Linux Is A Superbly Polished Copy Of

Individual Web Pages As They First Appeared In The Early 1990s Had The Flavour Of Person-hood. Myspace Preserved Some Of That Flavour, Though A Process Of Regularized Formatting Had Begun. Facebook Went Further, Organizing People Into Multiple-choice Identities While Wikipedia Seeks To Erase Point Of View Entirely. If A Church Or Government Were Doing These Things, It Would Feel Authoritarian, But When Technologists Are The Culprits, We Seem Hip, Fresh, And Inventive. People Accept Ideas Presented In Technological Form That Would Be Abhorrent In Any Other Forms

Our Willingness To Suffer For The Sake Of The Perception Of Freedom Is Remarkable.

Human Beings Either Function As Individuals Or As Members Of A Pack. There's A Switch Inside Us, Deep In Our Spirit, That You Can Turn One Way Or The Other. It's Almost Always The Case That Our Worst Behaviour Comes Out When We're Switched To The Mob Setting. The Problem With A Lot Of Software Designs Is That They Switch Us To That Setting.

Making Information Free Is Survivable So Long As Only Limited Numbers Of People Are Disenfranchised. As Much As It Pains Me To Say So, We Can Survive If We Only Destroy The Middle Classes Of Musicians, Journalists, And Photographers. What Is Not Survivable Is The Additional Destruction Of The Middle Classes In Transportation, Manufacturing, Energy, Office Work, Education, And Health Care. And All That Destruction Will Come Surely Enough If The Dominant Idea Of An Information Economy Isn't Improved.

What Is Extraordinary Is That In The United States The Current Culture Desires Feelings Of Machismo And Power, But At The Same Time Has Absolutely No Taste Whatsoever For Even The Slightest Loss Or Bloodshed Or Ickiness. That's A Fascinating Combination.