I've often mused that were it not for my affinity for the Mac OS
user-experience and my admiration and appreciation for the superior
industrial design, reliability (usually), and longevity of Apple
computer hardware, I am more philosophically and temperamentally a
Linux person.
Consequentially, a somewhat impassioned essay last week,
Linux Will Save the World by Linux Today's Carla Schroder, hit a
resonant chord with me.
Ms. Schroder references
Apple's legendary, Ridley Scott directed, Chiat/Day produced, "1984" Super Bowl
commercial, praising it as one of the most brilliant TV commercials
of all time - a superb piece of filmmaking that she says still gives her chills, but adds that
when the spell wears off, she realizes that while Orwell was a prophet,
the commercial actually bears no relationship to the product, asserting
that the athlete's Apple shirt should have a penguin logo on it instead
of the Macintosh logo.
"Sometimes I feel like a dinosaur," says Schroder, with her and her
fellow dinosaurs moving towards extinction, because we place supreme
importance on freedom. Well, count me in with the dinosaurs, Ms.
Schroder, and as you observe, we do seem to be a dwindling
minority.
Personal Freedoms Are Under Attack
She goes on to distressingly relate that the sort of stories that
perform the worst on Linux Today hit-count wise are anything that
pertains to freedom - software freedom, the GNU Foundation, the
Software Freedom Law Center, civil rights, and law, with few readers
seemingly interested in or concerned about the relentless siege by
regulators, corporate vested interests, and other would-be and actual
gatekeeping factions that have proven their hostility to civil
liberties, privacy, and, in her opinion, basic decency.
She says she believes it's no exaggeration to say that Linux/FOSS is
all that stands between technology tyranny, corporate tyranny, and the
hope of something better - to openness and accountability in the tech
industry to access to public data, open document formats and industry
standards, an open Internet, and openness in government. Schroder notes
that she can't recall Bill Gates, Scott McNealy, Steve Ballmer, Steve
Jobs, Larry Ellison, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, or any of the other
billionaire tech celebs emitting so much as a single word of concern
for any of these or performing any meaningful deeds to promote or
protect them with the forces massing against our personal freedoms
growing larger and stronger than ever.
Again, I'm in agreement. The portents are ominous, and I am
profoundly thankful that "Davids" - like the Linux community, the Open
Source software movement in general, and the Electronic Frontier
Foundation - are there fighting the good fight to keep the would-be
monopolists and gatekeepers honest and fended off to the degree that
they are.
Perhaps the evident lack of freedom-loving fire in the bellies of
Web citizens these days is an inevitable consequence of the
commodification of information technology. Most people are
unfortunately passive and apathetic when it comes to advocating and
defending the freedoms they take all too much for granted, whether in
the virtual cyberworld or society in general. The astonishing and
dismaying (to me at any rate) popularity of and preoccupation with
trivial fripperies like social networking is prima facie
evidence of this. Facebook and Twitter have their legitimate and
sometimes useful place, but they don't merit nearly the degree of
prominence they occupy in the online firmament - and for the most part
they represent one of the most colossal wastes of time in human history
while more serious matters go begging and neglected. It's all so
crushingly banal.
Carla Schroder's "dinosaur" analogy is appropriate, but I'll posit
another, complementary one.
Lonesome Dove
In Larry McMurtry's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Lonesome
Dove, the cinematic interpretation of which is my
all-time favorite western movie (even
though it is actually a TV mini-series), Augustus McRae and Woodrow
Call are retired Texas Ranger captains who spent their younger years
fighting Indians, outlaws, and Mexican bandits, only to discover in
middle age that their efforts contributed to taming South Texas to a
degree that they find themselves bored, unchallenged, and
enervated.
In McMurtry's words,
"They were people of the horse, not of the town; in
that they were more like the Comanches than Call would ever have
admitted . . . Indeed, it seemed to Augustus that
. . . they were not of the settled fraternity, he and
Call."
Gus and Woodrow have been living an aimless existence in the town of
Lonesome Dove, Texas, for ten years, when their old Ranger colleague
Jake Spoon suddenly shows up with tales of wonderful open grazing land
available for the taking in Montana. The idea hatches in Woodrow Call's
mind for one last great adventure - a cattle drive north to a new
frontier that's not yet crowded and settled.
"You just want to help establish more banks," Gus tells Call.
"That's aggravating," Call retorts. "I ain't a banker."
"No, but you've done many a banker a good turn," Gus shoots back.
"That's what we done you know. Kilt the dern Indians so they wouldn't
bother the bankers."
"They've bothered more than Indians," argues Call.
"Yes, lawyers and doctors and newspapermen and drummers of every
description...."
"Well, they ain't got to Montana," says Call.
"If we go, they won't be far behind," replies Gus. The first ones
that get there will hire you to go hang all the horse thieves and bring
in whatever Indians have got the most fight left, and you'll do it and
the place will be civilized. Then you won't know what to do with
yourself, no more than you have these last ten years."
Throughout history, there have been those who chafed under
establishmentarianism, and consequently were motivated to push the
frontier envelope. As Ian Frazier
observed in an Atlantic Monthly cover story some years ago
about the Oglala Sioux,
"When Columbus landed, there were about eleven people
in Europe who could do what they felt like doing. Part of the
exhilaration of the age came from the freedom that Columbus and other
explorers were rumored to have found . . . Amerigo Vespucci,
the explorer who would provide the continent's name, brought back news
that in this land 'every one is his own master'."
That worked for a while, but as Gus and Woodrow discovered, frontier
tends to be an ephemeral space, and one had to keep on the move in
order to stay ahead of the inexorable encroachment of bankers, lawyers,
merchants, politicians, and other despoilers of individual freedom,
which in today's context are the gatekeepers and would-be hegemonists
of the tech world and the Internet, the copyright bullies and Chinese
censors, and . . . well, you get my drift.
No More Geographical Frontiers
In Lonesome Dove, McRae and Call do go off on their grand
adventure driving a herd of cattle to Montana, but the problem for
their temperamental counterparts today is that we ran out of
geographical frontiers. This has created a severe - and doubtless
underestimated - existential and spiritual dilemma for that proportion
of the population that traditionally was inclined to head for the
frontier du jour. New outlets for that sort of restless energy
had to be found.
For a while during the '50s and '60s, some optimists thought the new
frontier might be outer space, and I suppose there are those who still
imagine that. Maybe it will be eventually, but I would suggest only for
a very select few, at least during the lifetime of anyone alive
today.
Then the more comprehensively accessible frontier of cyberspace
emerged, first through the development of microcomputers and then the
Internet. Like the physical North American frontier in the 18th and
19th centuries, cyberspace was, to paraphrase Vespucci, a new virtual
land where "every one is his own master".
The early years of the Internet were a bit like the frontier before
people like Gus and Woodrow tamed it - a free space with few rules and
little civilization. Some people found this untamedness exciting and
invigorating. Others found it frightening and unsettling - or just a
disruption of the business-as-usual order not necessarily advantageous
to their narrow vested self-interests.
Indeed, lands where everyone is their own master tend to be more
than a bit chaotic. As the late Steve McQueen put it in another
excellent movie western, Tom
Horn, the Old West was a "raggedy-assed" place. The
Internet, in its early stages of evolution, was pretty raggedy-assed
too. Some of us liked it that way. Others wanted to hang all the
cyber-bandits, domesticate the cyber-Indians, and make the Internet a
congenial, orderly, law-abiding place for cyber-bankers, cyber-lawyers,
and cyber-merchants, not to mention cyber-politicians and cyber-tax
collectors.
Balance
While a degree of order is desirable and necessary, it's striking a
balance that's the challenge, and the concept of a centrally regulated,
locked-down, and policed "World Government" style Internet makes me
distinctly uneasy and saddened. It may be inevitable, but I don't have
to like it.
This is why there's a little bit of me that smiles whenever a hacker
mischievously pricks the establishment balloon. I'm not talking about
malicious destruction here, just the welcome deflation of "Those who
lord it over their fellows and toss commands in every direction and
would boss the grass in the meadow about which way to bend in the
wind", as humorist and political commentator P.J. O' Rourke puts
it.
I'm not philosophically or temperamentally an anarchist, but I do
believe that he who governs least governs best.
Ultimately, the "bad bandits" who propagate viruses and take down
servers have to be brought down, just as Gus and Woodrow weren't about
to sit idly by and allow Indians (who doubtless had their own
perspective on the changes being unwelcomely imposed on them) and
outlaws to raid and kill ranchers and townspeople, however dismayed
they were by the incursion of polite society on the freedom of their
wide open spaces.
So what is the best answer? Can a balance be struck between freedom
and the ugly oppression of corporate avarice, copyright bullying, and
overreach, authoritarian Big Brotherdom, while avoiding lawless chaos?
I hope so. Don't you?
I agree with Carla Schroder that the existence of Linux, much more
than its raw market share numbers would indicate, is vitally important
to sustaining such a balance. I wish the Mac still was too.
Steve Jobs once
said it was better to be a pirate than to join the navy. The
problem today is that he's now one of the navy's admirals.
