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An Indian site, YourStory, has an unusually broad ranging interview with Richard Stallman. While much of the background and goals will already be familiar to SN readers, the interview is interesting not only for its scope but also that India is starting to take an interest in these matters.
To know Richard Stallman is to know the true meaning of freedom. He's the man behind the GNU project and the free software movement, and the subject of our Techie Tuesdays this week.
This is not a usual story. After multiple attempts to get in touch for an interaction with Richard Stallman, I got a response which prepared me well for what's coming next. I'm sharing the same with you to prepare you for what's coming next.
I'm willing to do the interview — if you can put yourself into philosophical and political mindset that is totally different from the one that the other articles are rooted in.
The general mindset of your articles is to admire success. Both business success, and engineering success. My values disagree fundamentally with that. In my view, proprietary software is an injustice; it is wrongdoing. People should be _ashamed_ of making proprietary software, _especially_ if it is successful. (If nobody uses the proprietary program, at least it has not really wronged anyone.) Thus, most of the projects you consider good, I consider bad.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday August 31 2017, @04:56PM (3 children)
Extreme greed, hoarding vast obscene amounts of wealth is a sickness. It has to do with wanting to control other people's lives.
I disagree; it has to do with wanting control over your own life. For instance, if I want my own private island, that's not because I want to control other peoples' lives, it's because I want to have a place where I can be away from other people while still enjoying nature, and not having to put up with the problems that come with sharing with other people.
Maybe in a post-scarcity future, NOBODY should be able to own a private forest.
Then it's not really "post-scarcity" is it, if private forests are scarce. If you're going to place limits on the resources people are allowed to have control of, then we can easily achieve this "post-scarcity" civilization right now, by adopting Stalinism: just give everyone a crappy dingy little concrete-block apartment, some crappy food, their choice of 2 different shoes, etc. We'll have a powerful central government manage all the resources and factories, and decide how to ration stuff. I don't think this is what people are thinking of as a future utopia.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday August 31 2017, @06:16PM (2 children)
So you don't want to control other people, you just want to make sure you can limit their movement in and around your island...? "Leave me the fuck alone" is still a command...
Although I also suspect you'd also want to be able to encourage people to bring you food and water and computing equipment at least... :)
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday August 31 2017, @06:28PM (1 child)
So you don't want to control other people, you just want to make sure you can limit their movement in and around your island...? "Leave me the fuck alone" is still a command...
Although I also suspect you'd also want to be able to encourage people to bring you food and water and computing equipment at least... :)
I fail to see how this is different from having a tiny apartment and not wanting to share it with several dozen random people. Would you open your home to anyone at all who wants to live there with you? Even if they don't feel like paying rent? And if they want to sleep in your bed too?
Almost everyone wants personal living space, and doesn't want to share it with others not of their choosing. The question is how much space should people have, and how much should they prefer.
In my own bedroom, "leave me the fuck alone" doesn't seem to be an unreasonable expectation. But what if we lived in a world that looked like "Soylent Green", or that episode of Star Trek TOS about the Gideons (the ridiculously overpopulated world where they tricked Kirk into beaming down to an exact replica of the Enterprise, with the goal being to get him to infect the population with a disease he was a carrier of so they could reduce the population)? So if we're talking about a world where resources are allegedly *not* scarce, then why is it unreasonable to have my own island or forest? If that's unreasonable, then the resources really are scarce.
And back to this crazy idea of controlling other peoples' lives, do you think it's "controlling" to not want random strangers to crawl into bed with you? Or come into your bedroom? Or come into your house/apartment? If you do, I question your basic humanity.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday September 01 2017, @12:15PM
Yes, I absolutely do want that small level of power over others. I'm not the one who said I didn't. I think having some tiny area in which I have that control is perfectly reasonable.
I'm just being a bit pedantic...but with a point, I think -- you say wealth isn't about control, and I'm trying to point out that everything you could possibly buy with that wealth can still be seen as a way of controlling others. That doesn't mean it's always unreasonable...but I think if the amount of wealth is unreasonable, the amount of control probably is too.