The crybabies who freak out about The Communist Manifesto appearing on university curriculum clearly never read it - chapter one is basically a long hymn to capitalism's flexibility and inventiveness, its ability to change form and adapt itself to everything the world throws at it and come out on top:
The point of #SoftwareFreedom was #TechnologicalSelfDetermination, the right of technology users to decide not just what their technology does, but who it does it to and who it does it for:
Powerful people imprisoned by the cluelessness of their own isolation, locked up with their own motivated reasoning: "It's impossible to get a CEO to understand something when his quarterly earnings call depends on him not understanding it."
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
When Apple says, "You can't install a third party app store on your phone," what they means is, "it's illegal to install that third party app store." It's not a technical countermeasure that stands between you and #TechnologicalSelfDetermination, it's a legal doctrine we can call "#FelonyContemptOfBusinessModel":
Forget F1: the only car race that matters now is the race to turn your car into a digital extraction machine, a high-speed inkjet printer on wheels, stealing your private data as it picks your pocket. Your car's digital infrastructure is a costly, dangerous nightmare - but for automakers in pursuit of postcapitalist utopia, it's a dream they can't give up on.
There's plenty else WEI can do (it would make detecting #AdFraud much easier), but for every legitimate use, there are a hundred ways this could be abused. It's a technology purpose-built to allow rent extraction by stripping us of our right to #TechnologicalSelfDetermination.