>On Jan 24, 2007, at 12:48 PM, Dwayne Monroe wrote:
>
>>It all seems to be a vast and mysterious black box.
>
>Like I keep saying, I bet 95% of users want a mysterious black box -
>one that's easy to operate and doesn't break much. I don't accept
>that wanting to know what goes on inside your computer or the pipes
>of the interweb is at all analogous to wanting to understand how your
>society works. My networked computer helps me understand how society
>works, but that doesn't mean I want to know what's going on under
>this keyboard.
Dwayne will recall my rant about this some months back, when I inquired as to why users would nearly accuse techy people of being thieves and cheats, making up complexity, in order to pull a fast one. As I've gotten to know this end of the market better -- mostly people that need a tutorial on what 'right clicking' is or how to download Adobe Acrobat *reader* -- what I'm hearing is: they don't *want* to know. There are people like me and R who will and who leap at the opportunities, time permitting, but when it's not or when there's no payoff, I'm perfectly happy sticking a tape cleaner into my VCR to clean the heads, not tearing apart the VCR to do it myself, which is actually a better way to clean it.
I get your concerns about technology and the abuses to which it can be put, but the answer to that isn't to get people more involved in tech and spend their time looking behind the scenes. The answer is to change the fucking economic foundations about upon this system resides. all FOSS does is alter the *social relations of production*. That is not the same thing. Oh, and if you don't know what I"m talking about re "social relations of production", then RTFM, MFers. :)