The convenience of privacy-unfriendly social-network technologies from Friendster to Facebook has made them tempting platforms for use in organizing activist causes. But as a techno-pessimist, I was horrified to see activists making use of unsecured unfit systems like Facebook, which make it trivial for authorities to snoop on and unpick the structure of activist organizations. As a techno-optimist, I was heartened to see the role that networked technologies played in aiding activists in Iran, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain and other middle-eastern autocracies to coordinate with one another. This programmerly mindset is the key to understanding the pessimism/optimism duality. Ubuntu’s Bug #1 will not be solved by a product, but by a process. Nevertheless, each revision of Ubuntu has worked explicitly to minimize the harm arising from the bug, by providing an operating system that can be easily switched to from Microsoft’s products, with similar keyboard shortcuts and built-in programs, but none of the lock-in or restrictions. This bug has been ‘‘open’’ (that is, still not satisfactorily resolved) since 2004 and I’d be surprised to see it closed in the near-term. This bug is widely evident in the PC industry.’’ ‘‘Non-free software is holding back innovation in the IT industry, restricting access to IT to a small part of the world’s population and limiting the ability of software developers to reach their full potential, globally. This is a bug, which Ubuntu is designed to fix. ‘‘Bug Description: Microsoft has a majority market share in the new desktop PC marketplace. The first bug in its bug-tracker is this: Take the Ubuntu operating system, a very popular flavor of GNU/Linux. It’s just not possible to squash every bug, so programmers track, isolate, and minimize bugs instead. While some free software activists might dream of a world without proprietary technology, the pursuit of free software’s ideology is generally more practical in its goal like good technologists, they view proprietary technology as a bug, and bugs can’t necessarily be eliminated. ![]() There are many motivations for contributing to free/open software, but the movement’s roots are in this two-sided optimism/pessimism: pessimistic enough to believe that closed, proprietary technology will win the approval of users who don’t appreciate the dangers down the line (such as lock-in, loss of privacy, and losing work when proprietary technologies are orphaned) optimistic enough to believe that a core of programmers and users can both create polished alternatives and win over support for them by demonstrating their superiority and by helping people understand the risks of closed systems. ![]() Free software is technology that is intended to be understood, modified, improved, and distributed by its users. To understand techno-optimism, it’s useful to look at the free software movement, whose ideology and activism gave rise to the GNU/Linux operating system, the Android mobile operating system, the Firefox and Chrome browsers, the BSD Unix that lives underneath Mac OS X, the Apache web-server and many other web- and e-mail-servers and innumerable other technologies. I don’t know about that, but I’ll at least cop to ‘‘techno-optimist.’’ Techno-optimism is an ideology that embodies the pessimism and the optimism above: the concern that technology could be used to make the world worse, the hope that it can be steered to make the world better. ![]() ‘‘Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future?’’ It’s a question I get asked so often that I have a little canned response I can rattle off without thinking: ‘‘In order to be an activist, you have to be both: pessimistic enough to believe that things will get worse if left unchecked, optimistic enough to believe that if you take action, the worst can be prevented.’’īut there’s more to it than that.
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