Hi, friends at Libreplanet.
During a discussion in #fsf, we were quite critical of modern society,
especially on copyright, patents, "intellectual property", healthcare
and Capitalism. A (possibly sarcastic of modern society) suggestion
was raised to build islands in the middle of oceans from plastic waste
and run a free society there. This is obviously infeasible, but it
reinforced my thoughts that free software isn't enough. With people
constantly in poverty, healthcare being so expensive in countries such
as the United States, companies and individuals focusing on profit
rather than genuine good for society, etc., free software is a step to
bring us closer to good-old freedom, but with a society that hasn't
woken up from the endless advertising (brainwashing) of cooprporations
and governments, we'll almost inevitably be forced to use nonfree
software, and have our right to freedom violated in countless other
ways.
I thought: Why aren't we doing a great job convincing users to switch to
free software as a replacement to the proprietary software they use?
Some classmates that I tried convincing into using Trisquel GNU/Linux
noted that most modern programs that they use day-to-day only run on
Android, Apple iOS, Apple macOS and Microsoft Windows, and these
themselves are nonfree software that they can't escape using (For
example, school here in China requires the use of WeChat and Tencent
Meetings to have online classes, and does not have a way to let me
dial-in by phone, despite my efforts explaining the Constitution and my
rights to deny a contract I disagree with. [1] They even went as far as
saying "We don't care what the Constitution says, you play by our
rules", which was a surprise to me.). I reconsidered the situation,
explained to them what freedom is in this context, and linked them to a
comprimise, Deepin Linux, a (GNU/)Linux distribution targeted at new
Chinese users who need WeChat, Tencent Meetings and all that in the
application center. This was a comprimise, but this is the best I could
do given their situation. Personally I use virtual machines that
reset to snapshots every boot to run these programs, sometimes even run
a GNU/Linux distribution inside the virtual machine and use Wine from
there. They aren't technically skilled and couldn't handle this.
Some sources state that US courts require the use of Zoom, which is
frustrating to think about.
I asked myself: Why do people choose convenience over freedom? This is
still a mystery to me, as this one of the problems in the to-solve list
of the upcoming project. I have a theory that it's a combination of
social pressure and coorporate brainwashing, as companies are taking
advantage of human psycology, creating an information cocoon of
"convenience is the most important thing in your life", pushing products
to users with social engineering in order to profit from sales or the
information of their users. They do everything for profit; they even
sign contracts with schools to push their products to students, often
with the students unable to reject. In this case, how the school and
government handles this situation is a good example of short-term
thinking (Or, it might be not caring about their students, I hope it's
the first, but my conversation with school makes me afraid it's the
latter.)
My family has been to the US in 2013. One of my biggest negative
impressions was that health care was terrifyingly expensive. A simple
X-ray, a two dollar checkup in most hospitals in Shanghai, China costs
hundreds of dollars in the US (I do not remember which state or region
it was, I was just 5 years old then. What I do remember is that we had
some kind of medicaid; even then, the prices are in hundreds). A
standard CT scan, around 20--35 dollars in Shanghai, costs hundreds or
even thousands of dollars. A ride in the ambulance costs 10 dollars on
average in Shanghai, but thousands in ths US. (Note that by "the US", I
am referring to the state I was in, I do hope that there are saner ones.)
Apparantly this is caused by the US not having a good system of
medicaid, which I hope gets better implemented with Obamacare, but that
seems to be just a wish. This leads me to the point that governments
are responsible for their citizens in exchange for the citizens giving
up certain liberties (note that liberty isn't freedom exactly),
including keeping citizens healthy---it is impossible to have a
prosperous planet with bad healthcare. (Don't get me wrong, I have more
positive impressions in the US :P)
For a government to be able to handle social needs, it must not be
corruputed. Theories such as the separation of powers exist, but in
contemperory times, implementations such as the US have
sometimes-corrupt but almost always ineffective governments. The Senate
fillibuster is a important reason, but not the culprit. The culprit is
the inherent eager to compete with other political parties and to gain a
political advantage, rather than coorporating, working together, and
actually managing the country with decent manners.
Humanity's system of managing society progressed from the rule of
monarchs to the rule of law. But laws can be unclear and
misinterpreted. The recent development of mathematics and computer
science may as well be utilized to create a system of society and
government, which algorithmicly distributes power in an explicit manner
(Maybe with something like monads, I haven't got into the mathematical
part yet.)
Godel Incompleteness tells us that we can never make a system of
mathematics that gets understood the same way everywhere; math is also
an evolving field (albeit very slowly). If this (currently nil) system
is to be ever used anywhere (may be the island), we'll definitely find a
lot of fissues. In such a system we also have the burden of educating
people in abstract algebra, which is relatively easy compared to
developing the system itself. My intuition tells me that Group Theory
will come in handy, but that's just intuition.
Currently, I host this project at [2]. I've only recently gotten into
Group Theory and abstract algebra, it may take time for us all to come
up with ideas. But it's worth trying.
References
==========
[1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/libreplanet-discuss/2021-10/msg00011.html
My previous memo on the use of software in education, COVID-19 and
the courts.
Ironically, I was still using GitHub at the time. I recently
deprecated all of my GitHub in a notice, and moved all of my current
projects to git.andrewyu.org and project.andrewyu.org. The avenir
repository is moving there some time, after I re-write the website
with plain HTML---I don't see a reason to use a static site
generator anymore. This GitHub link is not provided here.
[2] https://project.andrewyu.org/libresociety
A "checked out" version of the repository. The PDFs are of primary
interest.
git://git.andrewyu.org/libresociety
The repository itself. SSH protocol version also exist, described
in the PDF itself.
https://notabug.org/andrewyu/libresociety
A mirror of the above repository. Links Out
=========
[a] https://stallman.org/there-ought-to-be-a-law.html
A collection of bills/laws "proposed" or agreed upon by Richard
Stallman, mostly in support for a freer society, a less
corrupt/corruptable government, public benefit, etc. I don't agree
with all of them, but many of these will be taken into account in
this project.
Some of the thoughts I had during writing this memo will appear in the
next commit of the project.
This memo probably contains spelling errors and odd context-hopping.
When sitting down in front of my computer on the actual book, I'll be
more careful, and have a notebook and a pencil in front of me to plot
relation maps. Please forgive me, a 13-year-old with an undeveloped
brain from a non English-native country.
Sincerely,
Andrew Yu <andrew@andrewyu.org>
:P
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