Richard Stallman is the hero the internet needs(liminality.xyz) |
Richard Stallman is the hero the internet needs(liminality.xyz) |
That said, we need new voices and more voices, on that end of the spectrum. RMS has never been the ideal spokesperson for a movement, though his passion is beyond question, and his technical achievements impressive. The world of computing RMS represents is old-fashioned to the current generation. I fall in between the old generation and this new generation that has never known a time without the Internet dominating everything, and I can see where the language of RMS can seem to miss the point to a lot of younger folks. While he has always been prescient on these fronts, and I think he understands the world we live in better than most, I don't think he can be the voice of the current generation of hackers, the way he was the voice of prior generations.
The GNU project as a whole has the feel of a relic, and I worry every time I go to gnu.org and see the state of it. A few years ago, there were GNU projects for all sorts of modern things; there was Savannah to address the problems inherent in SourceForge (again, prescient...SF.net turned evil just as RMS assumed they would). But, GNU has nothing for github (there are Open Source github alternatives, but GNU is nowhere in the story).
Anyway, I don't know what needs to happen, but I know a few things: GNU is so much less relevant than when I started using Linux 20+ years ago. RMS speaks to an older generation of hackers; even though he should be heeded by the young, I doubt he is. And, I can't think of any other voices for software freedom that are as consistent or as effective as RMS and GNU was 20 years ago.
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.
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.
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.
I'm part of an older generation, and I view RMS largely as a crank. Yes, some of his ideas are valid and some of his warning seem almost prescient. But even way back when he wasn't the only person railing against injustice. I'd say that Stallman's effect has been net positive, but he's definitely not always on the right side of things.
We need not only new voices, but different voices coming from a different sensibility. We don't need an updated, modern Stallman. We need someone else, who shares Stallman's passion and commitment but not his off-kilter perspective.
RMS's response was:
> These MIT professors ought to know better than to smear us hackers by using the word "hacker" as synonymous with "security breaker".
It doesn't detract from his authority on the subject, not in the least, but is he a hero? I don't think so.
He would likely scoff at being called a hero too.
In any event, the vast majority of people will know no privacy other than from each-other's affairs. Frankly I think the advent of cheap home delivery will push the privacy issue higher into the general consciousness, and people will be alarmed that all of their purchases are now tracked and indexed.
The gap between online and offline purchasing will disappear over the next 18-36 months, and those on the forefront of this will be in a significant position of power. The synthesis of Big Data(TM) between related firms will reach new heights, and that will actually scare people.
So he certainly made significant sacrifices for what he believed in. I would not call him a hero because I think that cheapens the word. We typically apply that word to people who put themselves in harm's way for the greater good and my father, my ex, my ex's father and grandfather all served in the military. So I would not personally write a piece describing him with that term
But he did make personal sacrifices for a cause he believed in and to which he devoted himself while being crapped on and disrespected and managed to make a real difference in the world in spite of how much hostility he was met with. Props to him.
I very much respect him and I think he has done enormous service with the FSF and arguing for privacy. I also like using the cloud and think a lot about this: secure and private personal and small group clouds. Not too difficult to set up for storage, email, web apps - but conveniences like Google Now are an imposibility unless a very large developer community contributed.
I don't know in what world he lives, but it's not real. Like most people here, he values privacy way too much and doesn't seem to realize that we need as much information as possible about everything (including people) to make educated decisions as a society.
He's socially inept, and in no way a hero.
What I meant by paranoid is that he refuses for the world to have access to information about himself for who knows what reasons.
In retrospect, I should have used "insane" or "selfish".
Well, not in my view. There are political views in which the efficiency of society trumps all.
Greenblatt noted that he was out-hacking the whole bunch of them. Gosper called it incredible.
When Stallman finally couldn't keep up, he set a new goal that he hoped would solve the problem permanently. GNU.
There is, of course, the other side of the story, although I find the dismissal of the complexity of the features RMS was matching a little disingenuous - how complex they were seems irrelevant compared to the fact that he was doing it alone and Symbolics was doing it with a bunch of world-class hackers: https://web.archive.org/web/20080112153822/http://dlweinreb....
[1] Some people on HN define "hacker" as "person who can code". The definition in use here is older.
Out of curiosity, whom do you consider to actually be a hero in the modern day?
Do you mean the FSF, or the preceding GNU project? Because we were roommates when he founded the latter, and he most assuredly wan't homeless then. His willingness to be "homeless" later might in part be an artifact of a couple of kids playing with matches and kerosene burning that building down (in a not so good part of Cambridge, MA) and his losing his worldly possessions. Not that he was, to my observation, very materialistic.
As for "being crapped on and disrespected", well, if you've spent enough time with him, you'll understand why that was a common reaction, he's ... a difficult person, and is proud of ignoring a number of social norms, including ones that tend to keep a person and their friends alive.
But a lot of it after the GNU/FSF started was due to his extreme abrasiveness towards many people who didn't entirely buy into his mission. We were, for example, called "Software Hoarders" (this, while working for for Unipress, the legal licensee of the version of Emacs he stole to start Gnu Emacs, and we ran on a "gated open source" model, if the licencor of a piece of software agreed, you got a copy of the source, you just couldn't distribute it, but you could share patches with other customers). His regular imputation of ill will when there is none (well, to start with), his gross distortions of the historical record (especially as seen in Levy's Hackers, but also see GNU/Linux) ... they lose him a lot of support he might otherwise get.
I read his biography, but I don't follow his work or life very closely. So I used a vague, hand-wavy term because I have a vague, hand-wavy understanding of it all. Therefore, I cannot clarify.
As for "being crapped on and disrespected", well, if you've spent enough time with him, you'll understand why that was a common reaction, he's ... a difficult person
Yeah, I get called "difficult" all the time. I have a life threatening, incurable medical condition. I am pretty laid back, inclined to go along, to get along, and a conflict avoider. But, unfortunately, in order to be socially acceptable, I would need to politely die a slow gruesome death. Failing to go along with that plan for me has caused me shitloads of social problems.
Thus, I am inclined to be sympathetic to rms. Many of his predictions have come true. There is no telling how much more problematic things would be had he not stuck to his guns.
"Difficult" sometimes just means you aren't going along with social norms. If you firmly believe those social norms to be a very serious problem, it is foolish to go along with them. In my experience, no matter how politely you decline to go along with them, and no matter how compelling your reasons for politely declining, simply declining will get you a fuck ton of backwash.
Weirdly, the US has become a place where anyone joining the military is now a 'hero' (and military opponents are never described so graciously). It used to be that you had to show uncommon valour in the military to be called a hero; now it's just signing up that gets you the appellation.
This is a blaming statement and is judgemental. The point here is that someone else thinks he's a hero. Heroism implies bravery, which is an emotion. You don't get to speak for other's feelings or emotional responses (like mine) in that regard just because he was homeless and your relatives fought in a war. Those arguments are biases and ad hominem in nature. I would note that you will be unable to present an equivalent valid logical argument without the introduction of biases. The biases are the 'tell' for the misapplied logic.
Heros don't need to be well spoken, socially normal or face danger. All they need is to display the characteristics of a hero, which includes someone who, from a position of weakness, displays courage. This describes RMS perfectly given the guy has stood by what he believed (courage) while being homeless (a position of weakness).
I didn't say other people were wrong to call him a hero. I said I would be unlikely to use the word and explained why. I think you have misread and mischaracterized my remark.
And if rms is not a hero, then who is?
I already stated what makes a hero in my mind. My father fought in two wars. He got a purple heart. I am currently homeless, and literally out on the street. So I am experiencing things far harder than what rms endured. Hardship and heroism are not the same thing.
That's just my opinion. If you see him as a hero, you are entitled to your opinion. Having known people who did put themselves in harm's way and paid a real high price for it, I can't say that sleeping in a hacker space rates the same as what it takes to get a purple heart.
Anyway, I am not planning to argue this further. I already responded to a different reply making much the same point you made. So I am not sure why you are repeating what was basically already said to me.
That's why I think you're right. Without a growing movement of FOSS developers committed to making both software AND hardware, there won't be the necessary alternatives that regular people need to satisfy their underlying desire for the conveniences they're used to.
Each of these services would have to be dropped or replaced for you to consider yourself a full Stallmanite:
- Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat
- Gmail, Outlook
- Google Calendar
- Google Maps, Mapquest, Bing maps
- Mac computers, any non-Gnu laptop or desktop
- Dropbox, iCloud, Skydrive, G-Drive
- Google search
- iPhones, Android phones
So what do you do, build compelling alternatives? Or do you try to incite the masses on the dangers of privacy loss? It doesn't seem like option #2 has been working very well, but it actually does start to feel like #1 is developing. I'm starting to see more attempts at FOSS hardware on things like Indiegogo/Kickstarter. Maybe the secret isn't to replace each service, but to allow users to continuing using them more anonymously.
This is kind of problematic and exactly why rms insists that we call it "free software" instead of "open source". The big goal shouldn't be to be a better business, but a better ethic.
I attribute this at least in part to the dot.com bust. FOSS, commodity x86s, etc. became a necessary virtue when you couldn't get VCs to shovel enough money to you to buy the expensive closed source stuff.
Did anyone use MySQL because it was a better database than Oracle? (OK, it was probably easier to administer, so substitute DB2 if you wish.)
Give it away.
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.
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.
More like "Do whatever I feel like, whenever I feel like, without regards for consequences, including lethal harm to bystanders." The latter lost him more than a few friends/acquaintances.
Which biography would you be referring to?
Sorry, I don't mean to dismiss your observation that he is difficult. But I see it as more complicated than "he is just difficult."
My oldest son is genuinely difficult, but I get along well with him. One of the reasons I get along well with him is that I recognize that his IQ is higher than mine, so unless I have a specific objection, I have a tendency to go along with what he wants because it tends to get better results, even though my default personality is risk averse and his default personality is risk seeking, so he really makes me crazy at times. I have long experience with dealing with difficult people and doing so in a manner that makes them easier to deal with rather than making them more intractable. Most of the time, difficult people are dealt with in a manner that causes them to dig in their heels.
So while I don't doubt that Stallman can be genuinely difficult, I also don't doubt that the degree to which he has been given crap while being repeatedly proven correct most likely only makes his bad habits intractable when they didn't necessarily have to become so. My son gets real respect from me on things where he is more knowledgeable than I am and he gives me real respect and defers to me on subjects where my knowledge is superior. If I just crapped on him all the time, there would not be a two way street of respect.
It gets really difficult to put a stop to a negative social dynamic once it gets going. At this point, it is probably impossible to break rms of his bad habits because, from his perspective, it probably never seems to matter if he is right, if he is polite, etc. It does bad things to someone's personality to be consistently right and get no respect because people do not like what you are saying. I have had a taste of that, so I have sympathy for his side.
I'm sorry that probably makes no sense to you.
Your eldest son may be a risk taker, but does that go so far as (truly futilely) hitting on a gangster's moll while eating with a group of innocents who didn't sign up for that level of danger when they went for a normally routine run to the favorite late night Cantonese restaurant?
As for his "intractable" "bad habits", they were set in stone long before GNU/FSF, and as for respect ... hmmm, I don't know, he's weird about that. But not very flexible (I'm not the best person judge all that, seeing as how you grant me a degree of respect or else, and he did that).
My son probably qualifies as ASD, though he has no formal diagnosis.
I am sure I wouldn't want to be within 30 feet of Stallman. I did not watch the video of him eating something off his foot, but I have a compromised immune system. For me, cleanliness is extremely important and I will end relationships over people being unable to abide by my (necessary) standards of cleanliness.
There is probably little point in me trying to convince you of my view of how social dynamics work. Perhaps we should leave this for now.
:-)
You can safely assume it's accepted and that I'd be happy to, e.g., share a meal with you at a restaurant with high levels of cleanliness (assuming they even exist, or do you e.g. depend on cuisines where they do a good enough job of killing the food dead?).
I think the social problems typical of high IQ can be significantly ameliorated, but my private parenting blog only has two subscribers and life has gotten in the way of me updating it this past month. So my views are unlikely to start changing things anytime soon, if ever.
Best.
And, yeah, I have no idea what things were socially for him before he attended Harvard, and that can be an ... unusual place for the really intelligent, very possibly one reason he gravitated to MIT, although MIT being one of the world's top 4 CS schools, and the world's #1 engineering school, and Harvard being ... not so good in those two areas is almost certainly a bigger part. I only know of RMS as of when he showed up to MIT ... and there, he was an outlier amongst a whole bunch of outliers. But no apparent co-morbidities (is high intelligence a morbidity? I sometimes wonder :-) besides perhaps ASD, which really wasn't a "thing" back then and which I have essentially no knowledge of.
But certainly his fairly fixed by then personality is consistent with your hypothesis. He certainly fits into the Sigma category in this fascinating socio-sexual hierarchy essay: http://alphagameplan.blogspot.com/2011/03/socio-sexual-hiera... and you don't get there without ... well, as the essay mentions at the end, "Sigmas usually acquired their outsider status the hard way; one seldom becomes immune to the social hierarchy by virtue of mass popularity in one's childhood."