Informatics, progress, and technocracy. (original version in spanish, here: https://blog.canta.com.ar/2021/02/05/informatica-progreso-y-tecnocracia/) Some days ago I stumbled upon an article that got my attention for several motives: https://sysdfree.wordpress.com/2020/12/12/330/ The article, originally from the people behind Sabotage Linux, and focussed over some Free Software, show us some examples of how sometimes the idea of progress turns into exactly the opposite. And between other conclussions, the authors suspect of the dark hands of shareholders behind so many problematic decisions. Is in light of of this article, and the comments it generated, that I would like to argue some of my own ideas about it. In advance, this will be my arguing line: in an overwhelming majority of conflict cases inside informatics communities in general, discussions seem to tend towards gross simplifications of technical order. And it also seems that diagnoses of problems are unanimously concluded with the only idea in mind of degraded purities: the constant shadow of corruption, or people that doesn't comply with guiding principles (or don't understand them, and therefore this people are idiots). I consider this as symptoms of a profound political immaturity in our field, that we must learn to consider much more seriously when whe take a look at the actual role of informatics in society. However, as arguing this may be intrincate, very long for current internet standars, and from time to time diverge from simple notions to problematic generalizations, I prefer to split all this in parts, as follows: 1. Technocracy, and contemporary tecnocracies, in the example of economics. 2. The philosophical nature of progress. 3. Informatics, society, and Free Software: some conclusions. 1. "It's a technical problem, stupid": This phrase I'm using as title for this section, today is a legendary meme: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_the_economy,_stupid But whatever the iteration, both as meme or in it's original version as inteligent condensed concept for an electoral campaign, the phrase is coined to install an immediate common sense that purposely replaces a debate with a conclusion. I hate this phrase. I consider its success as meme a symptom of a good chunk of our contemporary problems in our world. That, and the popularity of capitalist realism [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_Realism]. And it happens that the economy is in the heart of our era. The whole XX century was organized around the fight on what's the ultimate economic system for humanity. And we know how that went. That phrase also introduces the gloom evil of technocracy behind a veil of smart and kinda funny. But, at this point, is so wrong to find that phrase funny (or worst, correct) as it would be to confuse Ku Klux Klan members with happy people in some ghost festivity. That phrase is used to impart violence, subdue peoples, and seize a power that belong to others. Let's check this out, continuing with the economics example, which is today one of the fundamental references of technocracy worldwide. I believe everyone will agree on that we need strict production and distribution plans in times of scarcity, in order to avoid resource waste and creepy situations like famines. Right?. And I also imagine that everyone would agree that such plans should be a top priority in society planing. In front of which economics certainly has things to say, and they're all most welcome. However, all of our big modern crises were about speculation and overproduction. And not only that, but in no single moment we stopped to suffer scarcity problems, even when literally we have millons of tons of extra food, and literally have tech that solved every logistic problem. The novelty is that our modern scarcities are synthetic: we now create scarcities where there's none. Interestingly enough, we actually do that to sustain that "economic system" which generated that overproduction in the first place. But in any case it happens that, given that it's a production problem, then even by common sense it should be an economic problem. And that's how anybody quickly comes to some conclusion like these: "well, then the problem is that somebody did a bad economic plan, or perhaps bad implementations". Or even stuff like "then we need to change the economic system", and discussions then go towards stuff like capitalism vs communism. Whatever the case, that's how economics renew its centrality in society. And yet, once and again and again economic plans achieve somehow catastrophic systematic failures, at least for wide sectors of world population. And there are a few things we need to take note about that. The first one is that an absolutely marginal fragment of world population has never stopped to getting richer, and in fact gets even more richer when "economic system" failures happen. In second place, everyone insist in reaching hypothetical states of purity (in planification, in execution, in system participants honesty, etc) that never get reached, and yet that's the only place where hope for a better future seems to always be. And the third thing to note is that both capitalism and communism (the two antagonic big XX century "economic systems") had similar failures: small privileged sectors of society, with massive groups of people damaged to scandalous and inhuman levels. That way, as it always happens with ideas that pretend to reach too much, sooner [https://www.truthdig.com/articles/wall-street-is-the-definition-of-a-ponzi-scheme-literally/] than later [https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/01/28/how-ongoing-gamestop-fiasco-highlights-sinister-nature-modern-casino-capitalism] they begin to show their obvious problems, and suddenly the previous common sense needs great rational efforts and very well formed specialists to survive. It's the case of the economy today: at the same time we're asked to get it as some obvious, common sense stuff, specially in times of elections; while we're also asked at the same time that we keep our oppinions obout all of this because we're not specialists in the matter, and thus we shouldn't get babbling bullshit about it. And at the very same time, it happens between specialists that they throw shit to each others, calling others stuff like "ignorant" or "idiot", when their speculations about what's going on and what to do just don't match between peers. Of course, no matter who's speaking or what may be saying, economicists arguments are always defined as "objective", and they always have "progress" as horizon. With all that in mind, before keep on asking anything else to economics, I believe we most likely need to check their credentials. The trick is that "economic systems" are no such things, but cultural orders. It's absolutely reidiculous to think today economics as an isolated thing from geography, biology, history, physics, linguistics, and who knows what else. In fact, nobody talks today about economics when they speak of economics: they talk politics. Nobody says stuff like "communism", "capitalism", "socialism", "free market", "intervencionism", and so on, as if those stuff where just some technical production and logistics conditions: everybody uses those terms as flags in an ideological battlefield that insists since at least 150 years from now, and XX century took up to the level of war. And the reason for that is what both "economic systems", capitalism and communism, has to say about beign human. It happens that, even when they say different things, they both share the centrality of economics. This way, nobody says something like "I don't know, let's try a few decades, and then we evaluate in detail". No country or state seems to agree in things like "this region try this system, this other region try this other one, and we can compare experiences". The idea sounds ridiculous, idealistic in a bad sense, or even alien, no matter that the most basic and elemental use of reason easily allows anybody to consider that as an obvious way to go. And at the same time, we still seem to be forced to ask economics for permission when we try to think about possible future worlds. What happens is that economics is barely a single component of a much more complex social system. The fantasy that "everything is economical", or that "economy is the mather of all problemas", is nothing but that: a fantasy. Economics is not more or less important than physics, biology, or sociology, per se: it depends on what are you talking about. Every discipline is a tool for solving problems. But in no way economics has any objective authority over other components of the system. That's why it's in constant and infinite conflict with basically any human action in a moderns society: because everything we do questions the weak points of economics, that again and again gets where it doesn't belong, at the same time it doesn't handle the stuff it should handle. All of this about contemporary economics is in fact a pretty general map of what constitutes a technocracy: an ideological bias, manifested in a central bureaucratic area of power, which can only be accesed with curated credentials, and that everyone else submits to. Economics as the center of the social debate, is ideology. The technical qualification as a condition for social debate, is ideology. The need (instead of desirability) for technical terminology in order to speack about real life conditions, is ideology. And ideology is politics. That's what both economists and business people do in contemporary societies: politics, and nothing else. And that's how economics is not only not solving any real problem anywhere in the world, but it's also generating a deep discredit of politics by taking its place. In case the reader didn't figured it out yet, informatics communities are full of this tecnocratic biases. I invite anybody to go and check out comments in discussions about any IT issue in general. Of course I could put here infinite examples, specially when it comes to the more heated issues, that frequently end up generating decades of flamewars and conflict. But allow me to let just a single, short one, in order to be brief about it in this long text. It's a 2015 article about why somebody considers a good idea to stop talking shit about PHP, and even talking shit in general when it has to do with others: https://blog.aurynn.com/2015/12/16-contempt-culture Then look at the responses in reddit, where php people is even accused of "anti-intellectualism", of course calling "objectivity" as credential for saying such thing: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/4z6vjv/contempt_culture/ All of our field is behaving that way, since some time from now. And to nobody's surprise, during last decade, our field began to characterize itself for creating problems where there weren't before, affect entire communities with forced and unwanted changes, creating synthetic scarcities by means of programmed obsolescence (as is the scandalous case with i386 deprecation), submit to corporate agendas at breakneck speed as if we had no history, deny political conditioning at the same time we use grandiloquent titles such as "democratic" or "open", and so many nasty extra stuff. And all of this is always done with the flags of objectivity and progress. 2. About progress. Following the example of economics, both in Wealth of Nations and Das Kapital you can find ideas of progress showing the way forward for humanity: opulence development, classless societies, and all the good stuff we all know. And the thing is, it was the epoch calling for that: we had a political revolution in France, and a tecnological revolution in England. Clearly the world was changing. And in the heart of it all, there were anthropocentrism first, and science later. Man had defeated God, and suddenly he was the owner of its destiny, no longer written in sacred scriptures nor controled by wise scholastics. And at the same time, science became the tool for ultimate truth. That adventurous spirit, mixing ingenuity with innovation, gave rise to a new ideological bias: technological optimism. As decades passed, scientific and technological development let little space for debate, and the feeling began to be that the only real limit for humanity was its imagination. Is not that there weren't any critical voices around that time, nor also newer problems: it was that technology introduced so many radical and spectacular changes that one could hardly argue against its virtues if used correctly. Such was the case with Marx, for example. When Marx saw the exclusion and misery spreading around technology, he didn't condemned technology but the way it was being used in that society; in fact, he argued that technological development was already not only desirable (as that would be the road to a classless society), but also inevitable. Yet, even when Marx was more explitic than others about it, getting to the point of saying that history only goes in one direction, the thing is that by that time technology (and its mother science) already had written underground the new destiny of humanity: progress. The freedom from holy scriptures last little for humanity, which invented some new ones, wich new sages to take care of them. I'm refering to the same historical time where positivism was born as philosophical school of science, and where the conflict between nations to solve old issues began to translate in races for scientific, technological, and economic, supremacy. This same very historial time started to move the world faster and faster after each generation, and incrementing the scale of every human action. This optimism lasted until the first world war: a conflict so scandalously devastating that not even nightmares were able to sum up all the disaster numbers. An entire generation got traumatized for that conflict. So, as the most elemental use of reason dictated, the obvious conclusion was that, at least, after that, it could hardly happen again, given that the whole world understood the insane magnitude of what was just happened. Again, progress; although this time the cost was actually too high, snd so the world began to suspect about the alledged good of scientific and technological developments: the immeasurable carnage that was the first world war had never been possible without the intervention of science. Of course, we all know that it came a second world war after that, event worse than the previous one. And the cherry on top this time was that it ended with no less than the atomic bomb: a tecnological device born from the purest and most advanced science, that for the first time in human history allowed for credible and inmediate threats of extintion for humans and everything else along with them. And even with all that, it also leaved the world in a state of cold war for half a century, and we may even tell without much shame that this stuff didn't ever ended and still goes on. Those few paragraphs back there are nothing but a brief history of modernity: an age in human history. And the idea of progress is but a child of modern times: it was born in it, and died with it. Please take note of that last thing I wrote: progress is dead. Nobody sane today who has read a book can speak of "progress" without hesitate at least once. Progress was literally the flag of our darkest hours in history, and it let the world with deep wounds not yet healed. Speaking about "progress" today, in abstract terms like that, isolated from society, is simply denialist. But it also happens that the story of modernity and progress is the story of scientific technocracies. In fact, "technocracy" as a term is quite modern. The rise of economics as a cornerstone and central mandate for modern societies is consequence of the same ideological biases that gave rise to the other things: the anthropocentrism from reinaissance, in union with modern technological optimism. With those two ingredients mixed together as rationale basis, it was obvious to understand anything as an object of scientific study waiting to be exploited by the forces of human production. And who's better qualified, in times like that, for handling such tasks, than scientists, and to a lesser extent technicians? It's clear that, having at their disposition objective and unquestionable knowledge, scientists and technicians know better than anybody else what to do, always. And if by some strange exception they would do something incorrect, it can only be explained by subjective deviations: as could be ignorance, corrupt personal insterests, or even mental incapacity (idiocy). This way we reach that article from the beginning, "when progress is backwards", where the people from Sabotage Linux ask themselves if this isn't "corruption" what's behind such non-progress. It happens that informatics is a somewhat young discipline. It was born in XX century, and in the last 40 or 50 years hasn't stopped its "technological progress", emulating in a dizzying way all the steps the rest of the scientific and technological disciplines had done before in previous centuries: first ingenuity, then optimistic, and eventually positivist and technocratic. And so today we look at each other in disbelief while flat-earthers are every day less marginal, hundreds of thousands of people all around the world step up against sanitary measures of isolation in the name of an apparently almighty freedom that seems to have priority over anything else, borderline lunatics threatening the most powerful nation in the world with an armed coup based on delirant conspirational theories, and there seems to be not a single place in the entire world that is not every day more polarized and in the brink of social conflict. From our field, it seems to me... short sighted, even when maybe an step in the right direction, to ask ourselves in this context about the progress in gtk or python, while telecomunications are our very tanks and bombers since decades now, and internet has become our own atomic bomb. Perhaps it is time that informatics learn to question the very idea of progress. 3. Free Software and society. The two problems I've mentioned before, happens because of a wrong distance from society. Technocracy is the abuse of a perhaps understandable specificity, while that nasty progress is simply closing our eyes to the social consequences of what we're doing. And I frequently feel this distances, even incrementing themselves, inside informatics communities. Also, both things happen according to our ideas of the limits in our communities, and our relationship with others. All of this is the reason behind this text. I would like to note some alerts I believe we should have as community, and having them into account to also explain some of our internal problems. But continuing that issue with the atomic bomb, an observation. Do you know how that ended? With the Universal Declaration of Human Rights [https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/]. It's very interesting to remember and to reflect about that event in hour recent history, barely some 70 years ago. Think for a minute about this concept: the URSS, *DURING STALIN*, signing a pact that says "everybody has a right to property", at the same time the USA, DURING MCCARTHYISM, signs a pact that says "everybody has a right to food, clothes, house, health, and social services". Do you understand the state the world would have to be in, for such monsters to sign such a treaty? Seriously, take some minutes to consider the magnitude of what just did happen on XX century, for such an scene to be possible. Today it's absolutely unthinkable a treaty like that, even when it's certainly urgent. And that's symptomatic. At the same time, today is not physics the one in the eye of the storm, but informatics: that young science born at the heat of the two great wars. Today, from biology to astrophysics, everyone understands the universe in terms of "information", while papers all around the world tell us about the conflicts between GAFAM and the nation states because of the power over society those corporations are dealing with. Today, we, informatics people, are responsible. It is obviously unfair to make any of us responsible for such big problems: all of it's clearly bigger than anyone of us. Yet, I don't believe it's asking for too much to have all of this in mind when taking decisions, specially when we're part of a political movement such as Free Software. And inside informatics this translates into changing lots of behaviours that actually look kinda immutable. Let's see some examples. RMS once called systemd "ethical" [https://twitter.com/nixcraft/status/849908742871175168/photo/1] because "it's free software". This is a case of both: to be too technical, and to uncouple from social consequences of software. While RMS is extremely specific about that is ethical and what is not in software, systemd was and still is a vector of absolute discord in Free Software communities in particular, and in GNU/Linux ecosystem in general. This is understandable, as could just have been the way RMS answer random mails: we all know RMS doesn't run away from political problems. But if we take a look at GNU's FAQ, when mentioning systemd (and I'm sure there are a lot of frequent questions about systemd and its relation to GNU, from years ago to this days), the only thing we see is a brief comment about naming conventions: https://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-linux-faq.en.html#systemd We can not just give our backs to social conflicts: not our own internal and technical informatics conflicts, not the ones between technicians and users, and not the ones regarding society in general. The same that happened with systemd happens also with wayland [https://gist.github.com/probonopd/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d1f2277], with examples as the one I gave before regarding PHP against other programming languages, also happened before with other clearly sterile debates such as kde vs gnome, and it most likely will keep on happening. Dissent is welcome, but that ideological bias what leads the fantasy by which objectivity one can speak outside of societal conditions and be immune to subjectivity should be an idea long overdue. And sadly it is not. In the same way, no matter the conflict details, the conclusion always seems to be that somebody "sold out": the FSF sold out when RMS was canceled, or RMS sold out when he did not criticized systemd, or redhad buyed the debian goverment, or canonical sold out to microsoft, or this or that corporation is infecting the project with their money, and so on. When it's not about purity of principles, then it needs to be about financial purity, or even maybe purity of soul. And the idea of objectivity does not help to humanize those conflicts. Sometimes it looks like we pretend that informatics people should ignore the way they pay the bills, or we're otherwise corrupt. Or we even seem to want that the people making free software be martirs whose only compromise in life is with... whatever the idea the person involved in the judgement interprets that should be what free software do; and of course they should be immune to real life economical conditions. It's no surprise that there's so little satisfaction this days inside informatics. The thing is that we're losing political battles, not that purity was ever to be found anywhere. Another typical case of political immaturity: the question of codes of conduct. The political movements related to racism, feminism, and gender issues, as some examples we all may know by now, have a long history so far of organization, failures, an successes. They're actually movements with many generations involved, not just one or two like we have in informatics. And they have learned how to build real, political power: they have real martirs, with real entire lifes dedicated to it. Also, consistently with their human ideological agenda (which they embrace), they get in the middle of every human sphere of praxis: just as economics do from centuries on and nobody seems to care much about it. If it has something to do with human beings doing something, then they have something to say, because they discuss what being human means. And when they get into informatics, again and again we receive them with hostility and contempt: we don't read their books nor participate in their talks, yet we act like we have deep shit to argue when in fact we're just trying to shut them off with some common sense that takes us back to decades. We don't like other fields telling us how to behave: we believe ourselves isolated from "all that social bullshit". We never say something like "I actually know shit about race, or feminism, or gender": but that's not an issue for us when it's about telling them that changing words is an idiotic thing to do, and that moderate language is censorship. Too many times we pretend that our bigotry is justified by some objectivity that the other person ignores, corrupts, or is unable to understand. And this is painfully visible when it's about codes of conduct. This is again giving the back to society, and is specially strong when the word "freedom" is involved somewhere. But also, that veil of alledged objectivity we use, makes us fantasize that we're immune to ideological influence, when we're far from it. Too many times I've seen debates in informatics where people speaks of pretended meritocracies, virtuous competition, or even directly criticism of the idea of the state, which all matches with neoliberal ideology. Of course there's never anybody considering those coincidences: not even when feminism or anti-racism people focus on this kind of details. What we achieve by isolate ourselves from our social reality, being that by means of pretending it to be simpler than it is, or by pretending that anything not adequated to our theoretical standards is alien, is to delegate political power around those issues to other actors. That's where corporate PR feasts, taking advantage of all the openings we let for them to speak in our name. Today we're clearly being used by corporations that make informatics a worst place for users and technicians alike, at the same time they're doing a shocking damage to society in general, while they show our precious flags with deep hypocrisy and shame us. And it's doubly tragic when all of this affects Free Software in particular, because we have lots to offer to society. In the same way racism or feminism activism get into the world of software and tell us stuff, our ideas about the nature of exchange, of knowledge, of communitary practices, and collaboration, has deep consequences once installed in general society. And I'm talking about real life solutions to very important problems. We have the potential for, as they do, converging in heterogeneous and massive movements of political power, installing that way an agenda of social change. Meanwhile, GNU/Linux has won the war for servers but never for desktops, GNU has no injerence in the mobile world, Linux is more corporate oriented every passing day, systemd is closer and closer of totally replacing GNU, corporations has users co-opted, and we as a community keep on discussing who's an idiot. We who work in informatics should not pretend to be isolated from the rest of society. But we who also are part of political initiatives, as we people from the Free Software movement are, MUST NOT, EVER, do something like that. That's a sin for us. We have the obligation to reflect about this issues and do our best for handling it with intelligence and responsability. But most important: we do ideology, and we need to embrace that idea once and for all. With all this in mind, I propose we do ideology with intelectual honesty and sensibility, as I'm convinced we're much more in need of empathy rather than objectivity this days.