The illusion of liberty

Dan Gillmor has left the building. The Cupertino building with the Apple logo outside. And he’s not heading to Redmond, nor Mountain View. He’s headed to the People’s Republic of Linux.

I don’t have an issue with Dan’s choice to move to Linux, and I understand and sympathise with his reasons for doing so. It’s a path that several friends have gone down — and one which I travelled along briefly myself.

However, something about Dan’s motive for switching to Linux doesn’t sit well with me, because I believe it’s based on a fantasy: a fantasy of liberation, a fantasy of regaining control, which for most people is nothing more than an illusion.

Here’s what Dan says:

We are losing control over the tools that once promised equal opportunity in speech and innovation — and this has to stop.

The counter to this, in Dan’s mind, is the freedom of Linux.

However, unless you’re a coder — and, in fact, quite a specific kind of coder — the idea that Linux is a tool which delivers control to the user is illusory. In fact, you are handing control of your tools to a group of people with whom your relationship is more like vassalship to a feudal lord than something which belongs in the 20th Century: the developers who actually create it.

Linux is great for tinkering. But unless you can actually contribute code, you have no more control over it as a tool in your life than you have when buying a Mac, Windows machine, Chromebook, or whatever other platform you choose. You didn’t make it. You can’t influence its direction. And it’s actually sometimes harder to fix if things go wrong.

Instead, you have to get someone who can code to fix or change your tools. If you’re rich, of course, you can pay someone to write some code. Or, more likely, you have to petition the Lords of Code to change things, which may — or may not — elicit any response.

How is this different — how is this better — than having to rely on the largesse of Apple, Microsoft, Google? At least in Apple and Microsoft’s cases (and to a lesser degree Google’s) I’m a customer and can swap to something else. If I stop buying Macs, that has a material effect on Apple, albeit a tiny one.

If I stop using Linux, what effect does it have on anyone who develops it? None. Even if a hundred thousand unhappy Linux users stop using it, no one will really care.

That’s not true of commercial tools. The mass rebellion of Microsoft’s customers against Windows 8.1 has led the company to reintroduce elements like the Start menu, despite it being arguably a step back. Could the same happen with Linux? Sure, there’s always another distribution to use — but that just means handing control to a different set of unaccountable coders.

If you don’t create a tool yourself, or you don’t have a direct relationship with the people making it where you can ask for and receive changes, you don’t control it. And it doesn’t matter whether the people who made it are corporations with customers, fluffy non-profits, or backroom coders. They control your tools, not you.