newspeak

No, You Won’t See Me on Facebook, Google Plus, nor Skype – Bradley M. Kuhn

Brad’s post raises some important points and these are not the same raised by, say, Steve Coll when he wrote on why he was leaving “Facebookistan.” His argument focuses on privacy and the user’s (un)willing engagement or emplacement in the market:

“Zuckerberg’s business model requires the trust and loyalty of his users so that he can make money from their participation, yet he must simultaneously stretch that trust by driving the site to maximize profits, including by selling users’ personal information.”

And Coll is right. Since FB’s plunge in stock valuation, the emphasis has been on finding a more efficient way to sell things to those who access FB using their mobile devices. The emphasis, in short, is not on making FB a better social environment but a better commercial mall. (In America, one can snarkily ask, What’s the difference? The mall is the social space par excellence and long ago replaced the bowling alley, the soda fountain, the whatever of years, generations, past. Shopping, in America, gives if not purpose to the life needing it then at least reason for its movement.)

But Brad’s point touches more on the obligation of free software. It’s an important post, and his point not considered enough, even by those whose life is all about Foss and the communities sustaining it:

When I point out that I use only Free Software, some respond that Skype, Facebook, and Google Plus are convenient and do things that can’t be done easily with Free Software currently. I don’t argue that point. It’s easy to resist Microsoft Windows, or Internet Explorer, or any other proprietary software that is substandard and works poorly. But proprietary software developers aren’t necessarily stupid, nor untalented. In fact, proprietary software developers are highly paid to write easy-to-use, beautiful and enticing software (cross-reference Apple, BTW). The challenge the software freedom community faces is not merely to provide alternatives to the worst proprietary software, but to also replace the most enticing proprietary software available. Yet, if FaiF Software developers settle into being users of that enticing proprietary software, the key inspiration for development disappears.

 

The best motivator to write great new software is to solve a problem that’s not yet solved. To inspire ourselves as FaiF Software developers, we can’t complacently settle into use of proprietary software applications as part of our daily workflow. That’s why you won’t find me on Google Plus, Google Plus Hangout, Facebook, Skype or any other proprietary software network service. You can phone with me with SIP, you can read my blog and identi.ca feed, and chat with me on IRC and XMPP, and those are the only places that I’ll be until there’s Free Software replacements for those other services. I sometimes kid myself into believing that I’m leading by example, but sadly few in the software freedom community seem to be following.

I would agree with Brad but I also am more lazy or pragmatic and use proprietary software galore, usually because others do, because it’s quite often good, because I persuade myself that there are gray areas where the use of proprietary software is not “bad” or “good” but simply reasonable. Thus, I drive a car based on proprietary technology, ride a bike that is totally proprietary in its making and even design, and use no end of technology whose patents, not to mention copyrights and trademarks, would  likely bury me, if printed out. Software is but one element. 

But just as there is movement to re-acquire the tools and objects by which we live, and to place proprietary  objects in their more historical perspective (“art,” but also “artisanals”), so too we can do the same with software, and conceive of the tools by which we make our modern life something “we” can build as well as use and exchange as well as buy and improve (or not) as well. 

World economy in freefall | Features | Fundweb.

Worth reading… and global investment (read Keynes) has been so long in coming, no doubt for ultimately selfish reasons. This, despite the imminence of global climate change (aka: massively save and largely unpredictable weather), the precipitous decline of a lot of water and food resources (and their corresponding sequestration by those coming into and already in power).

Not exactly new observations but useful.

Intellectual property: A new world of royalties – FT.com.

I grow concerned that people–typical consumers–don’t really get what intellectual property is and its importance in the world economy, both present and to come. And that it is not an academic issue without street effect. And that so much of the high-level discussion takes place in secret.

Budapest Open Access Initiative | Ten years on from the Budapest Open Access Initiative: setting the default to open.

Economics and Politics by Paul Krugman – The Conscience of a Liberal – NYTimes.com.

I’ve been following Krugman for years, now, well before he was progressive. His article on how he was reading opposing economists was actually bracing and encouraging, not because of the actual change of view the economists might evidence–they don’t, they are veritable sticks in the mud–but because he has the patience to read them at all. But this is normal. It’s in the course of academia, the requisite, that one must be able to tolerate those with whom one disagrees. The saving grace in academia is that it’s academic: it is about the abstract issues, not about the personal. One therefore can and indeed must evaluate the issues at hand dispassionately–without, that is, the embodied emotions that characterize other debates.

But I’ve always found that dispassionate distance difficult to reach. I’ve always been too involved in the argument I present. My position is simple(istic?)–I believe what I believe for reasons whose logic may be attacked and thus effect a change of mind, but which are by their logical force “true” and bound to me. 

Otherwise, why hold them? 

I miss the point–that the whole idea of the ivory tower is precisely to hold a cordon sanitaire that posits academic discourse outside of the familiar and personal. 

But then again I’m not in academia.

iOS 6 Maps Apocalypse – Business Insider.

Normally, I don’t actually laugh out loud. But these errors!

H-Net Reviews. (Reid L. Neilson. Exhibiting Mormonism: The Latter-day Saints and the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair.)

The review is good but I’m really interested in reading the study, which comes across as fascinating. The 1893 Fair was (and remains) a milestone in US culture, equivalent, at least culturally, to the British Empire’s Great Exhibition of 1851. 

I grow old … I grow old …         120

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.         125

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves

Combing the white hair of the waves blown back

When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown         130

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

via 1. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. T.S. Eliot. 1920. Prufrock and Other Observations.

Arctic Resources, Exposed by Warming, Set Off Competition – NYTimes.com.

It is an issue whose value for social thought and action has been difficult to pin down, and thus gets forgotten. It’s hard to pin in part because the melting arctic, and all that it implies regarding resources and their getting, almost implicitly involves military defence and fossil-fuel or other geo-stripping technology. There is in short nothing beautiful to look forward to, where “beautiful” implies something whose value lies independent of the natural resources, the commodities, that lie underneath, underground and soon to be revealed to those with the most money, biggest companies, largest and most powerful navies. 

That I live in Canada is not irrelevant. That Canada’s huge wealth derives mainly from its natural resources and their gross exploitation is important to any future calculus. That there has been an effective deprecation of innovative technologies, especially green ones, is to the point. Canada, after all, has programmatically removed itself from International green treaties, and it is only very locally that one sees the necessary efforts made to keep up with, for instance, trash. But that is by no means enough. (I find this frustrating. Canada could, and should, be the world leader in Green Technology. Argh.)