not just the freedom one. Thus, I hate it, but also can’t blame FSF or RMS for not bashing it, as they’re freedom people. This is important for the figosdev article. She/He also is a freedom person, but she/he hates systemd, and so she/he makes systemd a freedom afair: that makes her/him clash with the FSF, with the question “who’s really protecting freedom”; which in reality means “what does freedom really means”, and it’s the very thing I question in this article.

    Politics works different from idealized science. The latter is supposed to give you the tools to understand the universe and predict it, with the collateral damage of implying that anybody doing absolutely anything other than what’s in the theory is an ignorant fool or just a bad person (even NON-person). That’s clearly a proven idealization, used in practice to turn scientific discourse into political power. Yet, science (as well as other powers, as the one of the state and the one of the market) had to be put eventually on a leash in XX century, and that leash was called Human Rights. Why then there’s still ideological debates working the same way, as if “the true truth” about people were already there and anybody denying it is an enemy? That’s the ideological dynamics, and also what happens with most of our political discussions. That leads to internal struggle and fracture, which our true enemies (and they DO exist) feast on.

    Other movements, like gender or race, have learned to convive with different strategies (and thus different ethics), making a huge heterogeneous movement with real and transforming power. Today we all have to watch our words before talking publicly about gender or race, and feel the constant shift of our race and gender privileges. Knowing that this is an annoying issue for many, let me clarify: I’m not saying that’s neccesary a good thing, but a REAL thing. That’s real political power, which is something FSM needs in order to operate (much more than money, as figosdev’s “show me results” claim), and so we should take a look at how those movements achieved that.

    But then, there’s Jagadees calling for politics perspective in FSM, paying attention to users rights, but also telling us “we don’t need more regulation”. Careful there: there’s hardly any freedom without regulation. Many freedoms are just contextual stuff you can do because nobody’s watching you do it (like copying and cracking privative software), but that’s hardly a right in itself. A software user is subject of rights over that software (and viceversa) just as there are laws and regulation about it (like the licenses). Rights are not about doing it when nobody’s looking at you, but exactly the opposite: rights play a role when anybody can watch you do it (spacially when the state watches it). And many, many rights, as well as freedoms, may and do conflict with each other, so there’s always political struggle around them (that’s for you, figosdev).

    You Jagadees say “the laws of software freedom are already there”, but you’re wrong about that. First of all, there are many new laws constantly appearing because society changes, and you’re wrong if you think current conceptual tools to handle software freedom are going to be all-terrain and forever. That’s one thing. But also, what you have is principles, and laws are a different thing entirely. Scientific laws are absolute explanations of how reality works, unbreakable no matter what you think about them, and may only change when there are proven exceptions to it. Their role is to be the foundation for present and future techonological development. Society laws are what the states can enforce over people, and thus what people can ask the states to enforce. Their role is to be the foundation for present and future social development. None of that is what software freedom has.

    Yet, it’s close to it. It has the GPL, and other licenses, which operates under the social law. It has the four freedoms, which operates as theorical principles for explaining a possible stable relationship with a whole deal of different social and technical software phenomenons. However, if you take a look at figosdev’s article, you can see all those tools are being debated as insufficient or even outdated, in the face of what changing reality and society has to say about software freedom.

    Also, you Jagadees say “they are not building their own ethical energy companies or ethical drug companies or teaching people how to make drugs: they are politically acting for the system to change; that is the human way to do things”. But you’re missing the point that, preciselly, that very political acting changes society by new regulations, and also they actually DO create their own ethical energy companies and drug companies. Here in Argentina we have laws forcing medics to proscribe the generic drug name (and not some laboratory commercial brand name for a drug), so people can access more economic drugs made by local laboratories without having to learn either medicine or chemistry for that. And I myself studied robotics in a public and free (as in “free beer”) institution where they also teach “alternate energy” as a technical field: both things possible because of our public health and education state policies and laws, wich are the proud result of generations of people fighting for their rights against all kind of powers.

    I believe both of you are missing something. You’re both dealing, in your very own way, with how to deal with people’s rights, which ultimately brings core ethical problems about what it means to be human. You’re no fools in this, as (and I believe I’ve said enough about that) the whole world deals with those questions since no less than 150 years ago. You’re both living the right ideas for the right age. But I believe your relationship with the idea of freedom is constantly getting in the way. I feel this because of my experience with RMS, by which I can tell now he didn’t missed it a whole decade ago: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

    You see, Human Rights refer to the very human condition. It is so much like that, that even states or the very Science itself are politically forced to lower their eyes and say “yes sir, sorry sir” under the presence of human rights, or they’re otherwise criminals. Rights are about enforcement. But also, about what it means to be human. If you take a look at the UDoHR, you’ll find there many capitalist things like right to commerce, but also many socialist things like right to having a house or education or healthcare. As RMS said about FMS: “a little bit of both”. Because they were exactly about trying to deal with the human condition with something better than nuclear bombs (and please take note: that’s not an exaggeration). The world was in a mess objectively without precedent. And thus everybody agreed the response had to be political, because anything else is worst.

    Human Rights are constantly violated everywhere. But that’s also true with any other social law. It’s not about being unbreakable, but about what you can reclaim to a legit greater power in case of it being broken. And that’s not what the four freedoms do (but maybe the GPL).

    Jagadees calls for users rights. I’ve already argued there’s not such thing other than the licences. In fact, when the case appears, it’s usually stated as CONSUMMER rights, and not “user”. But Human Rights also cover a huge deal of mixed situations the four freedoms can’t address by themselves. For example, the whole systemd debate, as well as many other situations in the IT field, could be very well analized under the lenses of LABOR rights. Think about the consecuences over our day to day labor basis of those constant programmed obsolescence and forced corporate changes in software: we deal with them by constantly being learning in order to be up to date and keep doing our jobs (which we do because we’re workers and not because we can happily choose any other life whenever we like) by using our non-work-related time that then we don’t use to be with our families or for whatever other reasons. That’s close to a form of slavery, and it’s very much pushed through our throats by force. How many changes were the last decade on web development, even when 15 years old tech keeps working fine but newer tech doesn’t work well on older hardware? That’s not “progress”. How is it that some enterprises can push the idea of dropping x86 support because “is old”, yet we have entire countries (like mine) full of x86 hardware working great? We suddenly have to change our working tools, because somebody else and completely out of any regulation says so. Don’t we IT workers have anything to say in those kind of affairs?

    Of course we do. We actually do speak about it. But the legal, ethical, historical, and social context for justifying our words rarely is the UDoHR. The debates usually goes from ideological points of view such as “innovation” vs “legacy”, “conservatism” vs “vanguard”, defenders of X technical principle/dogma versus Y other (which could be stuff like object oriented vs functional), and technical stuff like that. Last time I’ve tried to debate an unnecesary change in software methodology and tools in my work, when I tried to explain the importance of being conservative in the tech we use, a guy with about 15 years less than me tried to argue about the importance of pure functions. That’s just too much distance between the two discourses. Linus ranted about quality, but he also had strong position on backwards compatibility and encapsulation (“we don’t break userspace”), two positions that could very well be called “conservative”. What would happen with linux kernel without that conservatism in place? What could the 4 freedoms do to protect us from the nasty consequences of such scenario, if such consequences are still GPL valid? What would our peers say about the technical change in favor of something newer? Well… labor rights may very well have a lot so say about such scenarios. But labor rights are very rarely related to software freedom in FSM debates I read of, and I find it symptomatic of ideological perspectives.

    We all know about the question over “what software runs this medical device inside my body”. But the question usually goes over “is it hackable?” or something like that. That’s again some technical (important) detail, that FSM rethoric focus on defending the four freedoms (access to code over security by obscurity) instead of health rights. Also, I don’t want to constantly update my peacemaker: I want it to do what it does fine and that’s it, stop screwing around with it. On health rights terms, it could be forced to be auditable by regulated people, and having strict control over its ways of handling security. The four freedoms doesn’t give you that, and even let the door open for “innovation”.

    The right to repair is another common case: if you use non-gpl software, or IP protected hardware, what good are the four freedoms? We need stronger tools than that. Tools that goes beyond the internal structure of free software, and into society itself: something RMS always had in mind.

    So, there are many examples of how Human Rights deal with software, and I believe this article to be long enough already to be speaking about it anymore. I’d like to close this by another political comparison, that I very much fear is happening right now: I don’t like when I see people using their ethical principles as social or objective truths. That’s what I constantly see doing on politics, both from the left or the right, when dealing with social problems. The constant battle between antagonic ideas or interpretations as if they were any other thing than that (ideas and interpretations) are NOT making anything better anywhere. I call for some focus shifts. First, we have to learn what to do with antagonic discourse. On the other side may be pieces of shit like Microsoft, but also sensible people with legit interpretations of legit concerns (like the whole DRM and Mozilla case, which I’ve always found much less worrisome than their incursion in the Apple ecosystem and haven’t seen as much as outcry for that). But we also have to let go the 4 freedoms and the FSF as if they were any other things than good ideas (but a church). We need to build real political power, and that’s messy: it doesn’t means to sell our souls, but it does means to deny any absolute truth and focus more on the situational friend or foe that doesn’t have to be forever in the same place. And, as reality may very well be showing us from some time to now, that should apply even for our greatest ideas, symbols, and champions. So, for starters, I call for a revision of what we’re talking about when we say “freedom” and “rights”.

    Dr. Roy Schestowitz is the runner of TechRights, one of the sites I have linked in my blog and that I recommend to everyone. I have a very high respect for his work. But this doesn’t means that I always agree with him. Last days there was a few posts regarding Codes of Conduct (CoC) being pushed by corporate people on Free Software activities. A few days ago I was asking in a comment for the CoCs itself, which weren’t in the posts. And today Roy posted this: http://techrights.org/2019/06/15/jeremy-sands-and-imposed-coc/

    So, I don’t like what I’m reading there. And I don’t believe this is good for Free Software. Let me explain myself with a response to that post.

---

    (…)

    How can I possibly guarantee you one third of anything, gender, color, nationality, religion, whatever shallow collectivist thing you’re fixated on when I select the talks blindly based upon merit.

    (…)

    Well… that’s pretty easy to answer: you change the way you select the talks.

    Is that it? That’s the whole deal? No, really… is it? Is it just conservatism and/or inability to recognize other people’s values and force?

    There is a debate about freedom on imposed CoCs. That’s fair. But that’s very different from “HOW AM I GONNA GUARANTEE YOUR FIXATION IN MY EVENT”. That “fixation” or “shallow collectivist” is pretty much what we do when we go anywhere talking about free software. It’s a very important thing to respect, and if we call it “fixation” or “shallow collectivist” then we’re hypocrites. Other people’s values MUST NOT give us a crap, or we’re hypocrites: because we take our values very seriously. We would walk anywhere, anytime, calling for free software based infraestructure in whatever event we may be called on, and then refuse to participate otherwise. That’s exactly what this guy is dealing with here, but with other values. He doesn’t like it, and that’s ok. So? Much more than “the problem of CoCs“, all I see here is “why the hell is this guy running a political event“.

    I say it again: Free Software is a political movement. Free Software conventions are political events. Those have political problems. And political problems have a great deal of conjunctural issues. Today is women, tomorrow will be another. We’ll be always dealing with that kind of issues, because that’s what we do. We’re technical people, ok: but we talk about technical issues in their relation with Human Rights and ethical principles. Which always bring problems with Human Rights and ethical principles. If you don’t like that, then it’s you who’s claiming for a safe place, and hence a CoC. “Don’t be an asshole” is a CoC, one that very much any person who likes to be an asshole will say a lot of crap about.

     (…)

     For me what was insightful was the one time when the rubber really met the road. when it comes to Codes of Conduct. And there are no winners in this story. There are only losers.

     (…)

    There’s this problem with what this guy’s saying: it’s all about money. The problem were the sponsors, and not the people. So, the problem is where the hell do you get the money for such an event. And guess what: the people with the money has conditions. OH MY GOD, THAT’S SHOCKING!

    We all have that problem. That’s why we go to work in the first time, every day, forcibly, in order to not die. And, yes, that’s corporate power. But then again, where does our money coming from is about being a political movement. We’re not on OSI’s side of the problem, but on FSF’s. If this were about “OSI planet”, nobody would care less about corporate influence, because is a declarated corporate environment created for taking distance from the FSF and doing business.

    Yet again, looking at the SELF website I can see this other thing: https://web.archive.org/web/20190427042315/https://southeastlinuxfest.org/?page_id=774

     The SouthEast LinuxFest is a community event for anyone who wants to learn more about Linux and Open Source Software. It is part educational conference and part social gathering. Like Linux itself, it is shared with attendees of all skill levels to communicate tips and ideas, and to benefit all who use Linux and Open Source Software. SELF is the place to learn, to make new friends, to network with new business partners, and most importantly, to have fun!

    See that? “Linux” and “Open Source Software”. “To network with new business partners”. No FSF, no political agenda, just “having fun!”.

    Is no surprise that, later, he says also this:

     (…)

     JS: Shocking. Somebody who claims to care about others really only cares about themselves. Sounds like they would make a great politician. (…) I felt he was duplicitous in the nature of his actions versus his proclaimed beliefs.

     (…)

    So, this person is picky about other people’s hypocrisy, and calls that “political”, but has no problem in dodging the issue of the political background behind the event itself, the political dynamics of the mixed communities involved (FSF vs OSI, in the current context of gender and women issues prime time), and from where does it gets money from, like this all were some kind of “common sense” and not complicated issues. Later on he says “I never thought about that” when dealing with gender and ethnics issues, but clarifying that he also doesn’t recognize other people’s terminology. He plays a victim role here, when he has plenty of agency: he just refuses to acknowledge it. The problem here is not about CoC, but about politization. It’s even later explicily stated in this:

    (…)

     And I would like to say that I hope this is the first, last, and only time that I have to be political in the context of this event and organizing it.

     (…)

    It’s the old “let’s not get political and have fun” pop culture in action, which does so well between technical circles (and not just IT). It’s overloaded, everywhere, with people trying to escape from politics by focusing on technical aspects of stuff. “This is about X, not politics”. That’s hypocrital crap most of the time, but absolutely out of place when you talk about free software. And I find it a serious problem between my peers. Let’s just ignore for a second the corporate world, which on-purpose install this anti-political agenda; as politics is causing a lot of anxiety and anger around the globe, people try to reach the things they love and make them feel most secure as if those things were not also political, as if those things were an anchor to a better an safer place. Is not new. And is a huge mistake in rationale, that corporate world knows how to exploit.

    Which bring us to this:

     (…)

     Here’s my real life code of conduct conclusions. The rules aren’t nearly as important as the people in charge of enforcing them. Bad behavior is already illegal. Serious transgressions should be met with legal responses. Do the people in charge have the wisdom to avoid being judge and or jury and or executioner.

     (…)

    And I agree. With observations, but I agree. I like the feeling of freedom, of not being policed around, and I want to share that feeling. I encourage catharsis, as I find it constructive and even healing; most of the time, that imply saying not-so-polite things. I found freedom of speech absolutely vital in any modern society, and every force against it is usually my enemy. I want people to be able to say what they think without fear of being treated like a monster, whatever the specific case. And I abhor speech police: I would never want to be it, or be imposed on anybody.

    But all that doesn’t mean that the freedom is absolute and there are no consequences for our actions. I also value caring over merit, and that means putting some limits. I value other persons personal limits too, and that has some deep implications. I voluntarily lower the bar of my possible freedoms in virtue of caring for others, wich may be harm by my words. And those are ethical principles, like the ones behind the Free Software movement.

    I believe all free software spaces should be dealt, in terms of CoC, more or less, as the quoted “real life CoC conclusions”. And I believe that, when someone comes and say “change that or you don’t get my money”, the proper answer is “go fuck yourself”. But I also believe this person justify it on the wrong premises. Because all that “statistical” and “non political” “information” he puts there will be nothing the day that, statistically, a bunch of morons create some drama on some convention and then, also statistically, the money suddenly goes away and then, also statistically, you gotta change those rules in favor of some corporate crap. That day, the rules should be the same: freedom of speech. But because it’s a political statement, on ethical basis, and not some statistical bullshit.

    As a closing note, there are lots of situations where we would like to be more free but that may not be a good idea. Please take a look at this example:

    When you see it, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Or this other fine example, although longer, from about 03:55, and specially from 20:40:

    So, CoCs are a problem, alright. But by no means the solution is being “non political”: that’s just barely over alienation, if at all. It’s always about the relation between one and others. And that is very much the definition of political.

    Agregando un item más a la lista de proyectos que jamás voy a terminar: quiero hacer un sistema de generación de historias. Ya deben existir un montón de estos; no podría importarme menos, quiero hacer el mío. Básicamente un motor de escritura parametrizable. La idea es implentar diferentes niveles de modelos de la lengua, y articular todo eso con lineamientos de escritura a más alto nivel. ¿Con qué objeto? Trollear a la literatura, no mucho más que eso; me gustaría poner bots a escribir textos a nombre de diferentes usuarios, que cada uno tenga “personalidades” diferentes, y que publiquen historias. En mis fantasías más sádicas, me daría por satisfecho cuando aparezca algún perejil a quejarse de que uno de esos usuarios boteados le está plagiando una historia.

    Decidí llamar a este proyecto Propp, en nombre del legendario lingüista ruso que quiso hacer una morfología de los cuentos de hadas.

    Acorde a la etiqueta de formalización de proyectos, le creo un repo: https://github.com/Canta/Propp

Tengo un profundo y plenamente justificado desprecio hacia toda tecnología cuyo único fín es quitarle derechos a las personas. WhatsApp es un claro ejemplo de una de ellas.
Se trata de lisa y llanamente de un email con otra UI; uno envía mensajes, ya sea a un grupo o a una casilla, ya sea texto o multimedia. La diferencia tecnológica fundamental es que el email es descentralizado, cualquiera puede montarlo en cualquier server, se puede resguardar de mil maneras, se puede encriptar como a uno le parezca, es ilimitadamente interoperable, es libre, es standard, es un sistema maduro, y sus logros son legendarios; WhatsApp, por otro lado, sólo te permite interactuar con WhatsApp, está centralizado en los servidores de WhatsApp, trackea a la gente, y es activamente incompatible con cualquier otro servicio de mensajería.

Es una de tantas tecnologías que el mundo parece complotar por instalar como el estado natural de las cosas. Pero es dolorosamente soprendente que gente del gremio IT, que no requiere mucho trabajo para razonar estas cuestiones, insiste en levantarlo como si fuera alguna forma de maravilla innovadora.

Hace un tiempo atrás me topé con un alma hermana, acá: link.
En ese texto, Eugene Wallingford, después de leer a D. Schmüdde y Alexander Rakoczy, nos deja su Occasional Reminder to Use Plain Text Whenever Possible. Hoy siento la necesidad de colaborar con la causa.

Hace años vengo diciendo eso de “email con otra UI”. Hoy me parece un buen momento para plantearlo como proyecto. Así nace “WrapsApp”, que no es más que un wrapper de emails pero que luce exactamente igual a la UI de WhatsApp.

Creo inmediatamente un repo público para poder darle lugar al proyecto: https://github.com/Canta/WrapsApp