Daniel Cantarín's Response to Alexandre Oliva's Talk on Achieving Software Freedom in the Age of Platform Decay
HOURS ago, or only shortly before we did Part 4, Soylent News caught up with the series ("Achieving Software Freedom in the Age of Platform Decay").
For those just joining us, in the the latest part, which dealt with some Argentinian politics, it was noted that some people struggle with basics and survival. To them, Software Freedom isn't an immediate priority.
From Soylent News:
Here are two related essays on software freedom in light of the current environment where platform decay has become the norm.
Lead developer of Linux-Libre, FSFLA board member, and previous FSF board member, Alexandre Oliva wrote a piece back in June about platform decay (also known colloquially as enshittification) and how to fight it through software freedom. It's from his May 5th, 2024 LibrePlanet presentation with the same title ( video and slides ). This weekend, developer Daniel Cantarín wrote a follow up addressing the nature of software freedom and the increasing communication, philosophical, and political barriers to actually achieving software freedom.
The two essays are essentially in agreement but raise different points and priorities.
Alexandre Oliva's essay includes the following: [...]
There is an outline in the above Soylent News post, followed by Daniel Cantarín's long essay, culminating in this long section:
On bullshit
Mr. Oliva, please take a good look at the next picture. That’s the face of “freedom” around here this days.
That’s what you get by saying bullshit again and again about freedom.
Which kind of bullshit? Mostly half truths, like saying that some politicians being corrupt and/or useless morons means that ALL politicians are the same, or even that politics itself is bad: “you need to break free from all of that”. Or doing the same operation with the figure of the State, then telling that all problems are fixed by private business mindsets and operations: taxes, rules, regulations… “free yourself” from all of that shit. Or saying that, because here and there are problems with some freedoms, then you have no freedoms at all and then you need to fight with nail and teeth against dictatorships, whatever that may be: sometimes it’s the goverment, other times is the leftist agenda, suddenly is the pope or some celebrity, et cetera. I feel comfortable we all know about this by now: we had the seventies all around the world so every adult knows about it, and now we have Trumps and Bolsonaros and Orbans and Boris Jhonsons and so on and so on everywhere in the world, so Milei shouldn’t surprise anybody with a minimum contact with reality and more than 20 years old. Yet I can’t but facepalm every time I see another half-truths-based article inside the FLOSS community. Take a look at this for example:
Banking institutions have sought to automate customer service through websites and, more recently, through TRApps.
https://www.fsfla.org/anuncio/2023-03-TRAppsWhat these banks are saving in offices and staff, we customers are paying for with security and freedom. They are morally bankrupt.(…)
Is this some kind of joke? This looks like some cynical brainwash attempt rather than any ethics argument. What the hell does “morally bankrupt” even means?
Mr. Oliva: my family is dying because of poverty and diseases, and I need to send them money for food and medicines. This is not rethorics: it’s a fact I have to deal with. I have my mother and a sister with Lupus, a grandmother with Parkinson’s disease, an uncle with prostate cancer and cardiac problems, and my sister’s husband had a stroke about 3 weeks ago and he can’t work anymore, all while they also have two young children struggling to end the school instead of dropping it for some informal job. It’s a disaster situation, all while we have a neoliberal goverment with no interest in fixing any problem for any poor people anywhere but literally hoping they just die. So I have to step up. And I was using web-based home bankings since about 18 years, up until every idiot in the world began using “apps” that are not web based but native to some different operating systems than the ones I use and so since months ago I was forced to use an Android device in order to be able to do online banking transactions; can’t remember why I wasn’t able to use the Android emulator for this. During those 18 years long of using the web fully interoperable thanks to Mozilla and others, from the FLOSS community I’ve been told again and again that that’s bloated and unethical and “javascript encumbered” and that I’m a fool for giving my freedom away using obfuscated (minimized) javascript and that Mozilla was corrupt and/or idiotic, without ever take a single fucking look to what are my real choices or my real needs. Again and again insisting in some fantastic ideal situations that supposedly I’m going to be able to achieve by myself by just having the right mindset and doing some efforts and sacrifices: exactly the same bullshit neo-liberalism offers to the world since decades ago.
Banking is actually a really good example, and that article is quite eloquent. Mr. Oliva quite lightly says that banks lays off people and closes offices, yet his argument implies it’s a moral problem regarding some technical detail in the FLOSS corporate agenda: “Banks are behaving evil by attempting against our software freedom”. Oh, you don’t say! We didn’t knew about it Mr. Oliva, thank you very much for telling us! Everybody spread the word, banks are not ethical entities! Yet, “morally bankrupt” or not, banks are obscenelly filling their pockets while entire countries like mine fall into a total FUBAR poverty scenario, and FLOSS people like me have no power at all to change anything and are forced to adapt to such unethical practices or literally face death: from ourselves, or from our loved ones. Let’s not even say a word about the people that lost their jobs by being replaced by software, as if we programmers had nothing to say about that, or as we didn’t also have an “ethical capital lost” by turning the blind side to the liiiiiiiitle fact that we’re part of the problem. No matter at all: all we need to think is “privacy” and “freedom”, exactly as the neo-liberal ethos mandates.
I see you had your deal with banks and consummer protection, Mr. Oliva. I had mine too. And do you know where TRApps are widely used other than banking? Health services. During the pandemic, I actually did a legal claim against both, my private health service provider and my bank, in both cases because they were forcing me to use “apps” instead of a web site. They both had websites, but suddenly stopped working in favor of “apps”. Of course such “apps” are only for Android or iOS, and I have a PosmarketOS mobile phone, so it doesn’t even matter if I even want to use the apps: I had to change my device’s operating system to begin with. And in both cases, the bank and the health business, the “app” turn was justified by this word: “security”. There’s this thing called 2FA, and this other thing called OTP, and it involves some remotely generated token, and they don’t do that web so you need an app. Security is another whole deal of technocracy inside our field, as if somehow they knew better than ourselves how to be secure in our lives no matter the context. But let’s not lose focus and come back to the TRApps debacle. So I had this conciliation sessions with both “private business” representatives in the context of “consumer protection”, and I told them I demanded to be able to use web sites instead of “apps”. I said lots of things: “I never agreed to be forced to use Android or iOS”, “we have a national ID system which works fine and that’s more than enough for 2FA as it has been since its very existance”, “this was working fine before the pandemic began and you’re now forcing me to do extra stuff while we’re all in quarintine”, etc. Of course at the end any argument matter little and they can do whatever they want because I’m powerless in my “privacy” and my “freedom” and neither interoperability nor the web were part of the goverment agenda at all. So, the legal system failed me, and even if it didn’t I would be most likely still legally fighting for this stuff while not being able to use my operating system of choice in my devices of choice, all of them very “freedom respecting” and very useless in real life. So, I finally throwed the towel and for the first time installed an app for personal usage in my job’s providen mobile phone, which has Android, in order to be able to go visit a medic. And we’re talking about the time when you could die or kill some family member by just going to the streets.
So, this organizations may be “morally bankrupt”, but they’re winning every single fight they fight while we have to use big chunks of our lives to just make things work even for them to be broken again the next week by another arbitrary system change. I understand the resistance rethoric and ethics, but that quickly turns into lunacy when others depend on us, when we’re not alone in life and we can’t just “fight for ourselves”. I never stepped into the FLOSS bandwagon “just for myself”: it was always about a better society, about “others too”. The “myself” part was about “what to do with what I know how to do”, “how to do my part”, but everything else was social, with others in mind. So I’m very tired of trying to turn my experiences into some kind of epic tale and tell people that making some software or hardware work in a marginal situation is the way to go, as it’s clearly unsustainable for the real people (like me) doing such efforts: I can’t tell anybody “FLOSS is great” if FLOSS involves dealing with all this crap. A different thing would be telling people “FLOSS needs help”, “FLOSS has things to say about tech problems”, “FLOSS people knows about what’s going on with your devices”, “we want FLOSS to be the way to go, join us”. That’s cool. But any of that can never, EVER, come with the word “easy” attached, or otherwise is utter bullshit.
Now let’s look at your guidelines, Mr. Oliva:
Don’t overlook programs that are nominally freedom-respecting, but that are deployed in settings in which someone else controls them, such as WWWRApps, SaaSS, and even Tivoized or remotely-controlled CRApps and TRApps.
Bear in mind that these programs are disrespectful of your freedom to begin with, so it would be naïve to expect them to be nice and not engage in enshittification. It’s an irresistible strategy for profit- or power-seeking suppliers, so when you device what you’re going to use to avoid enshittification, you have to think no so much of how attractive its honey looks like now, but how stinky it’s going to get later if you don’t stick to your freedom.
See what I mean? Such unbearable bullshit…
First of all, you speak of future stink yet you say nothing about the reality that every user already know all around the world: “in the future I’ll just switch to the next honey-looking stuff, and that’s it, I’ll adapt as I always do”. They know pretty well they’re mostly powerless the day they want to keep something but they have no idea how to do it, because they’re not fools but mentally sane people that knows their limits: “life goes on, no big deal”. It’s just some of us that get salty about this, and ever fewer of us wanting to do something about it. But is not about “us smart and them fools”, specially when we consider all the sacrifices we do in our path of FLOSS martyrdom.
Secondly, you speak of FLOSS here as implying that it lasts forever, when clearly it doesn’t: FLOSS is also full of stinky rotten carcasses of “the next big next thing” and “the great standard” from decades ago. FLOSS dies because big business controls not “privacy” but “publicy”. FLOSS dies because most of us do it for ethical reasons, and every real-life economical turn we do gets bashed by idealists and purists: Canonical and Mozilla are fine examples, as the FSF let them die in a fire before recognizing their death signature projects (Firefox OS and Ubuntu Touch) as top 1 in importance. FLOSS dies when we keep telling each other half-truths as if they were context-free final words of wisdom. FLOSS dies with no FLOSS society.
And thirdly, is not “an irresistible strategy for profit- or power-seeking”: it’s most likely a necesity for survival. It’s all nice and happy for us programmers to fantasize about all the free stuff we can do, all the systems and software we can design, all the ways we can change society or even do fun stuff with our skills, until money gets in the way and we need to pay the bills. We’re real people living in the XXI century, not some imaginary monks in a happy green field or snowy mountain with some idealistic computers that somehow we make work all by ourselves: we need infraestructure, we need a spare time we don’t have, we need to deal with real life non-computing problems too, all of that immediately breaking the idealistic bubble and facing us with survival problems.
Yet, here are the closing words for that very LibrePlannet talk:
After you flush and get rid of all the crap, deshittifying or disenshittifying your life, you may aim for the royal straight flush through eternal vigilance, to block future threats to your freedom.
Keeping control of your computing is a choice of pushing enshittification away, and embracing freedom, by avoiding enshittifiable crap. Interestingly enough, that’s exactly what this man, shown in the picture modded by my daughter for a speech of her own when she was 13, has been recommending since some 4 decades before enshittification was coined. Maybe it’s time people start listening. As usual, Stallman was right.
Now, even if all software we use is free, sometimes programs are abandoned and we can’t find a way to maintain them ourselves, sometimes hardware dies and we can’t find a replacement or port programs to run elsewhere. It’s also good to have backup plans, so cultivating programs and communities that can offer alternatives for features we rely on can help avoid making regrettable choices and getting back in the enshittification cycle.
Unlike disenshittifying, that amounts to cleaning up after a (sewer) flooding, unshittifying to me is preventing the flood. If you succeed at that, and manage to live an upright ethical life, you can even become a saint like Saint IGNUcius.
Oh, for the love of god… I don’t fucking want to fucking control fucking everyting I touch just because I have tech skills: I want to trust some organization (not “person“) that shows an acceptable-enough degree of skill and good faith to my liking, so I can be part of them and recommend their work to others. I don’t want to fucking have to do everything myself: it’s not epic, it’s demanding and tiresome and a titanic waste of my very little spare time; I began writting this in May and it’s August already because I have spare minutes daily.
My family with some GNU/Linux distro in the computer I’ve sent them doesn’t control shit: they just trust me, and because of that they keep using GNU, period. They don’t have the technical knowledge to control anything about their computing, and that’s absolutely fine considering their context. Eventually they get and realize the benefits of software freedom as years pass and every else’s computers turn into crap while my family’s keep working as fine as day one, and as they have zero security problems, and as they see how business try to change that from them by pushing TRApps and they don’t like it. It’s a matter of time and experience, and not about instantaneus undestanding nor agreement of some ethical guidelines that somehow should be “the smart way to go”. That control bullshit is for a very little kind of users, and for some of us programmers, and that’s it: the rest of the world is thankfully different from us.
But that’s me and my family, which is a very simple organization. Organizations tend to be very complex beasts, and to also change a lot over time: they will never be silver ethical bullets in an always changing context. And the four freedoms cannot be about “me being smart”, but about how we relate to technology. I want a healthy relationship with technology, both between myself and tech and between tech and society, and for that interoperability standards are the first step. Like the web, for example. Or like POSIX. Yeah, Stallman was right, of course, in lots of stuff: he’s truly visionary. Yet he also was very, very wrong, about a lot of other stuff, and keep trying to idealize him (or anyone else for that matter) just hurts the impression we give to any rational being paying attention to us: he’s a man with an agenda, and there are lots of figures like that. If you end up mixing our inability to choose software alternatives with the power big business have over us, and close that tale telling us that we can be some kind of saints by the magic of context-free ethics, then I’m sorry but I don’t want to have anything to do with FLOSS at all: it’s deeply discouraging. I don’t want you to tell bullshit to my family and other loved ones about ridiculous ethics that if they somehow listen to you would most likely end up in somebody dying a very stupid death. I’m not that kind of FLOSS champion you seem to try to describe Mr. Oliva, and certainly I never told anybody that I aspire to be any kind of saint: I’m ok with being good enough.
All of which leads us to the general FLOSS agenda problem I wanted to talk. First of all: we need money to live, Mr. Oliva. Money is in the “morally bankrupt” banks, Mr. Oliva. The question is not about banks being ethical or not, but what the hell are we supposed to do about them: the financial system, top 1 worldwide problem since the seventies. And secondly but no less important, that other thing about people being laid off by being replaced by software, all while we actually make software. There’s nothing wrong about preaching ethics. But it’s absolutely unacceptable to try to even imply that context-free ethics is enough.
I believe that quoted paragraph before about guidelines should have said something in the lines of “don’t decide yourself which software to use just by its functionalities, its easyness of use, its practicality: there are other serious things going on with software, talk to FLOSS people about how the software work and what are its inner and social problems; try to not feed a community of software that gives too much power to bad agents because consequences are a big deal”. Something like that let us talk to people without telling them they’re smart by using funny acronyms or asking them to repeat like parrots bullshit stuff about freedoms.
And speaking about money and banks, can anybody please explain to me when are we going to discuss openly the obviously unsustainable relationship between FLOSS and capitalism? I dare say context-free ethics are always bullshit when speaking about real life, and I very rarely see capitalism mentioned in such preachings even when such ethical guidelines usually imply big things about our relationship with money. Or forget the so controversial and divissive money: let’s just begin with the current political institutions and all the phenomena they involve. I’m so fucking tired of FLOSS referents talking shit about the State, yet they always end up going to the legal system to sort stuff out: from the very GPL existance, to Mr. Oliva’s tale about consumer protection. Yeah, in case somebody has any doubt about it: the legal system, as well as many other currently irreplaceable parts of our societies, are the State itself. Yet, FLOSS referents keep taking distance from the State again and again, as if it were somehow our enemy as well as the big business (or even worst), and no matter rather sooner than later we’re gona need it involved in the problems we fight and on our side of the battle. The State is the modern (as in “modernity”) social institution that representative democracies and republics all around the world articulate in order to sustain the concept of rights. Did you see how little FLOSS referents use that word, and instead of it keep using the word “freedoms”?
Mix the idealistic ethical hypocrisy with the forced distance from “rights” by using “freedoms”, and what you have is called liberalism: the people that all around the world seem to hate the State, glorify privacy and personal choices over almost anything else, and can keep talking for days about personal ethics but very rarely consider nor question current real-life capitalism as a context. Thankfully liberalism is old and diverse, so there are many ways of living it: I love Rorty’s take on it for example. Yet, today liberalism is a horrible problem thanks to neo-liberalism.
Is it so hard to think about national states funding FLOSS projects as part of rights-granting initiatives? It’s only hard for people who abhor the figure of the State, or people so far away from real life politics that shouldn’t be listened to when talking about society. Is it so hard to think about inter-national governance institutions funding and standardizing software, and by that vector also enforcing compatible hardware? I see lots of folks talking shit about organizations like Mozilla becuse they “sold out”, yet rarely see anybody talking about how to solve that problem: they talk about money going to CEOs, and pointing the obvious that such money should be used somewhere else, but that other place is never equally obvious; it’s easier to drop the web and talk about gemini than thinking how to protect the web against the current corporate forces aproppiating it (as they do with everything else since the early days of capitalism): as if gemini woulnd’t be also appropiated the same way in the future should it become popular; and in case it never become popular, what was the point of it anyways, other than fetichizing niche tech and/or trying to save oneself from being part of some other decadent environment by alienating from society. Of course it will be hard to think about saving the web with a mindset focused on private freedoms, avoiding javascript, and/or trying to get away from bloated media, instead of thinking about sustainable interoperability without breaking existing and working social links (like having a fully productive workforce and considering its needs, instead of forcing them to also adapt to yet another tech): any standarized subset of HTML beats gemini any day in any fight, and we just need to focus on standards enforcement instead of technocratic ethical principles. And what about other institutions? Why is it that FLOSS leaders always talk about “privacy” and “freedoms”, but almost never about public software infrastructure? Where are the workers unions, almost never mentioned by FLOSS people, in all of this mess? Why can’t we have some social network, some hosting, some identity providers, some communication infrastructure, some homologated software, all granted by our unions? Why not even political parties? Why is it always about individuals and never about unions or parties when it comes to software? What is this “apoliticalness”? I say all of this is a clear liberal bias towards individuals and against political organizations in general, as well as the state regulations in particular: when not explicit, at least implicit.
Did you ever consider that some of us actually want to be tracked from time to time? Ask any woman calling a car by night: they always turn tracking on in case they become victims of all kinds of abuse, including kidnapping. They share a link so others can track them in real time, and that’s actually a good thing. Did you ever consider that some of us prefer that the one tracking us is the State instead of some “private business”?. And, yes, I already know how dangerous it is when some bad actor gets elected, when data gets stolen, and about the impact of corrupt elements inside goverments: we’re already being hunted down here with Milei’s terror tactics, and we know very well about state terrorism. Now, did you know there’s something called “right to identity”? Yes, a right, those enforced by the National States and international governance institutions. In my country in particular we have desaparecidos: people abducted, their bodies never found, its children appropiated by the kidnappers; it’s a very big deal, where our national identity and biometric systems have a huge humanitarian role: yet RMS says in public talks “it’s evil, but if I can just tell the system I’m somebody else then it’s ok to use it”, like some bigmouth antisystem teenager, while people gives its biometric data to “private business” willingly anyways and the State gets weaker every day in terms of enforcing rights by giving people’s power to “the market”. I’m ok with the ability to turn tracking off when I decide: something that can only be enforced, by the rule of law and never by “honesty” nor any kind of ideal ethical “purity”. Yet, I believe that makes me a fool that knows nothing about “freedom” if I speak about it with any common FLOSS folk.
In the same sense: do you want me to tell my friends “don’t have quick access to sex using Tinder and such apps, because if you do you lose freedom”? I do tell them, by the way, that the reason I don’t use any “app” is because my ideological principles regarding technology, and so I don’t use Tinder and, yes, that way I actively drop the chance of having quick access to sex and other human relations through that way: yet I would never tell them “you’re a fool” for it, because I don’t suffer from any mental illnes and so I can clearly realize I’m the one against the current here and they’re no fools at all: they’re human beings enjoying the fulfillment of basic human needs thanks to popular technology, which is actually a wonderful thing. The problem here is not them being fools, but us tackling the issues with the wrong lenses (if at all).
Every basic human connection is being replaced/interfered/augmented/refactored by technological means, and so the one controlling such technologies is a big deal. That’s why I use e-mail for communications, which give me the ability to control myself my own server, and reject almost every other way of internet contact with me. Yet today I find that common folks don’t know how to send an email: they never fill the “subject” field (I suppose because of the mobile UI they use), they don’t even understand such concept as it’s not part of their lives, they seem to feel that writting an e-mail message is a different congnitive operation than writting a chat line in whatsapp or instagram, and they don’t even know the concept of “e-mail”: they belive that by that I mean “g-mail”. I’m talking about people already in their 30s, not just kids. During the pandemic, I had to fight in order to receive my COVID tests results through e-mail instead of through whatsapp: they didn’t understand the possibility of someone not using whatsapp, and that was already years ago. So I started to push for Delta Chat: it’s basically an e-mail client, but using whatsapp-and-the-likes UI. My family and friends talk to me through Delta. Yet, when I see my FLOSS referents talking about this kind of issues, the most common comment is “mobile phones are not neccesary, they’re evil because they’re tracking machines, don’t be a fool and stop using it”. It’s like talking with someone still living in the late XX century.
“TRAPps are bad”, oh you don’t say… The problem is TRAPps are mandatory, thanks to “the market” and the “private business” leading everything in technology, and us political activists and intellectuals who think and care about technology keep thinking in terms of “privacy” and “private freedoms”: we’re like neo-liberal market zealots, encouraging the problem, empowering big business, telling dissidents to go live like an ascetic monk while fighting all of this with “hard work and happy thoughts”. “The others are the fools”, we seem to tell again and again to ourselves. In the meantime big business are stronger than ever, to the point even national states can’t seem to be able do shit about them.
I refuse to be an accomplice of neoliberalism. I refuse to talk about freedoms instead of talking about rights. I refuse to preach that the State should have less power to enforce rights. I refuse to give away the concept of rights. I refuse to give away the power granted to me by democracy to be a part of the State and thus try to decide its direction on society: I AM the State. I refuse to fantasize that the problems in this text are all about personal ideas or all about personal sacrifices: I care about others too, I don’t want them to suffer, and I want a different society for them as well as for me, where technology is a force for good. We’re talking about social systems here, with complex agents and forces intertwined, and we need sophisticated organizations in order to tackle its problems. And I want RIGHTS, so I want the State there to grant them.
FLOSS people needs to check its liberal bias ASAP. Because today we are a political frontier in the absolutely critical field of software in particular and technology in general, and the second we became irresponsible by being acritical or dogmatic (“too critical”) we become a big part of the problem of technology in society. This days, being responsible is not done with context-free ethics but with social/human sciences knowledge that let us speak to our peers without talking bullshit, and with explicit political agendas that allow us to build activist communities, unions, parties. We can’t empower only very selected individuals: we need to empower social classes, etnicities, genders, minorities, majorities, nations. We need FLOSS as part of a bigger newer humanist movement that, in its complexity, could be able to actually tackle the financial system and capitalism as a whole. We need FLOSS integrated with our production systems and into our superstructures. We need to stop talking so much about the private and start talking about the public, specially publicity. We need FLOSS targeting global governance systems to enforce interoperability instead of fighting against working standars because “they’re encumbered” by promoting niche tech that will never solve all the problems the previous tech already do; we need FLOSS to solve real-life problems and not try to sell some self-righteous bullshit by telling everyone else that they’re fools because they don’t think or behave like us.
FLOSS is already successful at technical level, and it’s already on the proper side of history: FLOSS is right. It’s up to us that its political potential don’t get wasted, or worst: appropiated by big business. So please guys, I beg you: cut the bullshit about freedoms, and start talking about rights already.
The next part, which concludes this "series", shall deal with an exchange I had with Daniel Cantarín himself. It serves to elucidate the fuller context.
Mr. Cantarín has a lot of respect for Oliva, who is also South American. The two countries (Argentina and Brazil, respectively) share a border and hours ago in IRC Oliva told me, "thanks to your posts about it." So it's all amicable and well received, overall. █
