Your computing device is your agent, more than any doctor, priest, or lawyer-- you share greater intimacies with it, and you have far less ability to go about a

Your computing device is your agent, more than any doctor, priest, or lawyer-- you share greater intimacies with it, and you have far less ability to go about an ordinary life without access to one. Your computers mediate an increasing share of your interactions with other people, with the world at large. You need one to communicate, to obtain essential services. You take it into your home, into your bedroom. It should be required to act in your best interests and it certainly should not against your best interests. This shouldn't be an unusual demand or even a demand at all-- it should be table stakes. Even back when the concept of Free Software had just become an identifiable thing people advocated it in terms of respecting the user. But for a long time the disrespect was largely banal-- rent seeking, over priced, indifference to features or bugs that matter to you, rules that benefit the author but didn't care about the user's needs. The fact that software could actively and intentionally work against its users wasn't a surprise-- the freedom to inspect, modify, and share the results answers those risks too, at least in theory. But back then it wasn't a common problem. Somehow software and systems that actively betray their users became common, even normalized. And in large part it seems most people never noticed.