When word came in that John Perry Barlow had died, I thought of some particular comments that have stuck with me, relating his experiences interceding between FBI agents and their hacker quarry, right around the time the Cold War was ending.
I've usually thought of Bruce Sterling's The Hacker Crackdown …
The advantages of full freedom are not that difficult to recognize and describe. What's tricky is recognizing and characterizing non-free components in a mixed environment, plotting a course away from them, and then navigating that course successfully.
I was heartened to see, for example, the GNU project develop a rubric …
What we share with other people of our own thoughts spans a massive range of possibilities from the very personal to the very public.
At the most personal level roil our wildest dreams, our deepest fears, our greatest hopes. Here then also are our greatest vulnerabilities.
At the other end …
I tend to think of $PUBLIC_FIGURE as a radical and an extremist. These terms usually carry a perjorative connotation. Similar terms include "fundamentalist" or "absolutist" and might also be defensible here.
To draw some of the personal sharpness out of it, one might argue less that they are these things …
Just a note on nomenclature: I recognize that some people have very specific recommendations about what language to use when talking about software freedom. I appreciate the analysis behind these recommendations and largely agree with them (despite my other concerns about these folk edit dja 20211113).
Even so, I find …
If you’re an app, how do you keep people hooked? Turn yourself into a slot machine.
Mundane mechanisms for the gradual erosion of liberty
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