Re: <nettime> Interview with Richard Stallman in New Left Review (September-October 2018)

[Carsten Agger <agger@modspil.dk>]

On 11/1/18 12:46 PM, mp wrote:
> On 01/11/2018 10:23, Carsten Agger wrote:
> > That's another question and a valid argument: Do we even want computers
> > to exist at all?
> >
> > Note, that if we *do* want it, software needs to be free.  And, if we
> > can't avoid them to exist and we need to use software, software also
> > needs to be free.
> There's an additional (meta)question: what kind of software/hardware?
>
> The alphabetic culture that spawned book culture, which in turn led to
> computers, is only one of an infinity of possible literacies (beware
> conflating the general with the particular). "The book" (and now the
> computer) has also historically been a colonial force that violently
> destroyed all other forms of literacies: it is a monocultural literacy.

That's completely true. That a written culture was introduced, in my own 
part of the world as late as around 1000 along with the introduction of 
Christianity, doesn't mean that people were "ignorant" or "illiterate" 
before that time - on the contrary, they had a rich literature including 
thousands of poems, stories and songs, the vast majority of which are 
now lost, all of which was memorized and orally transmitted.

And as the written language takes over, the motivation and, in the end, 
the capacity for memorizing everything dies, and a rich way of thinking 
and transmitting and living with literature is lost.

So when advocating software freedom I'm not, let's be clear, saying we 
should necessarily have software or build our infrastructure with it and 
the hardware it runs on. I'm saying that software freedom is a necessary 
(not sufficient) condition for a society built on software to be free.

I also believe that widespread computer literacy, enough to enable 
groups without access to heavy funding to build their own 
infrastructure, is necessary for that purpose.

But, unlike Stallman, I don't love programming and working with software 
as such - I always considered it to be work, not fun. I'd definitely 
rather have a society without the extreme centralization of all 
communication infrastructure we're seeing in these years - Google, 
Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, Microsoft and Apple be damned and go to hell.

> See for instance attached paper. Here is a quote touching upon some of
> the significant aspects of these colonial/conquest processes:
>
> "The narrow vision of what ‘writing’ was led to the encoding of
> indigenous languages in Roman script in an attempt to ‘render the spoken
> visible.’ Latin was seen by those chronicling the ‘New World languages’
> as a universal linguistic system, and as such this was taken as the
> grammatical basis for the Amerindian languages (Mignolo, 1992,
> p.  304). Since they were Spanish speakers, the early scholars’ attempts
> to represent the sounds of the languages were governed by Spanish
> phonographic rules (the lasting effect of which will be discussed in the
> third section of this article). The first ‘alphabetizing’ of indigenous
> languages, then, can be understood as an “opression symbolique” (Calvet,
> 1999, p. 233), a ‘symbolic oppression’ whereby languages are forced into
> the norms of an external system and made an object which the
> colonizers can ‘possess’ (Mignolo, 1992, p. 306). From the outset, the
> ‘technology of literacy’ was used in such a way that it removed language
> and literacy from the indigenous peoples and reframed them to fit with a
> colonial worldview."
Very interesting, thanks!
> This kind of literacy has brought us detachment from the soil and the
> earth as such, climate chaos and, in its Twitter form, Trumpisms.

Yes. And given the coming fascist takeover in Brazil, enabled by fake 
news (outright and very deplorable lies) spread through Facebooks 
WhatsApp product, all the more scary these years.


Best

Carsten

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