Seizing the means of computation – Interview with Cory Doctorow

I used to really like Cory until I saw him give a talk at Burning Man. The talk wasn't bad but at the end of the talk he announced Q&A with "all gay, colored, or non-binary people ask questions first" and refused to take questions from anyone until all questions from "gay, colored, or non-binary people" were asked. While I can appreciate and respect that Cory himself is not heterosexual, the "social justice" flavored blatant discrimination over demographic details, arbitrarily excluding those with meaningful curiosity and intellect, and the manner in which he did it left me with pause before taking anything he says seriously.

I think that even if Cory got his perfect digital paradise, and we all ran our own servers, held our own data, and somehow had perfect encryption... it would be gone within days because of Linus Torvalds, and his failure to learn from Andrew S. Tanenbaum, which compounded on the earlier mistakes of Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie et al.

Our operating systems have no balls. They blindly submit to the whims of any program we care to run. By design, a very out of date design that lived in the almost paradise of classrooms and corporations with lots of people who just wanted to get stuff done, cooperating.

The IBM XT with dual floppy diskettes was the most secure that general purpose computing could ever get.

I'd really appreciate if someone could change my mind, it's damned depressing knowing our best days are behind us.

Good article. But

> Big Tech giants are often abbreviated as GAFAM

Ok, FAANG is a bit out of date in both names and composition, but surely we can do better than that?

I vote for GAMMA.

How popular movements can topple Big Tech monopolies