[libreplanet-discuss] "Internet of Broken Things" on reddit.com is a distraction

[J.B. Nicholson-Owens]

rysiek wrote:
> Rather, "Internet of Broken Things":
> http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/26722r/the_internet_of_broken_things/
>
> But yes, the question of retaining software freedom in a world of computing
> things is a valid one, and a hard one. There is no silver bullet, and the
> market will not solve this one (not that it solved any other important
> problems). I think our best bet is (*shudders*) regulation.

It seems to me that that reddit.com discussion all too quickly gets 
distracted in a side issue of complexity. People have long lived with 
complexity greater than most people understand (depending on what you 
look at, humans have never really understood everything we work with). 
But this complexity discussion quickly distracts attention away from 
treating each other ethically. Perhaps that's the real value of the 
complexity argument if you look at this from an "open source" 
perspective (the open source movement was founded to distract attention 
away from software freedom in order to speak to businesses[1]). We don't 
need to understand everything so deeply to understand how to treat each 
other ethically. In software, software freedom is a prerequisite for 
ethical treatment (I imagine I hardly need to explain that here on 
libreplanet-discuss).

The problem of the NSA scandals and Snowden's revelations isn't that 
things are more broken than we realize. It's that people are being spied 
on constantly in ways they don't realize and spying has long been known 
to have powerfully ugly consequences. The spying itself is a direct 
contradiction of the brokenness argument -- spying works quite well and 
that's why so many spies are interested in it. This spying can sometimes 
require nonfree software (such as with DRM); when people have software 
freedom they can and do improve software so programs obey the users and 
no longer obey the spies.

I think the best approach is an old one -- educate everyone, including 
the young, to appreciate software freedom for its own sake and keep on 
doing this for generations. I can't think of anything significant that 
was obtained with a quick ("silver bullet") approach or by placating a 
set of rules engineered to reinforce the rule of the currently powerful 
(aka "the market").



[1] See https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.html 
and http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html for 
more on this and on how the older free software movement differs from 
the younger open source movement.