Free Software and the Link to Feminism, Free Speech, and Activism Online
WE HAVE been very busy lately because we're still juggling with or working on several long series at the same time (and there's lots of GNU/Linux news to keep abreast of - all this in parallel). Most of the authors are women, but they want anonymity.
One very nice series touched Argentinian politics as pertaining to "freedom" and why communicating "Software Freedom" can fall on deaf or unwelcoming ears there. In short, some people can erroneously conflate the message of user-controlled programs with Libertarianism - not the same thing! Terminology matters and words mean different things to different people, based on connotations and personal/societal experiences.
After that last part and discussion in Soylent News I was contacted by Daniel Cantarín, who had further thoughts to add, some of them more personal and therefore left out from this article.
The other day we published this meme about "What Freedom Means to IBM" ("free (as in unpaid labor)").
Mr. Cantarín said: "You also said you (and people close to you) are recognizing there's a link between labor rights and free software issues. Again: not the same thing, yet not exclusive either, and my text was focusing in that relationship (among a few other things). Hence the IBM meme: it's clearly on-topic."
Mr. Cantarín went further to note the relation to entryism, free speech, and women's rights. I've only implicit permission to reproduce this and I'd decided to respond in-line while illuminating his views, sans any watering down or selective omissions (just mild correction of typos). He believes that censorship must be understood in a somewhat broader context and begins with the following argument:
And you also say that this way (by using harsh honesty) we would defend ourselves against corporate entryism. So you say entryism is an issue in our communities, something of course I agree with.You say "corporate" now, but few posts ago you were also speaking about "pentagon funded", which links the issue with other political matters as well: "espionage", "militarism", "imperialism", and so on. In my blog post I made the jump directly to "capitalism", but the road to that point is full of steps in the way.
But do you know who are the absolute champions talking about ALL of this stuff together?
Feminists.
In the past, figosdev drew useful comparisons to the attacks on feminists and the attacks on free (libre) software activists. A lot can be learned from feminists.
Mr. Cantarín continued:
There are all kinds of feminisms.Some of them say "you have to become a lesbian, otherwise you're a traitor". That's some radfems. Then there are the ones who abhor trans people. There are others talking about reversing the power imbalance in culture to a matriarchy, and in that context of course "killing men" is also over the table and small things like democracy could not care less. We could be all day talking about all the feminisms around since the XIX century, and many of them are "borderline".
However, there are many of them who are not borderline at all, and some of them talking about labor. And one of the things they've conceptualized is how capitalism is more likely impossible without "care work". By that they mean all of those tasks usually given to women "at home and not at work": from taking care of their children, to taking care of their elders, to taking care of their homes, to taking care of their husbands... all while males are "at work".
Feminists in Argentina focusing on that issue have a slogan: "all of that you call love, its called unpaid labor". Take a look at this graffiti:
The above reproduction can hopefully qualify as fair use, mostly in light of commentary.
Some explanation:
That last one has a signature: "seamos libres, seamos poderosas". That means "let's be free, let's be powerful", with a female gender inflection.See how quickly we get to "freedom" again? And to power. Feminists know very well who they're empowering, and why. That's how they achieved many things all around the world.
I said in my article my mother was sick. This year she reached 60 years old last March.
And one of the laws Milei didn't abolish by that time was the one granting the right to a paid retirement to women without all their retirement papers in rule. We need 30 years of monthly contributions here in order to access a paid retirement, which in turn is paid to the State by formal employers, and one of the many tax evasion strategies here from employers is to simply not pay such contributions: with corrupt officials not checking the data in time, you realize you have no contributions when you're about to retire. It was so common that the Kirchners eventually passed laws granting rights to the senior workers without forcing them to go through the legal system against their employers of decades ago. And the most common situation in this regards was with single moms, usually getting any informal job (with no paid retirement contributions) just to be able to survive while they also take care of their children. And so my mom, who was single and raised me while she was 20 with no education and an informal job, can now have a small monthly retirement payment: even during Milei's government, and in big part thanks to feminist organizations.
So even when there's "borderline" feminists, there's also others caring about some actual stuff happening in society to real people, which in turn has consequences over my life, and I feel eternally grateful for their work: they're a huge inspiration.
So feminists know about unpaid labor. They also know about much worse labor stuff: like forced sex labor, something male programmers like me luckily very rarely have to suffer. And they also talk, like us, about context-free ethical principles they should target, from "breaking the glass ceiling" to plain simply "kill all men". Yet the point is they actually organise themselves around all such issues, and not just some of them.
Feminists also know very well about entryism, and is a big issue for them. Everyone tries to use feminist agendas, and many males call themselves "allies" with all kinds of dirty reasons behind. So feminists have protocols, layers of security, different kinds of safe talk spaces, and many other organizational tools, all of that even before computers where a thing. And in that last regard, feminists also know very well about too-aggressive talks. They know because that's often the first alert before a relationship becomes toxic, or even violent: they know because women often take the worst part of that exchange, being powerless not having money and depending of the male's salary and home to survive. They know that fighting back is often too risky, and so the most common thing for them is adapting to that particular kind of abuse because the alternative looks even worse. They have protocols and academic works for this stuff too, which in turn also end up installing laws and discussions in societies, and in turn that leads to inspiring next-generation feminists iterating again over those problems in new contexts, and that wheel keeps rolling to this day.
There's some more discussion relating to free speech online:
With that noted, back to our exchange, if you take a look at the post in soylentnews you can see the most engaged talk is the one about someone using the figure of "violent ass rape" for explaining users engaging in platforms. And the people answering is making jokes about it. And if anyone criticize it we all know what is going to happen: most likely it will actually make things much worse in terms of violent expressions, "censorship" will be the lighter word used to defend such behaviour, and I'm betting we wouldn't even need to wait 3 posts to find someone talking about 1984's big brother. And that will be called "freedom", "of speech" in this particular case. Now try to go explain that to actual victims of "violent ass rape", like many of those feminists fighting for rights being granted (and actually winning), reading online about technology activism. What do you think is going to happen? "Something good"?In the very posts about my rants, you doctor actually mention social media being horrible: you've been expressing it since years now. And in another recent post you expose twitter's obvious double standards. But if you go look at the history of those things, you always see that very same "free speech" rhetoric, which I myself defended for years (even being all kinds of violent online myself) until also I myself realized that thing eventually called "alt-right" was using this supposed "freedom" for awful things: rather sooner than later it wasn't even "free" anymore but plain simple one-sided right wing spaces where any other rationale was quickly bullied to oblivion. You allow such speech, then the people that doesn't take it well leaves, then only the people talking like that stays, that keeps filtering or adapting people to the most extreme positions, and that's how you get the latrine we all know it's most popular online spaces. So it's not only about censorship, but also about sustainability and what kind of communities we actually want. Feminists know this very well: they need different spaces to talk in different ways about different stuff; it's not about limiting freedom, but about caring about others and about the future of what they're doing. It's not the same talking with legislators about the need of laws, than talking about being rape victims with someone they trust, than talking about organizational strategies, et cetera. Yet the moment we FLOSS people even mention codes of conduct it's an immediate scandal. And in your particular case doctor, when you faced (most likely paid and/or sick) morons bullying you and your family, you went for the legal argument: like indirectly saying "when it comes to illegal stuff, censorship is ok" (obviously implying "that's not censorship"). You even went that way in that last post about someone calling for murdering people: "this should not be allowed, it's illegal"; you know very well any free speech maximalist will answer you "so what? fuck the police, read 1984!!1!".
It's a trap. "Free speech" is not the same in the context of sciences, for example, where they fought against dogmas of old which blocked many discussions and in such contexts developed methodologies for debating stuff but also filtering "non-scientific" discourse, than in the context of journalism where you actually have to hide details to protect people (so many wouldn't call that "free"), than in online random spaces where random people say random stuff and it's obvious you should not be able to tell lies and other wrong stuff millions latter read because that hurts society badly: there are many different kinds of "free speech", because there are many contexts, and yet they all have also rules. We're not censors, and we have nothing to do with 1984's tyrants: we're just sane and decent people. Because we're decent, we honor our moral standards, and free speech is key for us. But if we also don't put some limits to real life phenomena happening to us, then we let bad stuff happen, and that means we're not so decent anymore because we're allowing awful stuff even with a noble agenda: and immediately that agenda turns into a excuse for bad actors. Once again this is a very old problem in politics. The usual core issue behind this and almost anything else in any society is who has the power to do what. So the problem is not about being "free" like some kind of absolute, but about who are we empowering by what we do.
FLOSS is great when it comes to empower users, specially the tech savvy ones. It's also great when it comes to dealing with intellectual property stuff: FLOSS gives rigorous data and arguments that even end up impacting into legislations in many nations. FLOSS also won some of its most important fights, specially inside the datacenters: it's so technologically virtuous that its enemies had to start appropriating it instead of fighting it. However, when it comes to dealing with real life societies, I often find FLOSS activism... "immature". Those "violent ass rape" comments, that lxo's [Alex Oliva] article like we were all living in Disneyland, all the stuff I ranted about and even myself ranting... it's like "dude... wtf..."
So my comments about feminism are not so much about feminism itself, even when I love it and promote its knowledge, but about how mature it is compared to us.
Which is totally understandable: feminism is much older than us. Take a peek at racial activism and you will find the same issues tackled with their own lenses too. FLOSS is barely a young adult in terms of political activism. But with adulthood comes responsibility, and that's where my rants come in.
It's also where the stuff about my tone goes too. It's not only about being unfairly rude to lxo [Alex Oliva], but also about enabling being rude between us FLOSS activists in public.
That's not ok at human level, but it's specially hurtful in a community so vulnerable to "alt-right" influence. In 2024 we can no longer say "we didn't knew this could happen" after our online spaces turn to violent speech epicenters. I empower aggressive people by talking in a too-aggressive tone to others, and I also hurt the organization when so gratuitously can talk so bad to our leaders (like RMS): the tone make that second part worse.
It's not about impose (self-)censorship or fear of the law: it's about actually caring, which in turn triggers a fear we may be doing a mistake, and so we better check out how we're behaving; not doing so is and will be exploited by our enemies, and not recognizing that is very irresponsible from us activists. There's also the fact that people is different: RMS may be good for some stuff and not so good for other, so will lxo, and even you and me. It's ok to be different and to behave different: that's key to achieve the diversity other activisms already have. The time will come when we'll have "right-wing" and "left-wing" FLOSS, "radFLOSS" people saying edgy stuff, at the same time some of us do journalism or academic work with a totally different target and tone, and others fight in legislation or standards bodies, all of us very different from each other even when sharing the FLOSS identity somehow.
And to close an already too long e-mail, there's an extra detail about this feminist stuff.
Feminism also gave birth to a young ethical theory: "care ethics".
It talks about the actual value of caring, with special focus in the "care work" scenario; but not only with the labor rights agenda, but also becoming a framework for alternative value theory discussions.
And basically it explains that we human beings do many things for love and other passional [sic] values that makes us who we are, and that should be recognized at least with the same importance as "productivity".
This isn't romanticism: it's science. It's not about what we "should" be, but about what we actually are. We do things because of how we feel, not just because we're forced to produce stuff by nature or society.
That's the main context where care work happens. And that's precisely what happens with many of us in the FLOSS world: we do it because we love it, we do it because we want to learn stuff, we do it because we want a better society and a better world, be it our job or not. Take a look a it, and you'll see most activism about anything happens to be the same. We're all brothers and sisters in this human thing, and what we do impact others. We can learn much from activism like feminisms, and the good people with all kinds of agendas most likely will need our help rather sooner than later in all sorts of technological problems. That's how we refine our touch with social reality around us: by being useful and kind to others, and not by screaming "truths" between ourselves.
The topic seems more timely in light of what we published last night about diversity. We definitely need diversity - the way to attain that is up for debate and corporations aren't likely to get us there because they have their own selfish vision and nihilist agenda. They tend to view women and minorities as another class of "consumers" to "target". Those who don't agree with them get framed as "radical". █
