Excellent article by Afsaneh Rigot, author of the Design from the Margins methodology.
The “defeat big tech for justice and freedom” story is somewhat undermined by being published on substack.
Kind of like how releasing a book about climate change and how we have to dump capitalism in the future called “This Changes Everything” is undermined by using capitalism to sell the book.
Naomi Klein’s writing is fantastic, but I will never let this one go. If it really changed everything she could have given it away as a PDF for free. No offense to Klein but she can afford to make such a sacrifice, she has been very successful in capitalism.
Free (as in freedom) software is the only way possible
Libre software is important, and relates to the article insofar as it can help keep our own devices from spying on us, but software is merely an incidental detail within a larger problem. This is about abusive power structures, bad actors with too much influence, and profit taking precedence over human rights. No software license will solve it.
Further, decentralized software means almost fuck-all when all the hardware and pipes are owned by corporations and governments.
Yes, it is possible. I think it will be something like this:
where proprietary software will eventually be replaced by FOSS software. it just takes a while (Linux was released in 1991).
also, for social media, it’s not so much about the software used, more about who controls it, and hosting plays a significant part in this. the question is, how do we put up an organization large enough to actually sustain that many users?
who pays for image/short video upload for a billion people? small instances on the fediverse already cost real money. feddit.org has 1000 users and reportedly already costs $1000/month to host, IIRC (which seems expensive, even to me, anyways), and catbox.moe, which is a donation-funded service also costs around $1000 (says so on their website). that number would obviously increase sharply if there were more users. So: who pays for it?
