Blonging for Freedom/ freedom is not the end

Blonging for Freedom ? ~ ⁂ *

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I often get the misguided retort that free software is technological solutionism. On the surface, the retort seems reasonable, because technology alone can hardly ever solve social problems. But it carries a fundamental misunderstanding about what free software is about.

Free software is not the technology, it is a conceptual framework, it's an attitude towards technology.

While a lot of technology in long past history was about enabling us to do more, a lot of recent (proprietary) technology has been about preventing us from doing that which technology would have enabled us to do, so as to control us.

The reason it can even try to do that is that it's proprietary: by being impenetrable, and supported by authoritarian laws introduced undemocratically, it can place selective roadblocks that typically serve the interests of those who place them, while they stop us from pursuing our own.

Such roadblocks are the opposite of freedom, and they've been alarmingly normalized. Freedom, conversely, is about being entitled to take whatever path you like. It doesn't mean someone has an obligation to take you there, though, only the absence of roadblocks that would otherwise impede you from taking those paths.

Free software respects our freedom. Having freedom doesn't mean that all of our problems are magically solved and our of our wishes are suddenly granted. It only means that we're not being prevented from pursuing solutions for our problems, or from following our dreams.

Therefore, freedom, and thus free software, aren't to be understood as solutions in themselves, but as enablers of solutions, as unblocked paths for us to get wherever we feel like.

With freedom, with control over our own lives, we can then work on solving social problems. Without it, we're under control of others, and limited by the roadblocks they place in our paths to stop us from even trying.

So freedom is not the end, it is only the beginning.

So blong,