2016-05-01 #
Before Richard Stallman, there was Jacques Ellul, who warned that technology has a cost, and that cost is freedom. He argues that technology has become the new religion, and society is dominated by technology. No longer are people in control of technology, as it becomes a force of nature as well as a religion of its own. Upholding freedom is as important now as it ever has been, and the means to do that is through reflection on our ethical responsibilities as humans.
Any critique of technology is met with some counter-argument that pre-agricultural society was far worse, but this is not what Ellul advocates. Unlike Henry Thoreau (or even Ted Kaczynski) who did actually live in the woods, Ellul embraces technology. Indeed, technology is not something that can just be discarded entirely, it has already escaped Pandora's Box, and now it is a matter of coping with it.
Freedom from Technology
The steps towards attaining freedom from technology shared by Stallman, Ellul, and others is to reflect, rather than "reflex" as Ellul posits. For example, the appeal of services like Uber is that it is more convenient to hail a taxi using a phone application and to have it negotiate all of the personal interactions for the consumer. People are more focused on the technique than on its social aspects. Uber is widely known for operating illegally in certain circumstances and for depriving its workers of social benefits, similar to other illicit trades, but this is given much less attention than it deserves. I think that people have a social responsibility to protest, but they are too distracted by technique. Top mathematicians, scientists, and programmers join government agencies and software companies not in order to trample on the rights of people even if that is the organization's unstated goal, but in order to practice technique. I think that is ethically reprehensible, and those people should quit.
Regarding protest, Stallman advocates avoiding non-free software, and more recently "Service as a Software Substitute" (SaaSS), as it deprives the user of freedom. This freedom is largely overlooked by the majority of software users who are not programmers, and even programmers themselves. However, it is more relevant now than it ever has been in a post-Wikileaks, post-Snowden world, as the lack of transparency between people and corporations and government agencies lead to gross violations of social contracts. With proprietary software, the user must trust that the software is not acting against their own interest, and is free of intentional security flaws.
I would argue that this extends not only to software, but media as well. For example, streaming is the new renting. No longer do people actually own media, free to consume it on their own terms, but now media is back in the ownership of the oligarchy that merely lends media to consumers, which can deprive people whenever they want.
The Software Industry
When computers were invented, it was possible for one person to fully understand what every vacuum tube did, what every instruction does, and the mathematics and electrical engineering involved to build one. The software "engineers" of today know hardly about the layer below them, let alone the hardware. A sort of willful ignorance is imposed by cloud computing which further removes the programmer from the hardware. There is more demand for higher level abstractions, which is why fundamental computer science research is at an all-time low. As newer generations of programmers enter industry, they are also deprived of passing on the generational knowledge, because age discrimination forbids older programmers in the workplace.
The software industry is a new religion, and technique is sacred. Therefore it is no coincidence that the job title "developer evangelist" exists. Even the act of critiquing popular technology becomes like blasphemy to the Church. Sometimes technique itself attains a cult-like status, currently functional programming, static typing, testing, Agile/Scrum management, etc. People develop quasi-religious views and shun everything that does not fit in their worldview, such as the widely abhorred PHP language.
I think that software professionals as a whole can do far better, but it is currently a very low status position for the vast majority. It may be decently paid at the moment, but only because of market forces of supply and demand, but still it is relatively underpaid compared to the value that it provides. In order to achieve that, I think programmers must let go of tribal battles between their favored techniques and treat them not as sacred things to take personal offense to.
The primacy of technique in the daily lives of people is indeed harmful to freedom, as it encourages reflex rather than reflection. It's too easy to get distracted by technique and forget about the goal of software: making technology useful for people (and not harmful).