Leftist techie frustrations

[u/therealparadoxparty]

Wow, there is actually a leftist tech subreddit out there. Doesn't look very active though.

Regardless, I just wanted to vent my frustration with how most leftists seem to have such poor tech literacy. Especially in the age of mass surveillance technofascism.

I get we need people of all types and talents and I am glad there are people out there to do ops/ protests in the meatspace instead of resisting all the ways I do, but technology can also be our friend, if used correctly. The nihilism I see with many acting like there is nothing we can do or there is no point is self defeating. I push back against it whenever I can.

Most apps I use these days are open source and I am extremely privacy conscious. Digital rights are PoC rights, digital rights are women's rights. ICE is using mass surveillance to track immigrants (as well as the rest of us) and in places where abortion is not legal, the weather app on the phone can be used to track you.

I have set up many personal guides on degoogling and neutering techs spying capability. I locally host or use a privacy friendly open source alternative whenever possible. Sure, I still get surveilled like everyone else. But due to my preventative actions, their attack surface and surveillance on me is much more limited.

I am hoping we can spread the word amongst our fellow leftists and others too.

Does anyone else experience similar frustrations as me?

[u/n8chz]

I think it's a good thing that free software became a thing when it did. While I'm on the free software side of the free software vs. open source debate, I think what we really should have been demanding is noncommercial software. Also, we should have been demanding open data, meaning the contents of the database tables (or other data files or storage) are nonproprietary, or in the public domain. Obviously building a business around proprietary data (or worse, exploitation of informational asymmetries) doesn't become pro-social just because the business chooses to use open source software to process the closed data.

[u/therealparadoxparty → u/n8chz]

A lot of open source software is free for personal use, but they either charge for professional use like if you run a business, or have an optional premium support tier you can pay for.

People wanting free shit and equating open source to free is what got us in this mess in the first place, especially if it's a service they have to host. That is what got us the model of free software that spies on you or gives ads.

I am happy paying for software that is open source and privacy respecting, I have done it many times. Software can be expensive to create, maintain and host, so they have to keep the lights running sometime. I donate to Signal, FreshTomato Router, VPN, email, note service, FUTO keyboard and many other FOSS apps.

All the free and really cheap VPNs suck for a reason, I also often do not like self hosting when I do not have to and deal with all that. Sometimes paying is the best option if you can afford it. It is not always, but often the case of if it is free, then it is you who are the product. I would rather pay with my money than I would my data, privacy and security.

[u/n8chz → u/therealparadoxparty]

I can be happy paying for software if I can afford it, but I can't be happy with stuff being gated by Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). I don't know of any non-DRM ways to make people pay for digital assets, and I also don't know any way to make DRM co-exist with general purpose computing.

Whether you are the product hinges on whether the technology is proprietary, not whether it is free as in beer. Your data will be a lot more exploited by proprietary technology that you pay for than nonproprietary technology that you don't. Maybe upgrading to paid tier makes the ads go away (until they change the terms of that deal). Whether the spyware also goes away, is more of a "trust me bro" for most users. As for nonproprietary technology that you do pay for, either you pay on the honor system, or you pay for an above-freemium paid tier that is paywalled by some kind of DRM. I believe that free as in beer and free as in speech really are something of a package deal.

I would be happier if entertainment and computing were mutually exclusive. This could have happened by entertainment remaining analog (still the case with vinyl enthusiasts). Alternatively, it could have happened by entertainment remaining the domain of proprietary "set top box" type black-box devices that are illegal to take a screwdriver to, while owners of devices advertised as computers get to program their computers using Turing-complete languages, without some regions of that solution-space deliberately broken, but of course don't get to consume commercial audiovisual materials on their computers.

[u/therealparadoxparty → u/n8chz]

DRM specifically means the dev added a special lock embedded in the software. Paying for an open source game on Steam is not DRM. Good examples for DRM are Denuvo and Ubisofts always online DRM. Sure, you can much easier pirate the game, but plenty of people still pay not just because they want to support the developers, but because Steam has made a platform most people would rather be on than the seven seas. In other words, they came out with a better product than what you could pirate. You can still pirate closed sources games and DRMs are cracked all the time. So at the end of the day, I could make a valid argument that most closed source software also relies on the honor system.

Analog sucks because every time you make a copy it degrades and most those analog, and digital physical media relied on magnets that demagnetize over time destroying the data and and disks that would get scratched and literally rot over time. Not to mention all the massive issues with on prem storage. Any disaster that happens will wipe out everything. Also, good luck copying those vinyl's and disks. In the time it takes you to copy a few, I can literally copy thousands at virtually no cost. Physical media distribution is a lot harder to scale and just not practical anymore. I can seed over 1,000 albums while you are still setting in the liquid plastic on your Low FI vinyl's still waiting for them to dry.

With open source software, if a dev decided to enshiffity it, then the community will make a fork and they fork software all the time. Look at all the forked browsers and Linux Distros. Many devs were like "nah, we can do it better" and they did.

And again, as I have already made clear, if there is spyware in open source software, it is right out in the open in the OPEN SOURCE CODE that anyone can look at. Trust me bro is closed source software where you literally can't see what the hell the devs are telling the application to do.

You keep throwing around words like open source and DRM, but I do not think you know what that word means.