Books on FOSS (was Re: [lbo-talk] Re: Purer Than Thou)

[Jim Straub]

That describes my own computer needs.  I am really not tech-savvy at all.  I
can, just barely, open up a word processor, internet, and graphics program
on windows; anything more and I turn into that old commercial with the two
monkeys banging their fists against the computer.  I'll never master the
technology or skills that go into the manufacture and programming of
computers, but I type and read very fast, and so using them opens up huge
new vistas of information for me, when I get the chance.  (Also, more
importantly, I can find people I went to highschool with on myspace and
crack jokes about how much weight we're all gaining all of a sudden at 26).

Computers, like automobiles and food processing and cell phones and air
travel and widget factories, are a technology and product that have some
great uses, and could be even much more socially useful if society
determined their production and consumption in rational ways instead of the
current pyramid scheme; I use all of those things, and having a skill in the
production or service in them is an honest trade, socially useful and
skilled labor, like so little of what our jobs are today (such as mine!).

But what is the big deal?  I notice a tendency for folks in the tech
subculture who have antiauthoritarian politics to get a bit carried away
about the radical possibilities of this or that program or platform; how
they're inherently socialist or anarchist or whatever; like after the
revolution society will produce and consume according to a great big
participatory utopiapedia online.  Eh.  Hey, to be honest, I go to the nyt
for journalism before indymedia.  These people, I find, often think that
blogs are more important than they really are, and think that sending a mass
email out about a protest is the same thing as doing real turnout for the
protest.  But the results of online politics coming into the material world
are usually underwhelming.  Call me old-fashioned, but, I'd rather learn to
work on my car's transmission or run an MRI machine before learning to run
an open source software, and don't think either of those things the key to
social transformation.


> 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.
>
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