Anti! Split up the tech companies! But I talk about anti-trust later…
Enshittification and “Social Media”
Pro true, OG social media, looking at pictures of friends’ vacations and babies and seeing their opinions on life and reading their recipes was amazing.
Anti Algorithmic short-form media of TikTok (and now Instagram and FB in its footsteps) and a public forum of rage-quips (Twitter and now Threads and its ilk) are terrible for society. Almost all our “polarization” and much of our society’s bigotry and illiberalism comes from the reality-distorting nuance-destroying rage-baiting nature of these things.
Their Section 230 immunities should be revoked because algorithmic recommendation is editorializing. They should be legally responsible for all content they push to you based on algorithms.
Free/Open Source Software
Pro
I am a huge believer that software should either be free/open source/whatever you want to call it, or it should be in-house software. I also believe that applications should be things you install on your computer, not hosted in the cloud---Google Docs should not count, for this dichotomy, as in-house software for Google, and honestly neither should Google Search.
I think laws should be written to try and get us to this world. Public funding should rain like streams to build competing open source projects.
”Free software,” Richard Stallman, and his followers
I am not a Free Software ideologue or absolutist. When I was young, I admired Richard Stallman. Now that I am older, I realize that he has a serious defect of judgment combined with the exact type of arrogance that will prevent him from ever learning better. I think he’s done admirable work, but his dogmas are unworkable, and of course, many of his views outside of programming and his personal behaviors are repugnant.
It’s not our fault that “free” means both gratis and libre in English, but it is---generally---our responsibility to communicate effectively in the community of the language we’re using. If Stallman really wanted to emphasize freedom in “Free Software” maybe he should’ve called it “Freedom Software” or something.
While “open source” doesn’t capture the ideology he wanted completely, it at least doesn’t sound like he’s trying to say “you don’t have to pay for it,” which does an even worse job of capturing his ideology. Of course, really, it was a sectional fight between the “open source” folks and the “free software” folks, but the linguistics of it were just absurd, and an affront to common sense.
I’ve defended some of my terminology and decisions on this blog under Copyright and Licenses: A Difference of Opinion.
Also, blah blah blah Netflix Should Become a Tech Company blah blah blah.