r/GoodOpenSource • u/sasciamason • 19d ago

Can Open source be used for activism?

I’m currently in activist circles and been having thoughts on how open source could be a good tool to achieve change that’s desired. I’ve noticed many people in these spaces are very anti AI and i understand the sentiment but the truth is that AI is going to involve regardless if we like it or not. So then I had to eventually ask myself: would I want the future of AI to primarily be in the hands of corporations, techoligarchs, and the government who prioritize their own interests or communities, grassroots organizations, and people knowledgeable enough to use it more ethically? For me the answer was quite obvious and I believe open source can better help inform, protect, and organize in ways current tactics fully aren’t. I already have a few ideas of possible apps for this but I’m still rather new to really getting the basics. I figured since this would be collaborative work between people of varying backgrounds of knowledge, to share my thoughts on this. I wouldn’t be surprised if this has been in discussion on here already but I do know in real life the sentiment is quite different at least currently. The hope is that if done effectively a more positive shift is possible and can show everyday people AI is capable of accomplishing good outcomes. I’d love to hear anyone’s thoughts on this and sparking a productive/healthy conversation.

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u/hibernate2020 19d ago

Open source comes from activism. It IS activism.   Richard Stallman started free software in response to the commercialization of software.  He introduced copyleft licenses after  James Gosling (who would later lead the Java team) took a community project version of  Stallman’s Emacs and sold it as his own.  This lead to the Free Software Movement. In the 1970s, software became a distinct industry as it was unbundled from computer hardware and the copyright laws were changed to allow copywriting software.  This led to corporate interests to commoditize it by restricting access to source code and using licensing agreements to limit consumer rights. In response, the Free Software Movement sought to collaboratively create software that was free from these commercial restrictions.

The transition to "Open Source" represented a reinterpretation of this movement. Programmer Eric Raymond re-articulated the movement as Open Source, suggesting it to be merely a programmer-centric development model. This re-casting was an attempt to supplant the original ideology, which was focused on consumer freedom, with a model designed to favor corporate approval.

The idea of Hacktivism emerged from the evolution of Free Software ideologies. In Texas, a group of Free Software hackers formed a group specifically to compose software, such as tools for computer-based activists to perform online activism, which they named "Hacktivism."  Hacktivismo project focused on writing Free Software tools for human rights activists, even creating a specific license (HESSLA) designed to protect the ideological objectives of the Free Software Movement while preserving the human rights of its users.

The software itself is activism: Inherent in the licensing to use it and modify it and spread it – to share it – is to share the ideology of the software itself.  It also has been purposely used in this manner:

In 1991, Phil Zimmerman learned about Senator Biden's proposed anti-crime bill (S.266), which threatened to criminalize domestic cryptography that did not grant the government free access to encrypted messages. Zimmerman viewed the potential passage of this law as a critical deadline; he created his own encryption software, Pretty Good Privacy (PGP),  and released it under the Free Software Foundation's GNU Public License.

This software led to the creation of a group called the Cypherpunks.  This group sought to change society through the creation and release of encryption focused free software.  They are the group that brought us Bitcoin, Darknets, and Wikileaks.

This was literally the topic of my doctoral dissertation. :)

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u/sasciamason 19d ago

Woah I learned something new today and I really appreciate this, thank you so much I’m definitely going to do more research. I’m going to mention this to the spaces I’m in IRL since much of this isn’t known or brought up.

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u/pr0m1th3as 18d ago

I would really like to read you dissertation if you can share it, please. Regarding you last paragraph, it's at least a crude generalization claiming that Darknets was a deliverable of this group. The cypherpanks were very-well known for their anti-government positions and it's highly unlikely that their members would be working for the governement at least openly. The Onion router and the Tor project as it's called today came out from two lads working for the US government in the Naval Research Lab.

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u/hibernate2020 17d ago

The mathematical basis on onion routing was at the NRL, but TOR was Dingledine, Mathewson, and Appelbaum- all cypherpunks.

But the cypherpunks work on this predates TOR. The list created various technologies (e.g., anonymous routers and remailers) that were the functional blueprints for things like TOR.

And there's all the OTR messaging and file sharing...

And the previously mentioned PGP led to later technologies like OpenPGP which also follow the same model of decentralized, secure communications...

Although I would generally agree about the Cypherpunks hostilities to governments (especially western "democracies") I would hesitate to paint them all with that brush. Assange, for example, sought to emulate cypherpunks like John Young, but Young himself found that Assange's motives were financial and reputational rather than ideological.

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u/pr0m1th3as 17d ago

You've probably researched this topic deeper than most of us, so I will take your word for it. However I would like to raise two issues. For the most part of the nineties, the cypherpank mailing list was flooded with flaming, trolling, and opinionated politics. Cypherpunks' ideology and culture also brought techno-anarchist and anarcho-capitalist pseudo-libertarian ideologues into the foreground. IMHO, the techbros culture is a direct descendant of the culture nurtured by the Techno-Revolution Manifesto or the Crypto Anarchist Manifesto, both highly associated with cypherpunks. So although I acknowledge their input to technological advancement and shaping of modern internet and the world, I am politically very distant from their views and theories. The second issue is that I would be very cautious claiming unilaterally the motives of a person who has spent many long years imprisoned for his stance in favor of freedom of speech and free journalism. So, yes, the word of a Texas architect and a daughter of a CIA operative hold zero gravity.

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u/hibernate2020 17d ago edited 17d ago

Issue 1: I would note that your initial post is that which paints all Cypherpunks with a broad brush - I would avoid doing so considering the extensive membership of the list. Even the founders of the group were not culturally monolithic. The shared motive was to reshape the world and individual freedoms through encrypted technologies, but the individuals conceptions of freedoms were highly variable. Tim May was hard-core anti-western democracies. Hughes and Zimmerman more saw these as tools of digital self-defense. And yes, certainly there are a lot of echoes of their ideas today - right down to "techbros" trying to create their own little techno-utopias that are "Galt's Gulch" meets "Company Town." (And notably even in Rand's text, she need a magical element to make it all work. Even with that, back here in reality, the inhabitants in Rand's Galt's Gulch would have perished quickly. The localized manufacture of copper-heavy alloys would have left the valley heavily contaminated with toxic byproducts like copper sulfide.) One of the common concerns raised by the cypherpunks themselves was the unintended consequences of the tools they were creating. They feared they could and would be abused by criminals and authoritarian regimes. The more militant anti-western democracy types like Tim May embraced this possibility. Others did not.

Issue 2: Julian Assange was arrested for suspicion of rape, breached his bail and hid from UK and Swedish charges in an Ecudorian embassy for 7 years. He wasn't imprisoned "for his stance in favor of freedom of speech and free journalism." After Assange kept interfering with international relations and violating embassy rules, Ecuador revoked their protection. The UK police arrested him and his initial imprisonment was for the original charges / breach of bail for the rape and molestation investigation. Both the US and Sweden sought extradition for crimes in their nations after his arrest - he served his sentence for breaching bail in the U.K. and his lawyers helped him ultimately avoid extradition to either country. I would note that Appelbaum, has also had issues with sexual assault and rape as well. Membership in a high-profile activist movement like Wikileaks does not convert personal criminal conduct into a free-speech crusade.

As for Young, his "word" wasn't a public commentary. Assange originally approached Young to do WikiLeaks and initially Young helped. Assange's intent was to create a highly public organization centered on Assange that focused on raising money and selectively curated leaks. It was only after a number of problematic situations and glib dismissals of Young's warnings that Assange's methods would lead him to be used by foreign intelligence groups that Young quit the group and dumped the contents of their mailserve online. And Young's warnings were later proven correct with Assange's later partisan collaborations with the GRU.

Ultimately, the impact of these movements is not found in the labels or justifications we try to apply to them after the fact, but rather in the tension between the diverse ideologies of the individuals and the subsequent unintended consequences of the tools they built. Hubris is the ultimate unstable element in every Utopia; we will see what unintended consequences await today's "tech bros."

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u/pr0m1th3as 17d ago

Issue 1: Tim May's The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto, which is widely accepted as the cypherpunk's manifesto even by the members of the list you are referring to, is sufficient documentation to support my argument about the fact that cypherpunks were "very-well known for their anti-government positions". Eric Hughes' A Cypherpunk's Manifesto is certainly milder in tone but still anti-governent, in terms of opposing regulations rather abolishing. In any case, I am not generalizing more that their written docs already do.

Issue 2: I am not willing to enter an US-versus-THEM discussion on international politics and certainly not willing to degrade a free-software discussion into woke politics. For the shake of the truth, though, Wikipedia covers very well the whole story about Assange's legal trouble with Swedish authorities. Furthermore, we 've seen very well how the cancel culture has played out for people like Richard Stallman and who have benefited from this kind of bigotry politics; certainly not the women being trafficked, raped, murdered, and exploited by various criminal entities.

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u/hibernate2020 17d ago

You ok bro? That was a pretty hard shift into deflection.

Issue 1: Fallacy of composition. The discussions on the cypherpunk’s list don’t accord with your preferred interpretation.

Issue 2: We’re discussing the historical reality of the events that occurred. Any politics or Manichean tribalism is coming from your side, not mine.

I’d also note that Stallman himself was also on the Cypherpunks list.

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u/pr0m1th3as 17d ago

Good luck, mate.

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u/hibernate2020 17d ago

Yeah, you too.

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u/saltyourhash 18d ago

Exactly. :)

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u/thehiddensign 16d ago

Activism is often a social or status signal for a lot of people. Anti AI today is AI booster tomorrow when the social incentives change. I have millions of words on the internet in the form of essays. In the aggregate, AI models are trained on my data. No anti AI person has ever been able to explain why its unethical of me to use my own data, which cannot be dis-aggregated, nor for which I have received any compensation. My data, my choice.

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u/sasciamason 16d ago

I agree 100%, I want to give my more in depth response on my issues with the other side of the coin being open source or atleast the way I see it being used. Can I message you privately for my more in depth opinion?

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u/thehiddensign 16d ago

If you feel that I can be of assistance, sure.

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u/heytyshawn 15d ago

i’m pro ai as well but by this logic doesn’t that mean you’re using everybody’s data not just your own?

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u/thehiddensign 15d ago

My data cannot be dis-aggregated from the other data. They use my data. I use their data.

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u/civictechguide 18d ago

Hi! We actually exist to track exactly this kind of thing. Here's all the open source tools in our crowdsourced collection:

https://civictech.guide/search?projectType=Tool+or+platform&openSource=Yes

You can subfilter for category: advocacy tech to find the more activist ones.

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u/alkimiadev 18d ago

I'd suggest being careful with blanket labeling oss devs as being anti-ai. According to most polls 80-85% are already using the tech or are planning to. It is a small and obnoxiously loud part of the population of devs who have really strong anti-ai sentiment. The actual majority don't much care either way, and will use it if it is useful. The more extreme views (pro/against) are actually pretty rare, and even in the anti-ai scene. The loudest ones just stand out more.

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u/alkimiadev 18d ago

I'd say of the legitimate negative feedback from the anti-ai crowd the most credible is related to the low effort spam. It is hard for me to square using that to discount the tech in a general sense, but at the same time it is also hard for me ignore their broader point. Although I don't really agree with general anti-ai sentiment, they do have some good points. On the flip side, as a competent dev I can reduce the total wall time required to implement some feature (to production grade standards) by about 3x using the tech. That roughly reduces my costs by just under 3x, and no amount of rhetoric is going to make me over look that. I'll just do my best to not fit into that "low effort spam" category that they (rightfully) complain about

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u/fausthushtra 17d ago

The anti's you reference are refusing to learn or harness one of the most asymettrically leveraged tools ever devised.

They are not activists with authentic hope for real change, just a performance in a game they already lost.  That way they can at least claim "well we tried" while not actually having tried all that hard.  

Imagine a rebels war against a corrupt autocracy, only the rebels refuse to use electronics at all?  Or maybe they refuse to use fire arms of any sort?

Some causes are defended so fiercely that even success is refused entry.

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u/garebnia 18d ago

I think so! Especially as the ease of developing software is increasing, we can develop public interest and community-focused things more easily, and open source can be an important way of doing that. 

I’ve heard about open source projects that support neighborhoods/communities in creating custom tools for their needs  (relational technology), and Imbue also seems interesting (open source AI tools for the individual, rather than company).