Re: [emacs-humanities] Has Emacs made you appreciate software freedom?

[Benjamin Slade]

Thanks, Prot, for starting this discussion. I've been meaning to try to 
participate on this excellent listserv, but up until now I've not managed too 
(including a lack of an intro post). Please accept a long, rambling email as 
back-payment ;)

> + Do you think that Emacs helped/helps you value your liberties, as
>   those apply to your day-to-day computer experience?

To a certain extent it's made me cognisant of my relative *lack* of liberties, 
both in day-to-day computing and elsewhere. That's sad on the one hand, 
perhaps, but it's made me try to take control over as much of my day-to-day 
computer experience as possible (at the cost of time).

> + Do you believe that there is something to be learnt from Emacs and be
>   applied to other parts of life?  Could/should, for instance,
>   scientific research be conducted and publicised in a free,
>   collaborative fashion?

Most definitely. And occasionally we do even see good true "open access" 
research venues. My field (linguistics), there are at least Glossa [1] and 
Semantics & Pragmatics [2], and a fairly strong tradition of scholars posting 
"pre-prints" in an accessible manner (on Lingbuzz [3], sort of like arXiv, but 
specific to linguistics).

(But still in day-to-day academic life I'm quite literally forced to use a lot 
of software I find morally- (not to mention technologically-) questionable, and 
pressure to use even more of the same.)

Back to the larger question, I think there is still a lot of "alchemical 
practices" (in Doctorowian terms) in academia, perhaps loosely connected to the 
publish-or-perish framework we exist in.

> + More generally, do you see a connection between software freedom and
>   politics/economics?  Could/should the lessons drawn from Emacs and
>   free software in general (especially copylefted) be used as an
>   antipode to repressive forces, be they corporate actors or state
>   entities?

 Yes, but it's hard to know how exactly to do so.

 To touch back on the linked articles, specifically "The Problem With Free 
Software... ...Is Capitalism", even this article, which obviously isn't exactly 
comfortable with capitalism, still seems to overrate its efficiencies ("...it 
is true that we’ve seen an unprecedented boom under capitalism"). If your goal 
is maximisation of paper clip production, or you really enjoy rolling fields of 
maize whose monotony is largely only broken by highways and petrol stations: 
then Capitalism's your man. That is, ever-increasing efficiency of production 
of some particular product.  But otherwise capitalism seems largely parasitic 
on innovations produced in non-capitalistic fashions (creations by 
dilettante/independently-wealthy scientists; creations by artists/inventors 
with wealthy patrons, or who are employed by academic institutions).

 I think here about the software that's most useful to me. As with the 
non-utility of a room full of VC-funded paperclips, there is very little 
commercial software (simply on technical grounds) that's actually useful to me. 
Before Emacs, the software that opened my eyes to power of really free/libre 
software, that was exponentially more powerful than any commercial offering, 
was (La)TeX, which was, and remains, indispensable for my work. (And to a large 
extent I started using Emacs as extensively as I did because it provided (& 
continues to provide), via AUCTeX, the best TeX editing environment.)

 And both TeX and Emacs were developed by people who had the ability (at least 
in part due to their affiliations with academic institutions) to make tools 
appropriate for their own uses, without having to worry about commercial 
viability. And luckily both the (La)TeX and Emacs ecosystems have had enough 
contributors (of additional code) to make them viable.

 (The) Linux (kernel) is, I suppose, a different sort of case. It has the same 
'dilettante'/'hobbyist' origins as TeX or Emacs, and also developed its own 
hobbyist ecosystem, but the ubiquity of Linux across a wide range of hardware 
does reflect in part corporate funding. But my main use case, desktop Linux, is 
just a happy side-effect, since corporate funding doesn't care about desktop 
Linux in the slightest. In this case, I feel we just shelter in an alcove 
accidentally created by market forces.

 So, what does this suggest in practical terms? Don't be seduced by the 
short-term efficiencies of capitalism: they're limited not only in time but in 
scope, and are only really efficient in maximising share-holder revenue.

 Try to create spaces in which people are able to freely create and innovate, 
and which thus are not tied directly to commercial interests.

 Ideally this is people just being independently wealthy, or having (largely) 
benevolent 'patrons' (including universities). But in most cases, it's probably 
actually just trying to figure out how to best co-ordinate the efforts that 
unfunded hobbyists can carve out from their days, and how to cobble these 
together into meaningful actions.

 It's hard to be too optimistic though, since both in software and 
politics/economics it seems far too easy for such efforts to be easily 
frustrated as soon as they run afoul of commercial interests.
  
[1] <https://www.glossa-journal.org/>
[2] <https://semprag.org/index.php/sp>
[3] <https://lingbuzz.net/>

best,
  —Ben

-- 
 '(Benjamin Slade ("he/him") ( https://lambda-y.net )
  `(pgp_fp: ,(21BA 2AE1 28F6 DF36 110A 0E9C A320 BBE8 2B52 EE19))
  "sent by mu4e 1.4.15 in GNU Emacs 28.0.50 on Void Linux")