> Jonathan looked upset. “Why do the knights support this work? They are skilled farmers, couldn’t they tend their own land?”
“The earls offer the knights a comfortable life, high salary, and pleasant work (though curiously poor housing). Life outside the earldom is uncertain and difficult.”
“Do no knights strike out on their own?”
Philip was quiet for a moment. He pointed across a vast vista to a large castle in the distance adjacent to that of their own Earl Zuckerberg’s. “That is the castle of Sir Brian Acton of the former Earldom of WhatsApp. Sir Acton was an idealistic farmer who rejected the ways of our earl. He promised the serfs he would take no part of their data harvest they produced from the land he provided them, and instead the serfs even paid him a small cash fee for his protection. He had no knights to watch and report on his people and no heralds spreading pronouncements.”
“What happened?”
“He was too successful. Earl Zuckerberg saw many of his serfs begin to leave his lands to work the lands of Sir Acton (at the time he was known as Farmer Acton). This was a risk to the power of Zuckerberg’s earldom, since an earl without serfs to tend to the data fields has no harvest to interest others. In the end he offered Sir Acton a knightship and such enormous wealth that he could not refuse. It’s said he now lives in that vast castle alone, is rarely seen, and rarely speaks. The serfs that were in agreement with him now belong to Earl Zuckerberg as they had before, their deal was broken, and once again they tend to our earl’s data harvest.”
all it takes is endless zero pay toil living with doesn't just work not all easy open source. to make our own lands. heck yeah let's keep all picking the subsidized to near free consumer experience.
i do think it's worth asking what the alternatives are, and what we have to do to chase them.
i was very salty above, but i feel like i have embodied the zeitgeist, captured the popular attitude, fairly accurately, to get an escape from capture into techno-feudalism.
i for one also have spent a lot of my life with endless zero pay toil, chasing the better alternatives, basically sure that my life will never reach any kind of techno-culmination, never achieve any kind of useful escaped coherency, but engaged in the struggle none the less. for zero pay, expectations of reward, other than personal satisfaction at having made a go at homesteading myself on the digital.
i'd also say that i don't find open source uneasy to work with, & in fact it feels more comfortable to me, lets me go down rabbit holes but rabbit holes that ultimately, usually, culminate in some kind of ground truth & insight, some understanding gained. my macbook on the other hand started refusing to connect to my wifi 3 weeks ago & there's next to no hope for understanding why the macbook has had this change of heart, for finding out what went wrong. the macbook will remain unknowable, a thing that is unexaminable, outside the scientific process & unadaptable; in some ways it's comforting, getting to a hard wall & having no place further to look, but i for one will take & hope humanity continues to have rabbit holes to dive into & chase down, towards reason, towards understanding, towards betterment.
and it's just so much easier & more interesting to situate myself in such a powerful land, as OSS brings.
i think we should take Cory's techno-feudalism concerns very seriously, and very much consider what we ourselves can do, and assess more honestly the behaviors & perceptions of the options about us.
An analogy that will probably define the 21st century...