Software Freedom in Perspective - Part 5 - When Richard Stallman Came to Argentina
Response to The bulshitification of freedom
IN THE opening part, the second part, third part and last part we focused on the Web, GNU/Linux and mobile in Argentina, based on a local supporter of Free software. Today we relay what he shared about meeting Richard Stallman (RMS) in Argentina. It might seem a bit harsh, but a discussion at the end of this series will tie things together and explain why those things were said. Daniel has respect if not admiration for the people to whom he has modest proposals. He wants to express his views on what happened to the term "freedom" in his country.
Politics
By the 2001 riots, my generation was screaming “que se vayan todos” in the streets. It means something like “everyone must leave”, and it’s referring to the politicians. All politicians from all parties were seen as corrupt incompetents, and politics itself was suffering a deep devaluation and total lack of credibility. “Que se vayan todos” felt like revolutionary, but it was actually synergic with the now decrepit neoliberal ethos -back then worldwide hegemony after the fall of the USSR-.
Of course being 18 myself, having no education at all in politics -or anything else whatsoever-, coming from a poor uneducated family, and growing up in poor neighbourhoods where all families were like mine, I could not care less for politics: media said all politicians were corrupt mindless useless pieces of garbage, except for some very serious people -all right-wingers- that said again and again we had to get a job to fix all of our problems and had to suffer one way or another with or without a job, so politics was kinda predictable and boring. What I had in mind was having a happy life -sex, love, parties, and adventures with my friends-, and fantasizing possible futures like all the stuff I was writting before about software and hardware and stuff. Being rich was some kind of social mandate, but I confess I would have been satisfied with just being right, specially when it came to discussing stuff with grown-ups that never seemed to understand what was important in life from my point of view, and that always seemed to repeat whatever stupid crap media already said first. So I guess I was already an intellectual somehow.
But 2001 was special. We were all furious: scared for sure, not knowing what to do, close to panic even, but unanimously furious. Being 18 helps in that regard. And when the total system crash came, grown-ups told us lots of bullshit as explanations. They talked a lot about corruption, yet again and again it was never their fault to put that corrupt people in charge; some of them talked about better times, all of those quickly turning into all kinds of negationism trying to explain how everything went from close to heaven to an absolute FUBAR situation -note we had things on our recent history like a genocide just about 20 years before that time-; most of them had to do some retorical contortionism in order to try to get away from the blame, and there even were the ones trying to blame “the youth” -being “lost” by rock music and violent videogames and stuff like that-. All utter unsustainable bullshit. My mind was a mess back then, but let me tell you: the most objetive, unobjectionable thing I felt, and that I defend up until today without flinching, is that I was innocent. 2001 was not my fault. I was a victim there.
So, being the grown-ups a bunch of idiots, and having to deal with a messed up reality by myself, having a drink was pretty much the best way to pass the day. Thank god for my friends or life would have been a total hell. And that was Tuesday here in the 2001 era. That, and a 20%+ unemployment rate -and when you had a job you didn’t preciselly had a life sustaining income-, was the context when I was trying to learn stuff in order to get economic autonomy first, and any kind of a future later. That was the context where all the previous tale about web, and desktop, and mobile stuff, started.
By 2003 we had Nestor Kirchner as president. He lost the presidential election to Carlos Menem, the 90’s neoliberal president and primary culprit of the 2001 crisis. But this time the election was fragmented, Menem had about 25% IIRC while Kirchner had about 22%, and so for the first time Argentina had a ballotage, wich Kirchner won because Menem deflected. But lets take a note about grown-ups being idiots, voting Menem again after having the guy 10 years in charge led the country to the trash bin. Whatever the case, good news was everyone else but that 25% was totally against the guy, and so he ran away from the ballottage.
And this Kirchner guy had a keynesian mindset. That means forcing redistribution and employement rates from the State, against the previous free trade and deregulation neoliberal ethos. It doesn’t give you any proper life, but it’s certainly light-years better than neoliberalism for everybody except the 0.1% richer -and maybe also those 25% lunatics living their right-wing ideological virtual reality-. Yet, it was more complicated than just “keynesianism”.
For starters, Argentina may had a rough turn of century, but the rest of South America wasn’t precisely disneyland either. We had Operation Condor in the 70’s, installing neoliberalism all around us by fire and blood. Our societies were demolished by the time the cold war ended, and Chile coup against Allende was actually instrumental in spreading the neoliberal ideology all around the world: Chile was the first neoliberal country -in direct and violent opposition to also having the first democratically elected socialist government-, and for decades was shown on TV as an example of progress because of their macroeconomical numbers disregarding its inequality levels. But by 1998 there was Hugo Chavez in Venezuela fighting that “end of history” claimed after the USSR collapse, and then other players came all around South America with all sorts of explicit anti-neoliberal and anti-colonial agendas. So the 2000s was suddenly a Patria Grande oriented decade.
And in such a context, beyond keynesianism and internal market, Kirchner’s agenda was to revalorize politics. He did lots of gestures to distance himself from previous neoliberal spaces, including bold moves like removing a totally rotten Supreme Court with only a 22% aproval rate, continuing the trials against the 70’s military junta, and even refused the FTAA in the face of Bush.
As I said before, I couldn’t care less, and had my reasons. I grew in a neoliberal world, so “if I got a job it was all because of my own skills, that I made all by myself and nothing but myself”, and everything else was the same: Thatcher was right, society was all about individuals. Not that I knew shit about Thatcher, but if I did I would have agreed with her. What Thatcher and her friends didn’t tell you is that, when you realize you’re not some kind of super-hero nor a world champion at anything, and you begin to suspect that maybe the good stuff happening to you wasn’t all about yourself being neither special nor right at all, then you feel like a useless piece of crap while trying to keep believing “your own ideas”.
Yep… realizing our own idiocy doesn’t feel good at all. It’s very painful actually. And as I started to suspect that Microsoft maybe wasn’t my friend back in the browser wars, when I saw my family had stuff like better food and better health and several of them actually got a job, and stuff was actually more stable and riots went away and life was kind of livable, maybe politics could have had something to do with that. But even with all the empirical evidence of the world, it was difficult to turn away from “my own ideas”. Nope, empiricism wasn’t enough: I needed something else.
What I was lacking after being raised in a neoliberal world was some basic human empathy: a thing I luckily depeloped after years of therapy, having some good friends that actually cared about me, loving some people without knowing how to deal with that, and realizing how hard could life become as one tries to just live it. The less alone you are, the more important politics become; you could call that “the inverse Thatcher equation”. So being mostly alone in my ways of life didn’t helped to get a better contact with the social reality around me.
Around 2005 I got a job attending a friend’s brother business, with that money I was able to rent a room close to my university of choice, and so I was also able to begin my lingüistics studies, all the same year. And I was SO HAPPY!. It was all very precarious, but… what wasn’t, really? We had 2001 four years before that, and all kinds of trouble everywhere, so having a job and renting a room near the faculty was an absolute triumph. That feeling lasted some time, until I realized university was much more difficult than my previous schools, and what I previously considered as being smart there it felt more like being close to a neanderthal: around the other people studying with me my behaviour felt unsophisticated and primitive, my aspirations about technology and artificial intelligence felt totally disaligned with my peers, and they were so much smarter than me! University was full of people coming from a lot of other places, many of them not just not-poor but even actually rich, and their cultural baggage was so big compared to mine… I felt a big cultural shock.
It took me years to adapt to that. I struggled between not being culturally up to the task, as well as trying to keep my jobs: by 2006 I was already working for a big enterprise as a programmer, eventually went from that room to a proper appartment, as years passed I began to have more responsabilities to handle, and studying lingüistics was always a steep demand. But I kept trying. Being working all day and then studying for being up-to-date with my jobs techs and problems and just then being able to begin studying for my very complex and disconnected from day-to-day basis lingüistics courses was, at the end of the day, very alienating. I had to see my friends less and less, had some love interests and it was also frustrating when not painful, job ridden stress was common, and I dealt with all that mostly by drinking alcohol.
But it was in the university I finally had a proper contact with politics. There was all kinds of activisms there, and eventually found my way into a group I felt I could be useful. You see, we had to deal with lots of texts there. Many of them were expensive, many didn’t have available editions in any market and had to find used volumes by luck, and so we studied by photocopies of photocopies of photocopies coming from the 80’s to our time. It was a mess. But there was a small group of young people trying to build a digital library, for the students and by the students, by digitalizing -and OCRing if possible- and uploading all of our courses texts and have a proper index and search engine, so we could download all. It was a mix of Intellectual Property, access to knowledge, and R+D into library tech, all in the same activism. This people were really something, but they weren’t programmers, and I was. I was actually in the same page as them: I believed in the same principles they were trying to push into society, and also had some ideas about it all. But it was really energizing that my own experiences in the software, multimedia, and IP fields were actually really valuable for them, even fascinating. For the first time, me being rare was actually a happy thing. But also I think that was the first time I felt “a valued member of a community”.
By that time I was already a web expert, but I was also using Ubuntu, and knew my way into all kinds of problems with computers. They were so surprised I was actually able to made ad-hoc software! Just like that, in front of them! And I was surprised of all the amazing work they already had been doing without knowing mostly anything about computers but using some software. They already had thousands of digitalizations, most of them made by hand by several students and recopilated by using tech like web forums and free storage websites. We quickly became some kind of elite group everybody heard of and loved: we gave free texts to anyone.
By being part of that group I had my firsts contacts with Free Software as a political organization. There was the Via Libre foundation with Beatriz Busaniche doing lots of activities, as well as all kind of weird groups of all sizes dealing with all kinds of problems: from communal radios to people fighting to save pumpking seeds passing through medications legislations or international women organizations. And there was also us, all talking as equals. This people also loved us for doing the right thing with books. It was very strange for me, but even then it was actually a happy thing.
Between “linux” and getting away from Microsoft was that I found Techrights online. First searching for this or that about Microsoft sucking at something, during my first steps back in 2007 or 2008, but then it started to show up every day in my newer searches about “gnu” or the FSF, and suddenly I was recommending it to everybody: “the people making this website are really well versed and organized”, I remember saying, “they must have a pretty big organization behind”.
And it was in those contexts I met RMS for the first time. I believe it was 2010 already. He came to Argentina and gave some talks, and given that we were somehow close to the organizers we ended up having dinner after the talk: everybody orderer pizza, but RMS prefered some pasta. And, man… it was a weird talk. He said stuff like that it’s wrong for us in Argentina to have a unique ID per every argentinian, because that’s a database that gives too much power to the State and to any rogue agent stealing the DB. And that was with a right-winger senator sit and smiling at his side. Bizarre. I get it, I already knew about databases and what to do with them -unlike the politicians listening to the talk-, but dismantling our public ID system was… good for what, exactly? It was clear RMS was all around freedom up to any tiny remote corner he could mine it in order to raise awareness. Weird guy. But he was one of the good guys, so it was fine.
Whatever, that matched the same time I struggled to survive in my “all linux” job, the one that didn’t end well. And at the same time, politics quickly became quite toxic when it wasn’t about just being nice with people and doing nice things. That year came out Conectar Igualdad (“connecting equality”, a goverment plan to give every kid in the country a netbook for free) for example, and RMS called it “Conectar a Maldad” (“connecting to evil”) because the netbooks had dual boot with Windows and Ubuntu, and then we suddenly had to defend Free Software and RMS against all the progressives in this country as well as the right-wingers calling us communists and pirates.
Oh, but that wasn’t even the beginning. Then RMS began to talk against SIBIOS, telling everybody that he will not come back again to Argentina until that evil system was shut down. Then again he actually came back, and when somebody asked him about the SIBIOS argument he just said that found a way in a frontier where he didn’t needed to check in so then he could come. So, it wasn’t about SIBIOS but about he being tracked himself? Some years already passed by that time, and in the meantime RMS and others were again and again and again talking shit about Canonical because Ubuntu didn’t had all the freedom it should, and it seemed that if I wasn’t using some obscure distro running in some even more obscure and inaccesible hardware then I was a fool giving away my freedom.
That kind of stuff was no accident: it was totally normal in the Free Software ecosystem, from the top at RMS’s chair down to the bottomless pit of places like “linux gaming”. Gnome was great according to RMS: no matter somehow it had a dozen forks and holy wars were ravaging communities while their devs behave like assholes, it was fine because it’s free software. Systemd? No problem: it’s free software, and so it’s ethical. While everybody was discussing -jockingly or not- about the future of desktop linux, computers were less and less in use and suddenly everybody had a “smartphone”: devilish devices apparently only useful for tracking people and nothing else, specially if you asked RMS. And in the same decade news went from trash to septic giving us from literal terraplanism to people like Trump as presidents: but just ignore all that internet media stuff and those mobile devices because it’s bad for your privacy, go get some absolutely-total-free hardware with holy freedom respecting software, and that’s basically all you need to consider about technology in society. Freedom, Privacy, that’s it. Even when our champions of old like Mozilla took the fight and made interoperability possible between mobile and desktop and old computers with newer computers, and at the same time all of it being easy to program and using langages that already had millions of programmers all around the world with also millons of libraries already existing and working (not putting workers in a situation of brutal change, but on the contrary caring about them), and all of it with third world countries in mind, and simplifying distribution by just putting some files inside a zip and that’s all you need, no sir, that was also bad: because Mozilla was receiving money from Google, and mobile phones are a distraction and an evil, and the web is also evil because is “javascript encumbered” and “has DRM”, there was evil javascript because it was obfuscated by minification, and so on and so on and so on.
By the end of the decade, about 2017 or so, I had the chance to ask RMS about it all. He came to Argentina again, gave another talk, and I asked him in public why the FSF waited for projects like Ubuntu Touch or Firefox OS to die before putting “mobile OS” as a top priority in the FSF’s list (which they finally did). He kinda accepted the timeline I was describing, but in the end just told me that don’t use mobile phones if I could, and if I must just use Replicant as OS. Of course didn’t said a word about where to get any Replicant compatible device, let alone talked about any Replicant software. In the same night he told the audience about how he uses their friends and close people’s mobile phones from time to time, because that way “the system could not know it was him using it”, and so in such case it was fine. Didn’t took long after that to get cancelled in the US.
I did my best that decade to spread awareness about free software, to actually make free software, and to try to keep on the right side of history by avoiding non-free options every single time I had the chance. Eventually left lingüistics and went for robotics: I got into all kinds of trouble trying to defend Free Software there. I didn’t used crap like Uber, avoided having sex by not using Tinder, up to this day didn’t ever sign up to any software that demanded a mobile phone number as ID (which includes whatsapp, the only way to contact some people and even institutions this days around here), all of that while trying to keep my job and my health and my family’s well being… And I’m still fighting for Free Software ideals and against all its enemies to this day. But FUCKING HELL, it is SO ALIENATING sometimes…
The next and final part (before discussion) deals with what software freedom means when a country is in crisis and some things are a luxury one cannot afford. █