The problem is not about Open Source or Free Software. The problem is everything else.

In the long term, our only hope is to build stronger commons. Every day, we must fight to protect and improve the commons while letting corporations have as little power as we can over it and over our lives.

All of this made possible thanks to open source and millions of hours worked for free by people who contributed to what we thought was "the commons".

We should also insist that every piece of technology is, by essence, political. That you cannot understand technology without understanding the people. And you cannot understand people without understanding politics. Every choice you made has an impact on the world.

We can live without Google, Facebook Microsoft, Apple, Amazon. We can write code which is not on Github, which doesn’t run on an Amazon server and which is not displayed in a Google browser.

They understand that they are two classes of coders in the world: those who are exploited without being paid and those who are paid to be exploited. A bit or even more in some cases. While a few hands keep all the power.

They don’t search, they Google, they don’t shop online, they go on Amazon, they don’t read a book but a Kindle, they don’t take a coffee but a Starbucks.

There’s a generational divide here. Brilliant coders now on the market or in the free software space have never known a world without Google, Facebook and Github. Their definition of software is "something running in the browser". Even email is, for them, a synonym for the proprietary messaging system called "Gmail" or "Outlook". They contribute to FLOSS on Github while chatting on Slack or Discord, sharing specifications on Google Drive and advertising their project on Twitter/X. They also often have an iPhone and a Mac because "shiny". They cannot imagine an alternative world where monopolies would not be everywhere. They feel that having nice Github and Linkedin profiles where they work for free is the only hope they have to escape unemployment.

It is not by accident that those distributions care a lot about the license of the software they distribute.

A git repository is a development tool, not a distribution mechanism for end users.

So, what can we do? In the short term, it’s very simple. If you care about the commons, you should put your work under a strong copyleft license like the AGPL. That way, we will get back to building that commons we lost because of web services. If someone ever complains that a web service broke because of your AGPL code, reply that the whole web service should be under the AGPL too.

Paid and unpaid open source developers are pressed into providing a support they never promised in the first time.

free software is provided, "without liability". That rule should be enforced.

paying the contributor/maintainer a dime is not the solution. It worsen the situation. It acknowledges the responsibility of the aforementioned maintainer and legitimises the exploitation.

When publicly distributed, the open-source code is hidden behind layers of indirection bypassing any packaging/integration effort, relying instead on virtualisation and downloading dependencies on the fly. Thanks to those strategies, corporations could benefit from open source code without any consequence. The open source code is, anyway, mostly hosted and developed on proprietary platforms.

On call. Incident response. Compliance deadlines. Like any IT job, stuff breaks. Long unpaid hours keeping up on tech to remain competitive. Dealing with the politics of your management not sincerely wanting to spend the money required to do things right and

writing code, reviewing code, deploying configs to harden environments, reading CVEs to know just how bad that vulnerability in our environment is and where it prioritize it in patching and what it could affect, trying to make sense of logs to determine if that oddity is an indicator of compromise or not

Every Archive a Collage

Creating building systems in the present sense is not enough. We need a new, more subtle kind of building system

Most designers today think of themselves as the designers of objects. If we follow the argument presented here, we reach a very different conclusion. To make objects with complex holistic properties, it is necessary to invent generating systems which will generate objects with the required holistic properties.

processes which then maintain the system’s equilibrium

Alexander doesn’t rule out spontaneous order, but sees that as a rare event.  For a system as a whole to have the properties desired, the builders will most probably have to have a generating system to create the system as a whole.

A generating system, in this sense, may have a very simple kit of parts, and very  simple rules.

The formal systems of mathematics are systems in this sense. The parts numbers, variables, and signs like + and =. The rules specify ways of combining three parts to form expressions, and ways of forming expressions from other expressions, and ways of forming true sentences from expressions, and ways of forming true sentences from other true sentences. The combinations of parts, generated by such a system, are the true sentences, hence theorems, of mathematics. Any combination of parts which is not formed according to the rules is either meaningless or false

We must not use the word system, then, to refer to an object. A system is an abstraction. It is not a special kind of thing, but a special way of looking at a thing.

In order to speak of something as a system, we must be able to state clearly: (1) the holistic behaviour which we are focusing on; (2) the parts within the thing, and the interactions among these parts, which cause the holistic behaviour we have defined; (3) the way in which this interaction, among these parts, causes the holistic behaviour defined. If we can do these three, it means we have an abstract working model of the holistic behaviour in the thing. In this case, we may properly call the thing a system, If we cannot do these three, we have no model, and it is meaningless to call the thing a system.

Stability, no matter in which of its many forms, is a holistic property. It can only be understood as a product of interaction among parts.

The most important properties which anything can have are those properties that deal with its stability.

holistic behaviour is that instability which occurs in objects that are very vulnerable to a change in one part: when one part changes,

The pattern form excels an engaging the reader in generative solutions: to understand the principles and values of lasting solutions and long-term emergent behavior. Good patterns go beyond the quick fix.

we need to address most interesting problems with emergent behavior.

… a fundamental characteristic of complex human systems … [is that] cause and effect are not close in time and space. By effects, I mean the obvious symptoms that indicate that there are problems drug abuse, unemployment, starving children, falling orders, and sagging profits. By cause I mean the interaction of the underlying system that is most responsible for generating the symptoms, and which, if recognized, could lead to changes producing lasting improvement. Why is this a problem? Because most of us assume they are most of us assume, most of the time, that cause and effect are close in time and space.

What, exactly, does it mean to say that structures generate particular patterns of behavior?

Lao Tsu principles of nonaction

Thus, as in the case of natural languages, the pattern language is generative. It not only tells us the rules of arrangement, but shows us how to construct arrangements as many as we want which satisfy the rules.

a means of letting the problem resolve itself over time, just as a flower unfolds from its seed

The structures of a pattern are not themselves solutions, but they generate solutions.

we often attack only symptoms, leaving the underlying problem unresolved.

Generative patterns work indirectly; they work on the underlying structure of a problem (which may not be manifest in the problem) rather than attacking the problem directly. Good design patterns are like that: they encode the deep structure (in the Senge sense) of a solution and its associated forces, rather than cataloging a solution.

emergence is a property of a whole that is not a property in its parts.

how such a system is born, itself, of a generative system, establishing the duality between the object as a computing agent and the method as a computational process.

design forms through the iterative readings and responses to interrelational conditions, with the intention of producing environments synchronous with their cultural settings.

computation of such interrelational, complex behaviour-based systems

The system behaviour emerges only in the dynamics of the interactions of the parts. This is not a cumulative linear effect but rather a cyclical causal effect

states

an overall design problem cannot be divided into sub-problems, and consequently, that it is impossible to arrive at a novel design solution as a summary process of solving individual problems one after the other

complex systems of interactions and reciprocities

critique on classic physics and its deductive methods and focus on isolated phenomena. Bertalanffy considered such methods as unsuitable for biology

Ultrastability places two sets of environmental and reactive variables in a primary feedback loop. A slower, second feedback affects the reactive variables by acting on the step-mechanisms and setting parameters for the environmental variables.

In order to develop a model for stability in design problems, Alexander looked to cybernetics for models of homeostasis and ultrastability. Such systems could stabilize themselves regardless of what disturbed them, including variables that weren’t considered when the system was designed.

Alexander would also step away from the notion of a semantic network and more toward the pursuit of the geometrics of order.

the language provides the framework for using the patterns as a program to create form.  But he aims for semantics, allegory, and poetics, as well as the aspects of language that generate feelings, emotions, a sense of order — all of which extend beyond the structural, topological and syntactic aspects of his program.

meanings and their evocations

networks

the sophistication of a semantic network

“Next, several acts of building, each one done to repair and magnify the product of the previous acts, will slowly generate a larger and more complex whole than any single act can generate,”

accretion

unfolding

systems may come to necessitate their own propagation, he suggests, when we use them.

In an interview with his biographer, Alexander noted, “We give names to things but we don’t give many names to relationships.”

a rule set

pattern languages contain an inherent rule set that determines their logic

context

genetics

Almost every ‘system as a whole’ is generated by a ‘generating system’. If we wish to make things which function as ‘wholes’ we shall have to invent generating systems to create them.

unfolding

9780231075657

Levin defines “intelligence” as the capacity to achieve the same goal via different means

Language action

Language-Action

Guidance on future action

Language-Action

pacing

pacing

understanding intelligent behaviour – as a direct interaction between organisms and their world

Der größte Fehler der Linken war, dass sie die Kapitalismuskritik aufgegeben und den Faschisten überlassen haben.

"Viel zu lernen du noch hast"

"Überall sind Augen. Es sind keine blinden Flecken mehr übrig. Wovon sollen wir träumen, wenn alles sichtbar wird? Wir werden davon träumen, blind zu sein."

"Solar Bones",

"Ein ungewöhnlicher Roman über einen gewöhnlichen Mann"

urgency of rebuilding “islands of trust” in communities before building out from there

open world

“It’s harder to protect your reputation for reliability than to damage it. It turns out that, as usual, offence is cheaper than defence,” he says. “Everybody who cares about the preservation of any institution has to stop everything, ring the alarm bell, and start thinking about how to preserve that ‘membrane’ in a way that is morally permissible.”

People haven’t really come to grips with the fact that it’s not just personal privacy that matters, it’s also institutional privacy

Delere Auctorem Rerum Ut Universum Infinitum Noscas. (Destroy the author of things to understand the infinite universe.)

practical truth

all control in human minds is via emotion

You don’t need miracles. You just need to understand the world the way it really is, and it’s unbelievably wonderful. We’re so lucky to be alive!

Another pandemic is coming, this time attacking the fragile control systems in our brains—namely, our capacity to reason with one another—that we have used so effectively to keep ourselves relatively safe in recent centuries.

strict liability laws, removing the need to prove either negligence or evil intent

The appified society is wrong when apps become necessary infrastructure, since infrastructure should be controlled by the people democratically, not privately owned by corporations.

9781778430381

map business problems onto a solution space that involves choices of software

IDE's like to hide a lot of details about whats really happening under the hood

We are all together in this, alone.

we shouldnt build anything new, we should try to make compatible the mindsets and tools that we already have

Manche sprechen bereits davon, dass das Informationszeitalter vom Zeitalter des Rauschens abgelöst wurde.

Es ist in wenigen Jahren von einem Ort der dezentralen und offenen Kommunikation, der niemandem gehörte und in dem alle Informationen gleich behandelt wurden, zu einem Spielball von einer Handvoll Konzernen und Milliardären geworden, die nun von den Plattformen zugunsten weniger Kapitalanleger ausgebeutet werden.

Herrschte im klassischen Kapitalismus, wer über „die Produktionsmittel“ verfügte, so ist es im digitalen Kapitalismus derjenige, der über die „Mittel der Verbindung“ verfügt.

"KI" dient der Bequemlichkeit der meisten Menschen: Sie müssen weniger tippen und weniger denken, um einen gewünschten Anschein zu wahren.

Überwachung, Vereinheitlichung und Kontrolle

Typically, if you can't afford to make the repair, you definitely can't afford to skip the repair either.

Web programming is plumbing. It’s just ripping out old pipes and putting in new pipes. It’s a dirty, ugly job. The old pipes are covered in greasy grime and the new ones are cheap plastic that keeps breaking and nothing fits together like it is supposed to.

As citizens, we can create meaningful organizations that span our communities but without the permanence (and thus overhead) of old-school organizations.

we’d probably be better off with the Fortune 500,000 than the Fortune 500. Scale brings with it the ills of Seeing Like a State; the authoritarian high modernist mindset takes over at large scale. And while large organizations can exist, they can’t be the only ones with access to, or ability to, afford new technologies. Enabling the dynamic creation and destruction of new organizations and new types of organization—and legal and technical mechanisms to prevent lock-in and to prevent enclosure of public commons—will be essential to keep this new fluid era thriving. We can create new “federated” networks of organizations and social groups, like we’re seeing in the open social web of Mastodon and similar technologies, ones where local groups can have local rules that differ from, but do not conflict with, their participation in the wider whole.

TensionThe ability to see like a data structure afforded us the technology we have today. But it was built for and within a set of societal systems—and stories—that can’t cope with nebulosity. Worse still is the transitional era we’ve entered, in which overwhelming complexity leads more and more people to believe in nothing. That way lies madness. Seeing is a choice, and we need to reclaim that choice. However, we need to see things and do things differently, and build sociotechnical systems that embody this difference.This is best seen through a small example. In our jobs, many of us deal with interpersonal dynamics that sometimes overwhelm the rules. The rules are still there—those that the company operates by and laws that it follows—meaning there are limits to how those interpersonal dynamics can play out. But those rules are rigid and bureaucratic, and most of the time they are irrelevant to what you’re dealing with. People learn to work with and around the rules rather than follow them to the letter. Some of these might be deliberate hacks, ones that are known, and passed down, by an organization’s workers. A work-to-rule strike, or quiet quitting for that matter, is effective at slowing a company to a halt because work is never as routine as schedules, processes, leadership principles, or any other codified rules might allow management to believe.The tension we face is that on an everyday basis, we want things to be simple and certain. But that means ignoring the messiness of reality. And when we delegate that simplicity and certainty to systems—either to institutions or increasingly to software—they feel impersonal and oppressive. People used to say that they felt like large institutions were treating them like a number. For decades, we have literally been numbers in government and corporate data structures. BreakdownAs historian Jill Lepore wrote, we used to be in a world of mystery. Then we began to understand those mysteries and use science to turn them into facts. And then we quantified and operationalized those facts through numbers. We’re currently in a world of data—overwhelming, human-incomprehensible amounts of data—that we use to make predictions even though that data isn’t enough to fully grapple with the complexity of reality.How do we move past this era of breakdown? It’s not by eschewing technology. We need our complex socio-technical systems. We need mental models to make sense of the complexities of our world. But we also need to understand and accept their inherent imperfections. We need to make sure we’re avoiding static and biased patterns—of the sort that a state functionary or a rigid algorithm might produce—while leaving room for the messiness inherent in human interactions. Chapman calls this balance “fluidity,” where society (and really, the tech we use every day) gives us the disparate things we need to be happy while also enabling the complex global society we have today.

However, it’s not this particular system that failed but rather the mode of society that depends on rigid systems to function. Replacing one rigid system with another won’t work.

The complexity of society today, and the failure of rigid systems to cope, is scary to many. Nobody’s in charge of, or could possibly even understand, all these complex technological systems that now run our global society.

Now, nebulosity, complexity, and the breakdown of these systems is all around for everyone to see.

But that’s not the case for a computer, or a robot, or even a corporate food service, which can’t navigate the intricacies and uncertainties of the real world with the flexibility we expect of a person. And at an even larger scale, our societal systems, whether we’re talking about laws and governments or just the ways our employers expect us to get our jobs done, don’t have that flexibility built into them. We’ve seen repeatedly how breaking corporate or government operations into thousands of disparate, rigid contracts ends in failure.

while concepts help us understand reality, they aren’t reality itself

modern technology lets us all see like a state

The hope is that, because we have better algorithms that can help us make sense of even more data, we can somehow succeed at making systems work where past societies have failed. But it’s not going to work because it’s the mode of thought that doesn’t work.

The challenge with previous generations of tech—and the engineers who built them—is that they got stuck in the rigidity of systems.

To boost its search engine rankings, Thai Food Near Me, a New York City restaurant, is named after a search term commonly used by potential customers. It’s a data layer on top of reality. And the problems get worse when the relative importance of the data and reality flip. Is it more important to make a restaurant’s food taste better, or just more Instagrammable? People are already working to exploit the data structures and algorithms that govern our world. Amazon drivers hang smartphones in trees to trick the system. Songwriters put their catchy choruses near the beginning to exploit Spotify’s algorithms. And podcasters deliberately mispronounce words because people comment with corrections and those comments count as “engagement” to the algorithms.These hacks are fundamentally about the breakdown of “the system.” (We’re not suggesting that there’s a single system that governs society but rather a mess of systems that interact and overlap in our lives and are more or less relevant in particular contexts.)

Beyond simply dividing time, computation has enabled the division of information.

clocks enabled the division of time

from a society centered around interpersonal dynamics and communal interactions to one that was systematic and institutional

https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v27i11.12712

BuildingonStar’smotivationtoexploretheinfrastructures’operations – decodingthemaster narratives and exclusion mechanisms – our motivation is also deeply com-mitted to justice and inclusion.

According to Star (2015: 480), “many information sys-tems employ what literary theorists would call amasternarrativeor asinglevoicethatdoes not problematize diversity. ȃis voice speaks unconsciously from the centerof things” (Star 2015: 476, our emphasis). ȃis voice includes and excludes, createsinsiders and outsiders. In this sense, infrastructure is a “fundamentally relationalconcept, becoming real infrastructure in relation to organized practices” (idem).Actually, it is the invisibility that makes the embodied infrastructure moreencompassing. Whereas the physical infrastructure can be permanently up-dated – new buildings, new computers, new collections – the embodied infras-tructure can remain inert throughout these visible changes.Moments of crises – like the present times – make this inertia more visible

Although less visible, this second meaning of infrastructure points to some-thing that is, nonetheless, as real as buildings, rooms, storage shelves, and collec-tions.

(e.g., Star 2015). It is learned as part of membership in a given community of prac-tice.It manifests itself as a set of embodied standards usually perceived as‘natural’by that community’s members.

As a relational concept, infrastructure is a fundamental part of human or-ganization, embedded in other structures, social arrangements, and technologies