So, that Ed Zitron article is really good.

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Lady of Misrule

@noracodes are today’s shitty laptops actually worse than the shitty netbook we put linux on for my dad in 2010? because i kind of doubt it

Lady of Misrule

@noracodes this said i think ed is a lot less focused on hardware and operating system software and a lot more on the Internet and Web

FLOSS, FSF, GNU, etc have historically been abysmal at the web. they haven’t had good ideas and they haven’t had successful projects. if the internet was good, the fact you were accessing it thru a shitty version of Windows on a shitty laptop wouldn’t matter, because the internet is designed to scale down to be accessible on even the slowest and worst hardware. that isn’t the case and nothing out of FLOSS has come close to changing that

Christopher Wood

@noracodes

I think I appreciate and agree with this whole thread as long as we're limiting the set of candidates to people who have time and inclination and ability to use FOSS (but don't currently).

Most people don't have the option of just installing a new OS, managing it, understanding how to fix it when it breaks. Even if it's simply that they have the capability but not the time to spare from their responsibilities.

Beyond the small FOSS-capable group there's a whole massive crowd, larger than we think, of people completely at sea with technology. Working in tech familiarizes us with a world that knows what an operating system kernel is, the difference between a JavaScript button and an application button, what unsafe things to avoid, and all sorts of other things. Far more people have no idea about any of that and better computing is effectively not available to them.

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A Spectre, Haunting

@noracodes Its also rather incredible that he blames these woes on some new form of capitalism -- "growth capitalism" -- much as Doctorow blames them on "shareholder capitalism"...

These aren't some new variants of capitalism, they're just capitalism, working as intended.

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Lady of Misrule

@noracodes firefox / chrome isn’t why the web is full of bloat though. the web is full of bloat because no amount of free software can let you influence what somebody else's server sends you, or what requirements they put on letting you access their systems. (free software actually just lets somebody else's server send you even MORE code you don't want to run, because they don’t even have to write it themselves.) no amount of licensing can fix this. software projects built entirely around the four freedoms have no answer to this problem, and largely do not even recognize it AS a problem, or pretend that if you are running an open source browser, that somehow gives you power over what is happening on corporations’ servers. it doesn’t.

software CANNOT replace infrastructure and the free software movement has had ZERO interest in providing well-funded, reliable, maintained network infrastructure for everyday people. instead it is obsessed with an egocentric, libertarian model which concerns itself only with individuals and what they can self-host and what rights they have regarding their own machines.

Lady of Misrule

@noracodes you refocusing this from a conversation about networked infrastructure to a conversation about choice of browser application used to access that infrastructure is exactly the kind of missing the point that FLOSS has been doing for decades

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maybenot

@noracodes

i'd say @cwood meant that the typical buyer of the $239 shitbox will not understand a word you're saying.

i read the article more as a "this is NOT IN FACT fine" than a "this is what we should do", and also as an appeal to tech-savvy ppl, to think of those who aren't.

this message would've been somewhat diluted if he ended it with "actually, here's how one can sidestep all this shit"

i guess @pluralistic would've ended on that?

again, conjecture and all, could be wrong.

maybenot

@noracodes @cwood

also, and this /is/ somewhat offtopic, microsoft strangling the 4gb celeron with unrelenting garbage is only one side of the problem. This one falls to a debian installer, but the others don't. The shitshow that is the modern web, oligarchisation of the services, everything-is-now-an-app, or fucking facebook, aren't as easily tackled.

All of them are being fought against, but to address each front the article would be even longer.

again, maybe it should have been.

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Stewart Russell

@noracodes Ed isn't a Linux user, and likely doesn't know anyone who uses it in a professional capacity. He's only ever mentioned Linux a couple of times in his columns, and typically as the platform that Android runs on. He doesn't know the people to talk to about this — and then, what if they turn out to be annoying?

I read his experience with the Windows S craptop as an example of how hyper-monetized modern systems cause harm to people, not as the focus of the article itself

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Stewart Russell

@noracodes But has the very real, very concrete resistance been very effective? There aren't open alternatives to the platforms that he mentions. Linux is another way to run abusive software in your browser.

Ed's an opinion writer. He's not here to read and cite academic works. He runs a PR company. People pay him money to make their products sound interesting. I think he's in the "could care less about FOSS" camp

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