"Ableism" and the Linux Aristocracy
Tue 07 January 2025
This is Part IV of the series, "Don't use what works for you."
Being an armchair FOSS advocate, there are a lot of anti-FOSS arguments I've become quite used to seeing and answering. Some of them are honestly just pretty dumb:
eloquent_FOSS_apologia();Well, I just don't CARE about that!
Well, I don't care that you don't care. Where does that leave us, an impasse of arseholery? Bravissimo!
I think the arguments that bother me the most, though are the ones with the greatest component of truth. I was reading a blog recently where the (honestly quite well-reasoned and not anti-FOSS in philosophy) writer was making a case against bothering people with FOSS considerations in their lives when they have so many other things to worry about, and likened it to ableism: a form of discrimination where a person judges or even advises another without considering their physical/mental/financial/etc. limitations.
This argument got under my skin, and gave me pause. Some people really do have a lot going on, and don't need to be sniped by a nerd with an attitude for using MS Word instead of vim.
I can see the argument. There is something "aristocratic" about finding the license of the software I use to be an issue of great import, just as a working-class person would find a rabid argument concerning ontology completely out of touch with their daily life and concerns.
The thing is, while a debate on ontology might be completely irrelevant to actual existence, issues of software freedom and digital agency aren't academic, because they pertain to an individual's freedom and agency in the digital realm, which is increasingly an inexorable and enormous part of our lives. The unwitting choices we make and the dynamics we ignore can have a huge impact on our lives in the real world.
Here's a tangential example:
Most people don't ever read or even peruse/search the Terms of Service and other legal documents they sign nearly every day, but they can have a huge effect on your life. There was recently a wrongful death case against Disney that was nearly thrown out of court because the husband signed a TOS that included a binding arbitration clause years before they visited the park when signing up for the Disney+ streaming service. Disney backed off quickly after an enormous public outcry, but that could have ended very differently. Disney was under no legal pressure to back off from such scummy action, and the family had zero legal recourse in the eyes of the law, because they clicked a checkbox that said "I have read and agree to the TOS."
These are the kinds of dark patterns that are snuck in all of the time, and without awareness, people will be victimized by the kind of limitless corporate cruelty we saw in the Disney case.
So, yes, please be mindful of people's bandwidth (e.g. number-of-remaining-spoons) when discussing supposedly esoteric topics such as software freedom and digital agency.
But don't you dare not discuss it.
100 Days to Offload 2025 - Day 3
Category: Ethics Tagged: 100DaysToOffload Computing Ethics FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) Life Linux Non-religious post Philosophy UNIX