If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
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The crybabies who freak out about *The Communist Manifesto* appearing on university curriculum clearly never read it - chapter one is basically a long hymn to capitalism's flexibility and inventiveness, its ability to change form and adapt itself to everything the world throws at it and come out on top:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm#007
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Today, leftists signal this protean capacity of capital with the -washing suffix: #greenwashing, #genderwashing, #queerwashing, #wokewashing - all the ways capital cloaks itself in liberatory, progressive values, while still serving as a force for extraction, exploitation, and political corruption.
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Openwashing is the trick that large "AI" companies use to evade regulation and neutralizing critics, by casting themselves as forces of ethical capitalism, committed to the virtue of #openness. No one should be surprised to learn that the products of the "open" wing of an industry whose products are neither "artificial," nor "intelligent," are also not "open." Every word AI huxters say is a lie; including "and," and "the."
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The point of #SoftwareFreedom was #TechnologicalSelfDetermination, the right of technology users to decide not just what their technology *does*, but who it does it *to* and who it does it *for*:
https://locusmag.com/2022/01/cory-doctorow-science-fiction-is-a-luddite-literature/
The open source split from free software was ostensibly driven by the need to reassure investors and businesspeople so they would join the movement.
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The idea behind open source was to rebrand free software in a less ambiguous - and more instrumental - package that stressed cost-savings and software quality, as well as "ecosystem benefits" from a co-operative form of development that recruited tinkerers, independents, and rivals to contribute to a robust infrastructural commons.
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The "free" in free software is (deliberately) ambiguous, a bit of wordplay that sometimes misleads people into thinking it means "#FreeAsInBeer" when really it means "#FreeAsInSpeech" (in Romance languages, these distinctions are captured by translating "free" as "libre" rather than "gratis").
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But "open" doesn't merely resolve the linguistic ambiguity of libre vs gratis - it does so by removing the "liberty" from "libre," the "freedom" from "free." "Open" changes the pole-star that movement participants follow as they set their course. Rather than asking "Which course of action makes us more free?" they ask, "Which course of action makes our software better?"
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Thus, by dribs and drabs, freedom leeches out of openness. Today's tech giants have mobilized "open" to create a two-tier system: the largest tech firms enjoy broad freedom themselves - they alone get to decide how their software stack is configured. But for all of us who rely on that (increasingly unavoidable) software stack, all we have is "open": the ability to peer inside that software and see how it works, and perhaps suggest improvements to it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBknF2yUZZ8
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It's time for action
Don't trust anyone under thirty
The internet is embroiled in a vicious polycrisis: child safety, surveillance, discrimination, disinformation, polarization, monopoly, journalism collapse - not only have we failed to agree on what to do about these, there's not even a consensus that all of these *are* problems.
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-just-privacy
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@JoeBeam @defcon @eff As noted in my bio, I post long threads from this account and there are many ways to get my essays if my Mastodon style doesn't suit - RSS, newsletter, Medium, Tumblr, a blog, etc. I recommend unfollowing me here and subscribing to one of those if you prefer. Links at pluralistic.net.
https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/17/so-youve-decided-to-unfollow-me/
Bad vibes only
@Da_Gut There is no policy more foolish than opposing or supporting something because someone else does. Paleocons opposed the Iraq invasion - that doesn't make it right. White evangelicals *supported* abortion until the 1980s - that doesn't make it wrong.
Where Facebook deployed substantial effort to enticing users who tired of eyeball-cramming feed decay by temporarily improving their feeds, Musk's Twitter actually overrode users' choice to switch back to a chronological feed by repeatedly flipping them back to more monetizable, algorithmic feeds.
Then came the squeeze on publishers.
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Musk's Twitter rolled out a bewildering array of "verification" ticks, each priced higher than the last, and publishers who refused to pay found their subscribers taken hostage, with Twitter downranking or #shadowbanning their content unless they paid.
(Musk also squeezed advertisers, keeping the same high prices but reducing the quality of the offer by killing programs that kept advertisers' content from being published along Holocaust denial and open calls for genocide.)
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Quite the reverse: first, Musk removed headlines from link previews, rendering posts by publishers that went to their own sites into stock-art enigmas that generated no traffic:
Then he jumped straight to the end-stage of enshittification by announcing that he would shadowban any newsmedia posts with links to sites other than Twitter, "because there is less time spent if people click away."
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Today, Musk continues to squeeze advertisers, publishers and users, and his hamfisted enticements to make up for these depredations are spectacularly bad, and even illegal, like offering advertisers a new kind of ad that isn't associated with any Twitter account, can't be blocked, and is not labeled as an ad:
https://www.wired.com/story/xs-sneaky-new-ads-might-be-illegal/
Of course, Musk has a compulsive bullshitter's contempt for the press, so he has far fewer enticements for them to stay.
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