At this writing I am among a flood of cyber-refugees exploring the social media world beyond the old platforms which have for years enjoyed having those ubiquitous Facebook and Twitter icons splattered indiscriminately all over the web. I cannot imagine how much free advertising that little feature of social media might be worth. This morning I decided to curate this Mastadon equivalent of a Twitter thread...
emc2@indieweb.social
Eric McCorkle
Note up front: I'm going to use words like "decommodify", "consumerism", "capital", and "rentierism" a lot here, because I need the vocabulary. I am not a Marxist or some other kind of radical, nor wholesale anti-capitalist, and *certainly* not a revolutionary. I'm a social democrat, progressive, and reformist. Keep that in mind if you reply to me.
Something I don't think many people realize is just how much the OSS movement has altered the private sector.
Sure, there have been the SCO v. Linux suits, and the battles with old Microsoft, both of which OSS won, and it's certainly produced a huge amount of software at this point. But look back to the software industry of the 90s, and the picture looks *completely* different. [1/n]
Back then, there was a whole parasitic cottage industry of companies that made a living off of selling the kinds of software packages we take for granted today. You wanted crypto, you bought a closed-source library for 4-5 figures. Same for all kinds of protocols we take for granted today. Beyond that, standards were frequently closed, and cost that much. ASN.1 was an example of this. This was essentially software rentierism. [2/n]
Worse yet, this created all sort of perverse incentives. Example: "surfing the wave of mediocrity" [link]
It was more profitable to deliberately produce broken/non-compliant implementations, and make them deliberately just short of too buggy to buy. This had a serious negative impact on a number of standards. ASN.1 and CORBA are two examples. In essence, there was zero incentive for interoperability, and lots of incentive to sabotage it. [3/n]
OSS has essentially wiped all this out by making alternatives freely available. Nobody in their right mind would pay out 5 figures for an SSL implementation when we have OpenSSL and 4 other alternatives. Also, however many issues OpenSSL has had, closed-source libraries tend to be much worse. Sunlight is a good disinfectant. Put in terms of political economy, this is a significant degree of decommodification. [4/n]
This is *directly* responsible for the productivity of the software industry over the past 2 decades. The startup economy as we know it could not have existed under the previous rentier system.
There's no way you could have launched most startups in a world where you have to pay out 4 figures a head for an OS license, then that much again a head for a compiler, then either buy or reimplement every package. [5/n]
There are some very important lessons to learn about the relationship of #OSS and the private sector. Those who were around in the early days remember how rag-tag early OsS was. Anybody remember battling to get their network card working? Remember early Gnome/KDE? It was scrappy, a headache to set up, often ugly, and the UI/UX was *terrible*. By the late 2000's, Linux desktops were beating Windows Vista in UI/UX. [6/n]
The reason for this is that OSS works on completely different dynamics from for-profit software. It is *highly* persistent, it tends to monotonically improve over time, and it is very hard to shut down. OSS is at its best when it embraces differentiation followed by cross-pollination. This enables it to explore alternatives and find ways around obstacles. It also makes it very hard to kill. This is something for-profit simply cannot do. [7/n]
At this point, I actually don't think OSS would have been killed had we lost the SCO v. Linux lawsuit itself. It would have been a massive setback, but an alternative would have stepped forward: BSDs, L4, or something. It's like Hydra: even if you manage to kill one project, two more will take its place. It also snowballs over time. The OSS ecosystem of today is *massive* compared to the old days. [8/n]
There was also a whole conflict over DRM. That's its own story, but the OSS world has fought and won several key battles to keep computing platforms open, and prevent a whole layer of rentierism from being set up. RIAA/MPAA were major opponents in this in the 2000s. So bringing it back, OSS has a *significant* effect on the for-profit sector simply by existing. [9/n]
Summarizing, it is
- persistent and nigh impossible to kill,
- more or less monotonically growing and improving,
- inherently decommodifying.
Gates *hated* OSS in the old days for precisely all this, but even he ultimately came around. So that's history. Let's look at the #FediVerse... [10/n]
#FediVerse had an additional barrier, that social media has a critical mass of users. For reference, I joined #Mastodon back in 2017, when it was below critical mass. The critical mass effect seemed to have #OSS attempts to affect social media behind the eight-ball. The #TwitterMigration and #redditMigration revealed a very powerful approach for getting around this. [11/n]
Both of these reveal a shortcoming of for-profit social platforms. Cory Doctorow's concept of "enshittification" sums it up succinctly. In more detail, a for-profit platform is under a mandate to squeeze more and more profit out of its users. In a social media platform, this means more surveillance, data gathering, "use the app", and ultimately gouging where possible. [12/n]
Something else to note: the profitability of surveilling users, collecting their data, and selling it is steadily declining in profitability. The whole adtech world is constantly climbing uphill against an landslide.
The takeaway from all this is that for-profit social platforms will eventually create a crisis for themselves. They degrade, trying to squeeze more and more profit out of an increasingly arid source, until they eventually do something dumb and blow their foot off. [13/n]
What happened with Twitter is that #Mastodon happened to be poised, almost by accident, to scoop up enough users to rocket past the critical mass point, and became self-sustaining. What's happening with #reddit is similar, but it's enabling something analogous to a strike by the mods. This is essentially Naomi Klein's notion of Shock Doctrine, except being employed *against* capital, not by it. [14/n]
One of the biggest strengths of the #OSS movement is that it does not hesitate to use the tools of its opponents against them. Pretty much the entire left is uniformly and vehemently against that idea. OSS does it enthusiastically. I suspect it's part and parcel with the hacker mindset: pulling off political-economic zero-days is right in line with how we think. [15/n]
So now #TwitterMigration fed us enough users to get #Mastodon to critical mass, and then #redditMigration proved it can be replicated. We have a model that seems to work.
Enter Facebook. They're already in a death-spiral, and I suspect somebody over there figured out essentially what I've said here. So they want to try to jump in and get out in front of it. It's worth gaming out what they're up to. [16/n]
Two tactics that have actually succeeded in being an impediment to OSS have been carpetbagging (showing up and using organizational weight, presumed prestige, etc to shove out a project's leadership and take over), and de-inventing (my term: what Google did to XMPP, RSS, and is currently trying to do to email). Google has tended to employ both of these in its quest for hegemony. If Facebook knows what they're doing, this is what they are planning to do. [17/n]
If Facebook thinks merely being part of the Fediverse is going to somehow magically going to save them from a reddit-style catastrophe, they're sorely mistaken. That will only make it easier for people to leave when that time comes (and it will).
So by this analysis, #ActivityPub and other protocols, standards, etc are what need to be protected. More broadly, OSS would do well to develop better defenses against de-invention anyway. [18/n]
As for the question of whether to federate with Facebook, I go back to differentiation and cross-pollination. Diversity is our strength. I have complete faith in the ability of OSS/FediVerse to outmaneuver a gigantic, ailing behemoth.
Somebody will figure out the right move at every point, and the rest will follow. The protocols will grow and adapt, and it will be on Facebook to keep up. [19/n]
So in closing, this is a very exciting time. #OSS has created a lot of change for the better, and back in November I felt like we were starting to remember that. I think this model, worked out and refined over the years is really quite powerful, and recent events have showed that. It's consistently overcome obstacles that were said to be impossible. So I'll close with the exhortation to dare to dream big about what else we might be able to accomplish.
No comments:
Post a Comment