The link I posted bypasses the paywall. But, if you insist upon rewriting the URL to remove the bypass, you can just open it through the wayback machine.
I do periodically mirror all my medium posts on my own website. As a policy, I only post friend links (i.e., firewall bypass) to aggregators like lobste.rs and HN & to social media. Nevertheless, people reading my back catalogue on medium nets me about $5 to $10 a month even if I don’t post anything new, & sometimes I make an additional ten bucks if I do post something new, so this is a reasonable justification for me to have a copy of everything of value that I write present there. (My most popular posts are not monetized at all, & have been rehosted multiple places; my income from medium comes mostly from medium users who encounter it through the site’s own recommendation system.)
So long as services like lobste.rs don’t strip friend links, nobody who sees a link because I posted it is subjected to a paywall. Unregistered users may be subjected to a closable registration wall (though I have never seen this behavior, but I hear it is stupid & confusing). Compared to most web apps that serve up text (including lobste.rs), medium is lightweight & responsive in my experience, & folks who find it too slow are welcome to look at a javascript-free version on my site whenever I get around to mirroring it. So, I don’t feel like I’m inconveniencing anybody particularly by using medium (though I would if the friend link feature didn’t exist).
Medium does not do itself any favors in the PR department by foregrounding its paid features. I hear that some unregistered users mistake the registration popup for a paywall on un-paywalled articles because of how much their copy talks about paywalls.
Your above assertion is not specific enough to test or falsify.
Karl Marx didn’t know about falsification (thus science) yet as that was only described after his death. You could write arguments that others can check instead of merely taking your word for it.
In the article you say:
users and corporations do not have aligned incentives […] therefore, so long as capital has the ability & incentive to influence software production, software will be pitted against users.
This is circular reasoning or perhaps a tautology. You give the conclusion as a reason for the conclusion.
Quirky, personal software that is aggressively unscalable
Software for humans (as opposed to only for some humans but not others) is required to be more scaleable than merely commercial software as there are more than 7G of them. Commercial software merely needs to work with enough humans to extract money, it can ignore the rest.
What is more important to you: Human needs/rights or the inability of the software to be used by corporations?
Is a communist revolution your goal in itself or is that only your suggested solution? Are there some goals you have where if some other idea could reach them, it would be fine for you not to get a communist revolution?
Karl Marx didn’t know about falsification (thus science) yet as that was only described after his death. You could write arguments that others can check instead of merely taking your word for it.
I didn’t mention Marx in this essay. However – your statement is incorrect. Marx wrote during the industrial revolution, & his explicitly stated goal was to remove the woo from existing socialist movements (like the fabians) by sticking to rigorously scientific analyses of historical economic data & construct falsifiable models of economics. This is what is meant by the term ‘historical materialism’: an attempt to bring economics out of the realm of Smith’s just-so stories & into the realm of science, submitting it to the same rigors that were then being applied to thermodynamics.
(Last I checked, the scientific method was attributed to Sir Francis Bacon, a few centuries before Marx was born. The nineteenth century was the absolute peak of the kind of scientific reasoning you describe – named and documented by Popper a half century after its moment ended in the wake of the virtual demolition of the analytic movement in philosophy by Godel & Wittgenstein.)
This is circular reasoning
No, I just thought that the incentive misalignment was so obvious that I didn’t need to specify it.
Software for humans […] is required to be more scaleable
This point is fair, so long as you assume the existing division between developer and non-developer. I’ve written at length elsewhere that this division is arbitrary, problematic, and a form of rentseeking, & ought to be abolished. Since you haven’t read those pieces, I can’t blame you for thinking that this is a flaw in reasoning.
What is more important to you: Human needs/rights or the inability of the software to be used by corporations?
Human needs. (After all, like the rest of us, I write software for corporations all day. I maintain that it is problematic in the long run, but in the short run it is necessary for my own survival.)
Is a communist revolution your goal in itself
I’m not really an advocate of revolution per-se. It’s messy & often ineffective, since military structure, while necessary for war, runs counter to an equitable arrangement of people. Gradualism has other problems, but luckily there are solutions that are neither revolutionary nor gradual. My own preference is the scheme outlined in bolo’bolo: the construction of alternatives, independent of existing systems, which people can move to freely. Popular alternatives starve incumbents of labor & resources. In the late stages this is almost guaranteed to result in direct attacks, but by that point, if things are managed well, the incumbents will be too weak to do much damage.
Let me repeat my first sentence with a different focus:
You didn’t refer to a specific model of economics.
You can’t have one without the other.
If you specified a correct economic model and matching implementation, that isn’t yet sufficient for that to follow. For your claim, you’ll need to specify properties without which Free Software can not occur. With enough precision so that it is easy to say if something matches those properties or not.
Marx […] construct falsifiable models of economics.
One can state something falsifiable without explicitly having defined falsifiability or deciding on using it for demarcation to non-science. I only mentioned Marx to be a bit more specific than mentioning the word communism. Marx certainly did make non-falsifiable claims in addition to falsifiable ones.
AFAIK Sir Karl Popper defined falsifiability long after Marx was dead and suggested anything not falsifiable is not science. Francis Bacon didn’t require falsifiability.
No, I just thought that the incentive misalignment was so obvious that I didn’t need to specify it.
There are certainly obvious cases of incentive misalignment. What is not obvious is that in all past, current and possible future systems in our reality, “users and corporations do not have aligned incentives”. (For it to be falsifiable you need to specify how to detect a corporation. Does Alice and Bobs collusion constitute a corporation?)
Software for humans […] is required to be more scaleable
This point is fair, so long as you assume the existing division between developer and non-developer.
[…] this division is […] a form of rentseeking […]
Doesn’t matter under what economic system or how the labour on that software is organised. That does not change that a human would need to be able to run compatible protocols together with over 7G humans for them to be able to not exclude some of them. Otherwise: Sorry, no internet1 for you, its full. Make your own internet2, which won’t fit everyone either. So some won’t be able to directly talk to some others. This would create the opportunity for those in both internets to seek rent for forwarding. Therefore the non-scalable property enabled what you said to avoid.
Unscalable software would compromise the rights of some humans. Thus it does not serve your stated goals.
If you specified a correct economic model and matching implementation, that isn’t yet sufficient for that to follow. For your claim, you’ll need to specify properties without which Free Software can not occur. With enough precision so that it is easy to say if something matches those properties or not.
You’re applying a lot more rigor to a flippant response (to someone’s flippant comment) than to the article itself, wherein I specify exactly what I mean by free software and exactly how it’s currently being prevented & a few ways to close the loopholes that are being exploited.
The goal of free software is to align the incentives of software developers and software users by making them the same group. (If we want to bring Marx into this at all, we have a convenient place to do it: he defines communism as any state of affairs in which the incentives of management and labor are aligned because management and labor are the same group. I wasn’t drawing on Marx in this essay but on Debord, so outside of this point that’s a much more suitable comparison to make.)
The labor of software use always falls upon individuals, so user incentives are best defined by individual incentives. Because almost all individual software users sell their bodies to corporations for at least eight hours a day, during which they are required to perform actions in the ways demanded by corporations rather than in the ways they would naturally perform those actions, points of friction become biased based on standard procedures. It is only in the interests of a corporation to lubricate the points of friction that occur when performing corporate-controlled work, and then only when the people who encounter those points of friction are insufficiently disposable.
Marx certainly did make non-falsifiable claims in addition to falsifiable ones.
Sure, as does everybody. And, Marx was wrong on a number of points (among them, he thought that ‘capitalism with a human face’ was impossible & so thought that the internal contradictions of capitalism would cause it to collapse substantially faster).
He had, as an explicit goal, to be scientific – by which he meant creating systematic models of the entire relevant portion of the problem & testing them against both historical data & new experiments, eschewing metaphysical ideas and wishful thinking in favor of mathematics & mechanisms, and emphasizing the importance of revising models when they have failed to be predictive even when the resulting new model is complicated by this collision between theory and practice. In other words, in terms of Popper’s idea of science (which itself is fairly controversial), Marx’s economics scores higher than many current fields (including practically all of medicine outside of drug testing).
There are certainly obvious cases of incentive misalignment. What is not obvious is that in all past, current and possible future systems in our reality, “users and corporations do not have aligned incentives”.
If we privilege the needs of individuals over the needs of corporations, then any time the two come into conflict and the corporation wins, it is an unnecessary tragedy. When their needs are aligned, it is irrelevant: the equivalent number of individuals coming together in a different structure would have the same power to fulfill that need. When they are not aligned, corporations tend to win, because that is what corporations are for.
you need to specify how to detect a corporation
The usual way will suffice. A corporation is a legal entity that can hold capital and resources the way a person does, and can usually be sued in the way a person can be, in such a way that it forms a buffer between an individual and liability. A corporation continues to exist so long as it periodically pays the government a registration fee, unless it is dissolved by its owners.
This means a corporation always has an incentive to accumulate capital, because accumulated capital is capable of protecting it from all possible risks, & any mechanism for accumulating capital that does not risk losing more capital than the company can afford makes sense (i.e., fines for illegal activity are part of the cost of business & bad PR can be offset by marketing). It also means that the owners of a corporation are incentivized to dissolve a corporation & run off with its capital if they think it’s no longer doing its job. A corporation is a disposable shield that is immortal so long as you keep feeding it, but gets hungrier as it gets bigger: an ideal tool for protecting individuals from the voracious maw of the market.
a human would need to be able to run compatible protocols together
I’m not opposed to the concept of protocols. I’ve got a problem with monocultures.
Software scalability matters a lot with regard to centralization. If one organization owns all the machines for doing a thing, then those machines need to be efficient, because the margins are the difference between skimming enough profit to survive and slowly bleeding to death. In a decentralized system, most of the things we mean by scalability don’t matter: one person isn’t doing maintenance for a thousand machines but for one machine, so it makes more sense for that one person to be comfortable with their one machine than it does for all thousand machines to be interchangable; one person isn’t moderating the feeds of all of malaysia, but instead, everybody tends their own moderation and perhaps helps out with the moderation of their friends.
I’m ultimately less interested in opening up low-level protocols than front ends, because the shape of behavior is controlled by the adjacent possible. I go into this in detail in other essays, but where it intersects with this topic is: when you make software for employees, the people who use it are biased toward acting and thinking like employees, which is a very narrow slice of all the different hats one could wear; likewise, when everybody runs the same software, they think more alike, because their imagination is shaped by their habits.
We know from observing users that they are capable of using an extremely flawed folk-understanding in conjunction with trial and error to produce effective, if convoluted, mechanisms for getting things done with inadequate tooling & inadequate documentation. In other words: all humans are born hackers, and the difference between somebody who rigs up some incredible hairball of an excel spreadsheet to do something & somebody who does it in perl is not a matter of inherent ability or even really skill but of access to the ability to imagine better tooling (i.e., a matter of exposure, education, & identity). Just as MySpace’s willingness to host arbitrary CSS led to often-messy but incredibly personal and expressive profile pages, making the resources available and visible by default to everyone to modify all the code on their system will result in even self-professed ‘non-technical’ users adapting their systems to fit their preferences in extreme ways – and the more available we make that ability to imagine a better fit, the greater variety & the closer fit we will see. (In other words, this is a natural extension of free software: rather than collapsing the distinction between ‘a developer’ and ‘the developer’, truly collapse the distinction between ‘developer’ and ‘user’.)
Even opening up the whole system, we should expect to provide reasonable defaults, because writing an IP stack is an acquired taste – I don’t expect many people to dig that deep when optimizing for a real-world task. Even so, monocultures of implementation are dangerous in many ways, so we ought to have more fully independent reimplementations of just about every protocol. If a protocol cannot be trivially reimplemented, then it has failed at being a protocol. Vary every behavior not specified with ‘must’, bring out the nasal demons, etc: the ecosystem will improve because of it.
Computer software is made for and by people who already like computers, and this prevents problems that are obvious to other groups from being solved. Require less initial buy-in at the level of software creation and you’ll get computers that are worth liking.
some won’t be able to directly talk to some others
If centralized social media has taught us anything, it ought to be that people don’t really want to open themselves up to being talked at directly by seven billion strangers, because scale of direct contact amplifies the power of griefers and low-effort shitposting a lot more than it amplifies useful forms of communication.
SSB has the best model I’ve seen in action. You’re responsible for managing your own feed, but visibility is based on the existing social graph & is asymmetric. Basically, so long as you don’t follow pubs, you can keep the presence of hostile randos looking to bother you down to a dull roar without putting the labor of that on some overworked moderator. Visibility & access follows the usual course of human connectedness, & tactics created by a fully flat network like sealioning and swarming don’t really work.
Paywalled articles should be disallowed.
Clear cookies and localStorage and you get more “free articles”.
The link I posted bypasses the paywall. But, if you insist upon rewriting the URL to remove the bypass, you can just open it through the wayback machine.
EDIT: I’m sorry, it looks like it wasn’t you but the lobste.rs software that removed the paywall bypass. The link I originally posted is https://medium.com/@enkiv2/freeing-software-3e3ede439f20?source=friends_link&sk=faeed756e13f8fefd93c6c599199dd3b , which is not paywalled. This is a bug, and also a new behavior since the last time I posted a medium article here (when it only stripped the bypass if I hit the ‘detect title’ button).
Any reason you prefer to post to Medium instead of your own site?
I’ve answered this at length before: https://lobste.rs/s/bykzkm/hide_medium_com_as_personal_filter_on#c_v6frxz
A couple additional notes:
I do periodically mirror all my medium posts on my own website. As a policy, I only post friend links (i.e., firewall bypass) to aggregators like lobste.rs and HN & to social media. Nevertheless, people reading my back catalogue on medium nets me about $5 to $10 a month even if I don’t post anything new, & sometimes I make an additional ten bucks if I do post something new, so this is a reasonable justification for me to have a copy of everything of value that I write present there. (My most popular posts are not monetized at all, & have been rehosted multiple places; my income from medium comes mostly from medium users who encounter it through the site’s own recommendation system.)
So long as services like lobste.rs don’t strip friend links, nobody who sees a link because I posted it is subjected to a paywall. Unregistered users may be subjected to a closable registration wall (though I have never seen this behavior, but I hear it is stupid & confusing). Compared to most web apps that serve up text (including lobste.rs), medium is lightweight & responsive in my experience, & folks who find it too slow are welcome to look at a javascript-free version on my site whenever I get around to mirroring it. So, I don’t feel like I’m inconveniencing anybody particularly by using medium (though I would if the friend link feature didn’t exist).
Thanks. I didn’t know Medium had friend links and if Lobste.rs strips they, then that’s a bug.
I just felt that publishing a post extolling the virtues of free software to a site that seems to demand payment was a bit weird.
Medium does not do itself any favors in the PR department by foregrounding its paid features. I hear that some unregistered users mistake the registration popup for a paywall on un-paywalled articles because of how much their copy talks about paywalls.
It looks like you don’t want Free Software, but a communist revolution.
You can’t have one without the other.
Your above assertion is not specific enough to test or falsify.
Karl Marx didn’t know about falsification (thus science) yet as that was only described after his death. You could write arguments that others can check instead of merely taking your word for it.
In the article you say:
This is circular reasoning or perhaps a tautology. You give the conclusion as a reason for the conclusion.
Software for humans (as opposed to only for some humans but not others) is required to be more scaleable than merely commercial software as there are more than 7G of them. Commercial software merely needs to work with enough humans to extract money, it can ignore the rest.
What is more important to you: Human needs/rights or the inability of the software to be used by corporations?
Is a communist revolution your goal in itself or is that only your suggested solution? Are there some goals you have where if some other idea could reach them, it would be fine for you not to get a communist revolution?
I didn’t mention Marx in this essay. However – your statement is incorrect. Marx wrote during the industrial revolution, & his explicitly stated goal was to remove the woo from existing socialist movements (like the fabians) by sticking to rigorously scientific analyses of historical economic data & construct falsifiable models of economics. This is what is meant by the term ‘historical materialism’: an attempt to bring economics out of the realm of Smith’s just-so stories & into the realm of science, submitting it to the same rigors that were then being applied to thermodynamics.
(Last I checked, the scientific method was attributed to Sir Francis Bacon, a few centuries before Marx was born. The nineteenth century was the absolute peak of the kind of scientific reasoning you describe – named and documented by Popper a half century after its moment ended in the wake of the virtual demolition of the analytic movement in philosophy by Godel & Wittgenstein.)
No, I just thought that the incentive misalignment was so obvious that I didn’t need to specify it.
This point is fair, so long as you assume the existing division between developer and non-developer. I’ve written at length elsewhere that this division is arbitrary, problematic, and a form of rentseeking, & ought to be abolished. Since you haven’t read those pieces, I can’t blame you for thinking that this is a flaw in reasoning.
Human needs. (After all, like the rest of us, I write software for corporations all day. I maintain that it is problematic in the long run, but in the short run it is necessary for my own survival.)
I’m not really an advocate of revolution per-se. It’s messy & often ineffective, since military structure, while necessary for war, runs counter to an equitable arrangement of people. Gradualism has other problems, but luckily there are solutions that are neither revolutionary nor gradual. My own preference is the scheme outlined in bolo’bolo: the construction of alternatives, independent of existing systems, which people can move to freely. Popular alternatives starve incumbents of labor & resources. In the late stages this is almost guaranteed to result in direct attacks, but by that point, if things are managed well, the incumbents will be too weak to do much damage.
Let me repeat my first sentence with a different focus:
You didn’t refer to a specific model of economics.
If you specified a correct economic model and matching implementation, that isn’t yet sufficient for that to follow. For your claim, you’ll need to specify properties without which Free Software can not occur. With enough precision so that it is easy to say if something matches those properties or not.
One can state something falsifiable without explicitly having defined falsifiability or deciding on using it for demarcation to non-science. I only mentioned Marx to be a bit more specific than mentioning the word communism. Marx certainly did make non-falsifiable claims in addition to falsifiable ones.
AFAIK Sir Karl Popper defined falsifiability long after Marx was dead and suggested anything not falsifiable is not science. Francis Bacon didn’t require falsifiability.
There are certainly obvious cases of incentive misalignment. What is not obvious is that in all past, current and possible future systems in our reality, “users and corporations do not have aligned incentives”. (For it to be falsifiable you need to specify how to detect a corporation. Does Alice and Bobs collusion constitute a corporation?)
Doesn’t matter under what economic system or how the labour on that software is organised. That does not change that a human would need to be able to run compatible protocols together with over 7G humans for them to be able to not exclude some of them. Otherwise: Sorry, no internet1 for you, its full. Make your own internet2, which won’t fit everyone either. So some won’t be able to directly talk to some others. This would create the opportunity for those in both internets to seek rent for forwarding. Therefore the non-scalable property enabled what you said to avoid.
Unscalable software would compromise the rights of some humans. Thus it does not serve your stated goals.
You’re applying a lot more rigor to a flippant response (to someone’s flippant comment) than to the article itself, wherein I specify exactly what I mean by free software and exactly how it’s currently being prevented & a few ways to close the loopholes that are being exploited.
The goal of free software is to align the incentives of software developers and software users by making them the same group. (If we want to bring Marx into this at all, we have a convenient place to do it: he defines communism as any state of affairs in which the incentives of management and labor are aligned because management and labor are the same group. I wasn’t drawing on Marx in this essay but on Debord, so outside of this point that’s a much more suitable comparison to make.)
The labor of software use always falls upon individuals, so user incentives are best defined by individual incentives. Because almost all individual software users sell their bodies to corporations for at least eight hours a day, during which they are required to perform actions in the ways demanded by corporations rather than in the ways they would naturally perform those actions, points of friction become biased based on standard procedures. It is only in the interests of a corporation to lubricate the points of friction that occur when performing corporate-controlled work, and then only when the people who encounter those points of friction are insufficiently disposable.
Sure, as does everybody. And, Marx was wrong on a number of points (among them, he thought that ‘capitalism with a human face’ was impossible & so thought that the internal contradictions of capitalism would cause it to collapse substantially faster).
He had, as an explicit goal, to be scientific – by which he meant creating systematic models of the entire relevant portion of the problem & testing them against both historical data & new experiments, eschewing metaphysical ideas and wishful thinking in favor of mathematics & mechanisms, and emphasizing the importance of revising models when they have failed to be predictive even when the resulting new model is complicated by this collision between theory and practice. In other words, in terms of Popper’s idea of science (which itself is fairly controversial), Marx’s economics scores higher than many current fields (including practically all of medicine outside of drug testing).
If we privilege the needs of individuals over the needs of corporations, then any time the two come into conflict and the corporation wins, it is an unnecessary tragedy. When their needs are aligned, it is irrelevant: the equivalent number of individuals coming together in a different structure would have the same power to fulfill that need. When they are not aligned, corporations tend to win, because that is what corporations are for.
The usual way will suffice. A corporation is a legal entity that can hold capital and resources the way a person does, and can usually be sued in the way a person can be, in such a way that it forms a buffer between an individual and liability. A corporation continues to exist so long as it periodically pays the government a registration fee, unless it is dissolved by its owners.
This means a corporation always has an incentive to accumulate capital, because accumulated capital is capable of protecting it from all possible risks, & any mechanism for accumulating capital that does not risk losing more capital than the company can afford makes sense (i.e., fines for illegal activity are part of the cost of business & bad PR can be offset by marketing). It also means that the owners of a corporation are incentivized to dissolve a corporation & run off with its capital if they think it’s no longer doing its job. A corporation is a disposable shield that is immortal so long as you keep feeding it, but gets hungrier as it gets bigger: an ideal tool for protecting individuals from the voracious maw of the market.
I’m not opposed to the concept of protocols. I’ve got a problem with monocultures.
Software scalability matters a lot with regard to centralization. If one organization owns all the machines for doing a thing, then those machines need to be efficient, because the margins are the difference between skimming enough profit to survive and slowly bleeding to death. In a decentralized system, most of the things we mean by scalability don’t matter: one person isn’t doing maintenance for a thousand machines but for one machine, so it makes more sense for that one person to be comfortable with their one machine than it does for all thousand machines to be interchangable; one person isn’t moderating the feeds of all of malaysia, but instead, everybody tends their own moderation and perhaps helps out with the moderation of their friends.
I’m ultimately less interested in opening up low-level protocols than front ends, because the shape of behavior is controlled by the adjacent possible. I go into this in detail in other essays, but where it intersects with this topic is: when you make software for employees, the people who use it are biased toward acting and thinking like employees, which is a very narrow slice of all the different hats one could wear; likewise, when everybody runs the same software, they think more alike, because their imagination is shaped by their habits.
We know from observing users that they are capable of using an extremely flawed folk-understanding in conjunction with trial and error to produce effective, if convoluted, mechanisms for getting things done with inadequate tooling & inadequate documentation. In other words: all humans are born hackers, and the difference between somebody who rigs up some incredible hairball of an excel spreadsheet to do something & somebody who does it in perl is not a matter of inherent ability or even really skill but of access to the ability to imagine better tooling (i.e., a matter of exposure, education, & identity). Just as MySpace’s willingness to host arbitrary CSS led to often-messy but incredibly personal and expressive profile pages, making the resources available and visible by default to everyone to modify all the code on their system will result in even self-professed ‘non-technical’ users adapting their systems to fit their preferences in extreme ways – and the more available we make that ability to imagine a better fit, the greater variety & the closer fit we will see. (In other words, this is a natural extension of free software: rather than collapsing the distinction between ‘a developer’ and ‘the developer’, truly collapse the distinction between ‘developer’ and ‘user’.)
Even opening up the whole system, we should expect to provide reasonable defaults, because writing an IP stack is an acquired taste – I don’t expect many people to dig that deep when optimizing for a real-world task. Even so, monocultures of implementation are dangerous in many ways, so we ought to have more fully independent reimplementations of just about every protocol. If a protocol cannot be trivially reimplemented, then it has failed at being a protocol. Vary every behavior not specified with ‘must’, bring out the nasal demons, etc: the ecosystem will improve because of it.
Computer software is made for and by people who already like computers, and this prevents problems that are obvious to other groups from being solved. Require less initial buy-in at the level of software creation and you’ll get computers that are worth liking.
If centralized social media has taught us anything, it ought to be that people don’t really want to open themselves up to being talked at directly by seven billion strangers, because scale of direct contact amplifies the power of griefers and low-effort shitposting a lot more than it amplifies useful forms of communication.
SSB has the best model I’ve seen in action. You’re responsible for managing your own feed, but visibility is based on the existing social graph & is asymmetric. Basically, so long as you don’t follow pubs, you can keep the presence of hostile randos looking to bother you down to a dull roar without putting the labor of that on some overworked moderator. Visibility & access follows the usual course of human connectedness, & tactics created by a fully flat network like sealioning and swarming don’t really work.
Lots to chew over here. Thanks for taking the time to write!