Homo Ex Machina

Open Source Enslavement

I started consuming online news heavily after September 11th, 2001. I was in Grade 8 at the time—my mother had been the one to call my elementary school and tell the principal to turn on the TV. “‘What channel?’ ‘Any channel!’”

I became a young news junkie after that, developing a bad habit of needing to constantly check, several times a day, to make sure that the world hadn’t again been knocked from its axis while I had been off eating, or playing with my friends or anything else unconnected to the larger world.

I recognize it now as something of a trauma response. That doesn’t mean it was all gloomy though—all it really meant was that, between the laughs, when I refreshed Fark.com I’d jump a bit at the black and yellow “NEWS” tag which preceded serious items. Yes—I was a thirteen-year old Fark junkie; back when the site had Boobies and Wieners tags.

In this way, I was definitely “tethered” to the internet well-before the internet became always available. If you want to know how much, read My Cyberspace. I wrote these essays in 2018 after the horrifying experience of attempting Jordan Peterson’s Self Authoring Suite and realizing I had no idea who I was.

Imagine that. There’s this highly recommended, very successful, clinically proven writing exercise which, step by step, is supposed to guide you into understanding your past and plot your future. And I just stare, dumbfounded, at nearly every question. Answers to the simplest questions are impossible to formulate in any useful sense.

What am hell from my past am I supposed to write about? “I sat in a chair every day, staring at a screen.” What about my present? “See above.” What kind of sensible biography takes place predominantly in a bedroom? Or on the internet? Who the hell have I ever been since young adulthood?

I mean, I was also just coming out of a very serious, protracted psychosis, so that didn’t help. Thank God I had been reading Marshall McLuhan—I can’t imagine what I would have done otherwise. He told me exactly what I had to do to find myself.

If Hegel projected a historical pattern of figures minus an existential ground, Harold Innis, in the spirit of the new age of information, sought for patterns in the very ground of history and existence.

—The opening line of McLuhan’s forward to Innis’ Empire and Communications

My Cyberspace is my chrysalis. It was a very serious attempt at authoring the ground of who I was. The complement to who I was, as gestalt. Whoever was emerging from that ground I could figure out later.

Hilariously, as I dig up these links, I see that I first published My Cyberspace on a blog I hadn’t used since 2006. How appropriate! This old blog also features what appears to be the first mission statement of what I was apparently calling “Hypermedia Ecology.”

GNU/Linux, Naturally

I open this way to establish my bona fides. I’ve been using GNU/Linux on the desktop since early high-school, around 2004 based on the first version of KDE I remember. I spent a month or two in spring trying out a distribution called Mepis, which now survives as MX Linux (ranked #1 today on Distrowatch!). But I really got started that summer—my first in three years not spent at Blackdown Army Cadet camp—wrestling and sweating day and night for the entire break to compile the notoriously difficult Gentoo Linux.

I got into GNU/Linux because, like Fark, I had also been reading software news website Slashdot.org daily. I found the proceedings of the SCO lawsuit endlessly fascinating—yeah I was a weird teenager. I think it was because I could relate heavily to the immense frustration of needing to explain computer stuff to people who absolutely do not want to learn about it. Story of my life. Judges and lawyers are often such people.

I loved reading all the informed opinions from the commenters like Pamela Jones at Groklaw who actually knew their stuff. And, twenty years ago, the ideology of online computer culture was heavily influenced by the Free Software Foundation and its founder, Richard Stallman.

This was a culture that knew that the term “open source” was a Trojan horse for big tech. This was a culture which was for the rights and liberty of end-users like you and me, not corporations and their hired programmers who wanted source code they didn’t need to pay for. This was a culture which could thrive in the lull of the tech market collapse between the dotcom bubble burst in 2000, and the release of the iPhone in 2008.

This was a culture which has since been completely misrepresented, defamed, and side-lined by the relentless assault of big money from every quarter.

The Open Source Angle

If you work in tech, let’s assume that you are maintaining some small part of a software library. It exists somewhere in relation to a bunch of other parts: some kind of “back-end cloud solution” yadda yadda yadda high up the stack. Of course, it sells because it makes things slightly easier, slightly faster, slightly cheaper.

You don’t know everything about the whole stack or the larger system—the fragmentation of division of labour means that’s all someone else’s job. It’s the power of community which makes the whole thing work—makes your whole computer work. You’re all in it together. You, personally, love to be “full stack,” but you know that even most people who claim to be aren’t really. That’s just a buzzword sometimes necessary to meet job interview requirements. You can do basic computer stuff enough to help your parents when their stuff breaks, and that makes you a tech wiz to them.

Some of the stack is proprietary to your company—closed source. But some part also involves, thankfully, FOSS.

You learned that FOSS, or Free and Open Source Software, is a giant community—and you love community! Online communities have always been there for you, and online communities of tech people are the people who get you. You can talk about your nerdy interests and hobbies with. They actually understand your world, unlike most people in your life.

For the proprietary you do at your specific job, or in your field, you can only really talk to your coworkers. But the FOSS community is the best community, because it’s global! Because it’s about software everyone can use. It’s a world of everyone sharing with each other, freely. You love sharing knowledge with the whole tech world when you throw your code up on GitHub! Collaborating to create wonderful software that everyone can use—often better than paid software! On the one hand, it’s fulfilling to make some arcane, invisible part of the world’s infrastructure better, even if most people will never know it. On the other hand, it’s wonderful to contribute to FOSS for end-user applications. To make software that even your parents can use. And maybe, just maybe, something that impresses even them.

Imagine that. Impressing them not by your paycheque—not by some some secondary measure of the value of your work—but with an actual thing you have made. With the work itself. Imagine them understanding what you actually do the same way your online community does. Imagine their opinion on it actually meaning something. Oh!

But you get the business aspect too. You know that Open Source means more eyeballs, which means more security. Faster development. Companies using and developing open source demonstrate openness and generosity, which is great marketing. It instills a culture of collaboration, and moves the world toward common standards. Personally, making open source software is good for your resumé. It’s a way to demonstrate your coding skills and your passion for your work and your ability to work with a team. You can build a reputation for yourself, let the whole world actually see your contributions line-by-line, unlike the secret, proprietary work you do. It helps you network.

Sometimes, in flights of idealistic fancy, you wish everyone in the world would switch to open source software. The benefits are just so obvious: healthy collaboration and community building, open to all programmers to learn, normalize sharing and being open, faster discovery and fixing of bugs and security exploits. And sure, maybe even knock big tech companies—like the one you work for—down a peg!

The key to increasing adoption, of course, is to make it as easy-to-use as proprietary tech. People like your parents are scared of computer jargon and arcane, abstract things. They don’t want to care about software licenses, and you know they don’t have to. They don’t want to learn, they want to be seduced—and that competition on UX and aesthetics.

Time to fix this clunky, utilitarian FOSS world and make it look good. Sexy, even.

Has the car taken up the burden of sex in an increasingly neuter world?

…It is a common mistake to regard this brand of advertising as a mere “vulgar” effort to hitch sales curves to sex curves. The mistake is made by not observing how girdles and related equipment are sold on an engineering and technological basis: “an all-way stretch and resilient control. Girdle and garters act in harmony to give you a slim hip and thigh line… It lives and breathes with you.” The body as a living machine is now correlative with cars as vibrant and attractive organisms. An Ethyl ad reproves those who look on cars as mere vehicles and applauds the man or woman whose car is “as much alive as though it were housed in flesh and blood…responding to every mood…”

—Marshall McLuhan exhibiting a Buick advertisement in The Mechanical Bride, 1951.

And What’s Wrong with That?

Sounds wonderful, doesn’t it? So what the hell am I on about, then? What’s so wrong with sharing? With making software easier to use?

Well, first and foremost, I don’t work in tech. I’ve merely been reading what people who do work in tech have been saying online every day for the past twenty years. Not what their company’s marketing material says—what they, the workers themselves say.

I’ve seen how they’ve changed.

Let’s assume you’re like me.

Like me, you bought a computer one day.

You own it. It’s your property—you should be able to do what you want with it. It shouldn’t be doing things you don’t want it to do—after all, it’s yours. Nobody else should be doing stuff on your computer without your express permission. Like guests in your house, others doing things in your computer should be well behaved.

And you certainly shouldn’t suffer the indignity of being disallowed from understanding what others are doing with your computer. The one you paid for. The one with all your most sensitive personal stuff it it.

This was common sense the whole 20th century. Before smartphones, user rights were sacrosanct. Inviolable. It took the total reinvention of the computer to create a new workforce of programmers and “app developers” to sufficiently sever any living connection with the 20th century hackers who knew that.

And no way in hell am I going to allow the forces of propaganda to condition me out of something so plainly, obviously true as my rights over my own machine.

This has been my standard for my relation to my computer since I first made the switch from Windows twenty years ago. There are a lot of things in my life I don’t have any control over—but freedom from the prisons of Microsoft and Apple and Google is one thing that I actually can do. I take great pride in it.

I mean, I was liberating myself long before I went crazy thinking about all the wacky mystic cybernetics shit this blog reveals I think I’m liberating myself from. Now that I actually do freak out about these perceived wider effects of the technology which creates our environments, my teenage-years spent learning GNU/Linux feels like pre-emptive deliverance from hell! Thank God I put in all that time reading computer manuals instead of playing sports, or playing video games, or getting laid, or figuring out who I’d hypothetically even want to lay if I was going to try.

The crazy thing is that the poorer you are, the easier it is to have this freedom. I mean, it’s Free software, for crying out loud. I literally couldn’t afford to fuck myself over with a dependency on the exploitative programs all the rest of you paying to be enslaved by.

You may be offended by my tone. Please allow me the small indulgence of the above public show of gloating. If you’re using a Macintosh or running Windows or paying monthly for “apps” to do things you know your own computer could do for free, than please don’t think I think any less of you. I really don’t. I just want you to know how you got to where you are, and what your options are.

Even if you don’t do anything else—maybe you know sure as hell aren’t going to just learn a new operating system anytime soon—you may as well throw a coin into the fountain for good luck. You should donate to the Free Software Foundation with my referral link. That would help fund the cause of collective liberty from computerized tyranny and help me get recognition.

The Long Con

So how did this massive cultural shift actually happen?

Slowly.

In the 20th century, the experts in technology came from academia. The closing chapters in Stephen Levy’s 1984 book Hackers entailed Richard Stallman hacking on Free software to compete against businesses being launched by fellow MIT alumni.

Nearly everyone who learned anything about computers had done so in school. Universities were where a great deal of the best stuff was developed—although you may be forgiven for thinking that the entire industry was birthed from Xerox, Apple and Microsoft. The internet also prohibited advertising and commercial activity until the early ‘90s, and its users largely comprised university students, alumni and faculty.

My point is, hackers in education are working on software for the love of software. Without the big tech profit motive, their self-serving opinions can actually be toward the service of their ethics. It is, after all, totally self-serving to want computers to be free, and not enslave people, if you yourself believe in liberty and want freedom for yourself and others.

Notice the lack of one-sided power-dynamic. Free software hackers will give you everything you need to be as empowered as they are, for free. You just have to take the time to learn how to wield the power for yourself.

Today, the acknowledged expertise in technology are people in the tech industry. Academics just want funding from that industry, and produce all the scary theories about cybernetic social control behind video game criticism that I wrote about in Cheating at Peekaboo. The exciting work in academia and technology isn’t in the actual tech, but the human factors.

Can you imagine a news program in 2024 claiming to have sought out the advice of a tech expert and then introducing a computer science professor? Preposterous! The audience wants someone who really knows what’s going on—someone who knows where the money is!

And the power-dyanmic is entirely on the side of corporations using their power over your computer to get more power over your computer. And you. They rent you monthly today what they sold you for a one-time fee last decade ago what they gave you for free a decade before that.

Solitaire in Windows has ads now. And you just accept that?

Liberty Stands for Freedom

The main software license which makes Free Software actually liberating is full of restrictions which stop the code it licenses from being freely copied-and-pasted into other programs.

Open Source ideology is good for the community of people who work in tech. Free Software is good for the community of humans who live on planet Earth. Open Source does nothing to lessen the power-differential between those programming the machines and those who merely “own” them, in the sense of physical property rights. Free Software leads to meaningful ownership—it restores the equality between ownership and control.

Open source is some freedom for programmers. Free Software is freedom for YOU. The end-user. The person with their own computer—programmer or not.

Free Software is less freedom for people who aren’t you to do things on your computer. And that’s why people who aren’t you, but who want to control your computer, HATE it. They’ll tell you that Free Software isn’t free because it has more legal restrictions than Open Source. But the restrictions they’re complaining about are restrictions against them having more power over your box than you do.

Where is your allegiance? To the online tech community of programmers who want to freely share and collaborate on Open Source software which may or may not be stealing your computer out from beneath you? Or to yourself, and the freedom to own your own computer, and thus remain in control of your life?

Externalizing your Faculties

Instead of buying a GPS unit, and then getting free maps, you now use Google Maps on your Google Phone. Before that, you’d have a passenger in your car with a paper map giving you directions.

In all cases, you don’t need to study a map and learn the cities you are driving through. Your sense of where you are, in the larger picture, has been externalized from your brain, into something which is thinking for you. But you knew your navigator, and you owned your old GPS. Now Google is doing your thinking for you. Literally telling you where to go. Hey, it’s nice to avoid traffic jams with live updates, or whatever—but it comes at the cost of naturalizing a relation to a corporate brand as an extension and externalization of your mind.

You used to type documents or make spreadsheets in software you bought. Now you rent that software. You used to save those documents on your computer. But now you can save them on the cloud—the cloud that you can choose to pay for. If your documents and finances are essential aspects of your life, you’ve normalized handing them over to remote servers, to some exploitative company’s computers—just to avoid the chore of making your own backups. Or to share them between computers with fewer mouse clicks.

Do you think that it’s so easy to give your life away to a giant machine because doing so is actually the most efficient way for these things to be done? No—it’s because the software only lets you do it that way, and you don’t know of or want to use all the alternatives.

And, compared to climate change or mental health crises or political oppression or bigotry, control over where your computer saves its files seems unconvincing and difficult fight to gain support for.

Well, that’s why I’m here!

How Nerds Do It

Imagine a world in 50 years where self-driving cars are everywhere and you, as someone who used to drive your own car, are always nostalgically whinging at members of generation beta about how much better it was. How much freer it was. You could just drive for no reason, even without a destination. Yes, yes, maybe you were wasting a bit of gas, you admit. Sure, you could get lost—and people got drunk too, and sometimes killed people. And yes, it was scary when you started to learn, coordinating control over this metal death-trap screaming down the asphalt. But once you got good, you felt in control. You were the car. It was you moving around the world—the world which was opened up to you!

These dumb beta kids don’t know what they’re missing. Cars may as well be elevators: door opens get in, door opens get out. Their life is a series of scenes connected by loading screens and distance may as well not even exist. Just time. How long till we get there.

And the betas are all that way. It’s not just normal, it’s ubiquitous. It’s invisibly normal, to the point that only old geezers like you even know how weird it is.

They are not in the world; they are in-between two virtual pushpins in a virtual map. They’re being moved through a route they aren’t driving, and that it’d be pointless for them to override or interrupt. What good is feeling in control? Keeping control within yourself? Why does it matter to old people, so much, to internalizing the control of the motion of the vehicle en route? Why try so hard focusing on driving a car, constantly checking mirrors and intersections and the relative location of all the other cars are etc. when you could be playing video games? Playing video games controlling an onscreen character as they move around within…

The Chrysalis

I said above that My Cyberspace was like a chrysalis. A representation of the environment, the ground of the world I grew up in. If you read it, you’ll see that it’s more than just the websites I went to, or the online communities I was in. It’s the history of the internet at large. It spans back decades before I was born, through the layers of infrastructure of the net. It implicitly it connects me to the tech community past and present. To the people in corporations and universities and, yes, militaries who designed this giant multi-layered thing we’re all now enveloped within.

Not only are computers now much, much more commercial than they used to be, they themselves have become the ground for commerce in general. We buy more and more things through them. And companies love being able to program every facet of their own business model.

What’s a business model? Well, you try and sell a thing with some quality, according to some terms, and then once it hits the market you hope others buy it. Others need to want to buy what you’re selling. Your business lives or dies at their mercy.

What mass media and advertising has done throughout the 20th century, and what online commerce is doing in the 21st, is socially construct the market to want or absolutely need to buy whatever is being sold. You, the person with the money, do not and cannot know that you don’t need to spend that money on computers. You are certain that you do. Your psychology is totally shaped by what you do and do not know, and what you do and do not know is determined by tech companies.

They are the experts on tech. They run the websites. They inform the books and docudramas. They have all learned, from their online communities, that open source software is the best, and that Free Software is full of radical weirdo zealots with purity obsessions which are hurting the “open source community.”

And all of it cultural dominance is to keep your computer out of your control. Even to keep their own computers out of their control—except for the tiny corner they hack on. To make everyone happy with that situation. To welcome more and more Eternal September waves of more surrender of one’s control over to their control. To close the “digital divide” and get Africans and South Americans addicted to phones before they learn computers were ever a tool which was liberated from centralized control.

They want to make the software you use and seduce you into using it. And all software, even Free Software, externalizes something you can do for yourself into a process outside of you. But only Free Software is restricted from the ability to turn around one day and seize control of that process, begin selling that process back to you, forever.

My Chrysalis

As I’ve been explaining, your personal development, your growth, is shaped by the outer-most layer of who you are—the layer which knows who you have been. That layer, when it is changing, becomes a liminal space. And liminal spaces can be controlled—but I think they ought to be controlled from the real world of embodied people, not the imaginary, non-existent world of community inside your machine.

There is a real world out there. But you can’t get there by being passively shuttled around in it like it’s a giant loading screen. You need to understand—even in the crudest of ways—the box you’re shoving that real world into as it exists in that world. Or else you’ll never live in the real world again—just in the fake representation of that world that exists in the magical box you will no longer, one day, even legally own.

Your chrysalis won’t be My Cyberspace, which situated my developing self in relation to a long line of innovators and researchers and hackers working in the real world. Silicon & Charybdis and My Cyberspace were grown out of digitized books and video tape. They enveloped my liminal self within a tradition stretching backward through history involving people who are now old or dead. Your chrysalis will be a video game—immersing and filling you always with an electric sense of communion with many other ungrounded people right now. At least you’ll probably end up with better fashion aesthetics than mine, to your collective credit.

I’m still working on trying to sell you on wanting to understand your computer as a physical object, and not a magical portal to some non-existent world inside of it. I’m trying, striving to find the words to make you want to understand computers as they really are.

If you think you may one day buy what I’m trying to sell, or help me sell develop it for those who will—you might start with a paid subscription. I promise to keep trying to keep it entertaining, even if you never really get where I’m going with all this.