5 ms·

I think part of the problem, at least that I've found, is how do you properly articulate to and galvanize a young crown on the concept of relinquishing convenie

I think part of the problem, at least that I've found, is how do you properly articulate to and galvanize a young crown on the concept of relinquishing convenience? To adopt Stallmanism is to sacrifice conveniences like the iPhone, and kids/teens/young adults are flocking to Apple/Google. How can you get a kid to say no to an iPhone, when what you're asking him to do is extrapolate a vague and possibly non-existent threat of privacy loss? It's incredibly difficult and honestly without some real-world event to bring it home for these children I fear it can't really be done. Without an event, you'd be reliant on a cultural tidal shift -- it would have to be "cool" to be anti-Apple, or anti-tracking devices. It would have be cooler for kids to own burners than smartphones because they don't track you. There will always be a subset of people who truly understand what Stallman is saying and will probably adopt his behaviors. But to actually appeal to younger audiences and disseminate that message effectively to a mass amount of them seems to be too difficult.

hga 11y ago
Forget about smartphones for a moment; with minimal exceptions, he doesn't use the web interactively (https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html). That very much makes him a "relic", and detached from so much knowledge, the Zeitgeist of the times. Good luck getting people to adopt to this behavior, when we are so massively leveraged by what we can look up on the web. It works to an extent for him because of where he's been situated since 1970, but try telling a kid who's not in The Athens of America (the Boston area) that he should cut himself off from most of the world's useful, and cheaply obtained info, and you're not likely to get many sales.
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  I don't follow. How does supporting RMS' ideals imply you have to adopt his computing habits to the fullest? I don't recall him ever making such a claim. His is mostly to avoid profiling and non-free JavaScript, but not something he insists everyone advocating free software to do.
  - hga 11y ago
    One point is that his take on the "technological vastness of the future" we now live in has become so circumscribed that his advice WRT to is is getting less and less relevant. At another level it's making him more and more ignorant, since the price for him to do the research necessary to chart wise paths in things like FSF/GNU governance is so high. To draw back from the weeds, how can he be "The Hero the Internet Needs" when he is so disconnected from it? Per the essay, his argument has no nuance, it is to not be a part of this thing which, at least to my paranoid mindset, is indeed just as dangerous as portrayed, but which offers vast benefits for being (a careful) part of. Especially for the vast majority of us who, aren't, you know, (any more) a part of the MIT community or the like. ADDED: Maybe to draw back even further, he's not wise; that doesn't disqualify him from being A Hero of the Internet, but it's a significant thing.
    - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
      I still don't follow. Most noteworthy computer scientists, programmers and hackers have workflows that are totally heterodox or outside the norm. That doesn't make them any less authoritative or informed. He definitely is informed on the subject, too. You can tell from his constant political notes and regularly updated boycotts or calls to action. He's active enough that he understands much of the web's giants from third-party sources or observation without having to directly use any services himself. Or are you suggesting that one cannot understand and criticize Facebook or Twitter without being a regular user? What a puerile and ludicrous assertion. He's not disconnected from the Internet, nor the Web. He merely limits his exposure to it. Again, does one need to be intimately involved in their social media profiles to have the necessary prerequisites to speak against it? I further do not understand how heterodox computing habits make the free software message any less relevant. What is so grand about the web that such a conclusion should be derived? SaaS? Non-free JavaScript? He voices out against those.
SwellJoe 11y ago
Agreed. Popular culture has begun to appreciate nerds, but usually only the ones that have exhibited sort of evil tendencies at least some of the time (Zuckerberg, Jobs, etc.). So, a rich nerd who abuses privacy or profits from monopolistic practices is cool, but a nerd without a shitload of money is still just a nerd. Especially if the non-rich nerd is weird and uses weird phones, computers, etc. while treating it like it is an ethical decision rather than just being weird and isolated. I can't criticize the general public, and kids, too harshly, because while I use Linux and Open Source software almost exclusively on my laptop and desktop, I also use gmail a lot, I have an Android phone (if I could find a decent Firefox phone in the US, I'd switch), I have an active facebook and Twitter account, etc. It's hard to treat these things as inherently dangerous, and thus something to actively avoid, when the world is so tied to them. And, replacing them is hard, because it takes millions of dollars and armies of engineers to build GMail or facebook at scale. Which is kind of what I'm getting at. Without a mass movement of brilliant hackers, or at least very prolific ones, building open alternatives, we will eventually lose everything resembling privacy, developer freedom, and communities free of marketing. I'm not arguing things are worse or better than they were 20 years ago (that's an extremely complex and nuanced discussion to have, and for every stride forward, there have been dramatic losses), but there was an almost religious fervor behind the development of the Internet. Nearly everything that ran the Internet in the beginning was aggressively free or Open Source software: Apache, BIND, Sendmail, Postfix, QMail, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Perl, PHP, Linux, BSD, etc. Even the web browser, and all the other client software, started out free. It was based on a cultural belief that this thing we were building was meant to be free; a safe haven from state and corporate power, and a place where an individual had a meaningful contribution to make without needing permission. So, while there's more Open Source and Free software than ever, and more developers building more code in public, I think that religious fervor has faded, and I think it's to our detriment. I don't know what to do about it, and it may be that I miss the subtleties of what can be done about it (I grew up without the Internet, and learned it as a second language as an almost-adult; maybe there's something positive happening that I don't see or understand). But, I feel vaguely like we (anyone who cares and understands where we're from and where we're heading) should be doing something about it.
- mikegioia 11y ago

hga 11y ago

Forget about smartphones for a moment; with minimal exceptions, he doesn't use the web interactively (https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html). That very much makes him a "relic", and detached from so much knowledge, the Zeitgeist of the times. Good luck getting people to adopt to this behavior, when we are so massively leveraged by what we can look up on the web. It works to an extent for him because of where he's been situated since 1970, but try telling a kid who's not in The Athens of America (the Boston area) that he should cut himself off from most of the world's useful, and cheaply obtained info, and you're not likely to get many sales.

vezzy-fnord 11y ago
I don't follow. How does supporting RMS' ideals imply you have to adopt his computing habits to the fullest? I don't recall him ever making such a claim. His is mostly to avoid profiling and non-free JavaScript, but not something he insists everyone advocating free software to do.
- hga 11y ago
  One point is that his take on the "technological vastness of the future" we now live in has become so circumscribed that his advice WRT to is is getting less and less relevant. At another level it's making him more and more ignorant, since the price for him to do the research necessary to chart wise paths in things like FSF/GNU governance is so high. To draw back from the weeds, how can he be "The Hero the Internet Needs" when he is so disconnected from it? Per the essay, his argument has no nuance, it is to not be a part of this thing which, at least to my paranoid mindset, is indeed just as dangerous as portrayed, but which offers vast benefits for being (a careful) part of. Especially for the vast majority of us who, aren't, you know, (any more) a part of the MIT community or the like. ADDED: Maybe to draw back even further, he's not wise; that doesn't disqualify him from being A Hero of the Internet, but it's a significant thing.
  - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
    I still don't follow. Most noteworthy computer scientists, programmers and hackers have workflows that are totally heterodox or outside the norm. That doesn't make them any less authoritative or informed. He definitely is informed on the subject, too. You can tell from his constant political notes and regularly updated boycotts or calls to action. He's active enough that he understands much of the web's giants from third-party sources or observation without having to directly use any services himself. Or are you suggesting that one cannot understand and criticize Facebook or Twitter without being a regular user? What a puerile and ludicrous assertion. He's not disconnected from the Internet, nor the Web. He merely limits his exposure to it. Again, does one need to be intimately involved in their social media profiles to have the necessary prerequisites to speak against it? I further do not understand how heterodox computing habits make the free software message any less relevant. What is so grand about the web that such a conclusion should be derived? SaaS? Non-free JavaScript? He voices out against those.

SwellJoe 11y ago

Agreed. Popular culture has begun to appreciate nerds, but usually only the ones that have exhibited sort of evil tendencies at least some of the time (Zuckerberg, Jobs, etc.). So, a rich nerd who abuses privacy or profits from monopolistic practices is cool, but a nerd without a shitload of money is still just a nerd. Especially if the non-rich nerd is weird and uses weird phones, computers, etc. while treating it like it is an ethical decision rather than just being weird and isolated. I can't criticize the general public, and kids, too harshly, because while I use Linux and Open Source software almost exclusively on my laptop and desktop, I also use gmail a lot, I have an Android phone (if I could find a decent Firefox phone in the US, I'd switch), I have an active facebook and Twitter account, etc. It's hard to treat these things as inherently dangerous, and thus something to actively avoid, when the world is so tied to them. And, replacing them is hard, because it takes millions of dollars and armies of engineers to build GMail or facebook at scale. Which is kind of what I'm getting at. Without a mass movement of brilliant hackers, or at least very prolific ones, building open alternatives, we will eventually lose everything resembling privacy, developer freedom, and communities free of marketing. I'm not arguing things are worse or better than they were 20 years ago (that's an extremely complex and nuanced discussion to have, and for every stride forward, there have been dramatic losses), but there was an almost religious fervor behind the development of the Internet. Nearly everything that ran the Internet in the beginning was aggressively free or Open Source software: Apache, BIND, Sendmail, Postfix, QMail, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Perl, PHP, Linux, BSD, etc. Even the web browser, and all the other client software, started out free. It was based on a cultural belief that this thing we were building was meant to be free; a safe haven from state and corporate power, and a place where an individual had a meaningful contribution to make without needing permission. So, while there's more Open Source and Free software than ever, and more developers building more code in public, I think that religious fervor has faded, and I think it's to our detriment. I don't know what to do about it, and it may be that I miss the subtleties of what can be done about it (I grew up without the Internet, and learned it as a second language as an almost-adult; maybe there's something positive happening that I don't see or understand). But, I feel vaguely like we (anyone who cares and understands where we're from and where we're heading) should be doing something about it.

mikegioia 11y ago