Alternatives

Tech conferences, media, and ticker symbols point towards solutions discovered, ground gained, and competition defeated. The founders and CEOs sometimes fill the "great man" myth of their companies' history. In a pinch, the company names serve as a flag apparently staked through every surface of the planet.

If we concede that these companies are conquerors of frontiers, we cast ourselves as vassals or the ground claimed. We can look at Facebook's defeat of Myspace, or with somewhat more nuance, Mac/Windows "beating" Linux as the major story guiding our digital lives, but just like a "great man" view of history, in this narrative we lose a range of choices, motivations, and futures we can imagine.

1. Free Software Didn't "Lose"

Wendy Liu absolutely nails it when she says of the free software movement:

Even as it attacked the idea of software as property, it failed to connect its message to a wider analysis that acknowledged the role of property rights within a capitalist framework.

The failure to apply a class analysis to a radical software vision looks like a severe weakness to me. And along a lens that isn't white, male, etc., RMS gets harder to defend as an appropriate leader.

I would say it's in spite of these failings, rather than due to them, that free software (or it's more capital friendly "open" cousin) have succeeded. People still write this stuff and use it every day. Even if that doesn't include most people knowingly using it or choosing it, and even if a Linux desktop operating system is undesirable for whatever reason by people who don't want to install things on the command line, it's a strong claim to say that it "lost."

If the metric for losing is the perrenial laughability of it never being the "year where Linux runs as a preferred desktop system for everyone," then yes, it's a failure. And even if linux and thousands of other components weren't integral to modern websites and other software, I'd still say it didn't lose.

Why?

2. Free Software Can Be Dormant

Open source software, free or not, is defined by code being available. Closed source software is an animal. It needs mergers and acquisitions to reproduce, and it eats cash to survive. Open source software is a plant. It can flower, and then go dormant while you collect its seeds. Store them in a cool, dry place, and then plant that code whenever you want.

And yes, the animals eat the plants sometimes. Mac's dev friendliness went up significantly when they added a unix terminal. Is this unix "losing?" Does a rabbit defeat a carrot? Presumably, if developers know how to use a unix terminal, they're more equipped for a scenario where macs are unavailable and they have transferable cross-platform knowledge.

3. Money

Regarding wages for work, yes, free and open source has been largely defeated in terms of comparing with wages paid to build products. There are exceptions though. Sometimes open source software is sponsored by companies. Platforms like Open Collective organize funding for open source work. And some open source contributors make a living providing support and guidance on the tools they or others have made.

Though these paths might be exceptions, we can't help but admit the possibility that they could become more common.

4. Alternatives

When we look for an alternative service, we've already loaded a lot into the requirements. What does a "Facebook Alternative" need to do? Everything Facebook does including all the scandals and ad-powered fascism uptick enabled? Probably not everything, right? Ok, well, here's a list of alternatives. You want a gmail that doesn't mine your purchase information? Here are some possibilities from a more ethically-focused site. To some people ethics means free software and/or privacy. I think it's more complicated than that, and I believe that, to a much greater extent than I've seen before, efforts are being made to consider accessability, race, gender, supply chains, labor conditions, and the planet as part of what we consider "ethical."

Anyways, you want an "ethical" phone? Here are a few options. I don't think we had this many options even just a few years ago. It's unlikely that any particular one of these phones suits everyone's definition of "ethics," but that feels like a high bar for something so personal and varied.

We can say these alternatives are dormant, unexplored, underfunded, unpopular, complex, or region/community specific, but to say they don't exist extends too much credit to only extending the notion of viability to "companies" that "compete" for "marketshare." Not every alternative is going to be a feature-by-feature match within a "tech company" pursuing a "victory." There's a reason capital throws millions of dollars hoping to create companies that happen to function as monopolies. It's specifically so they can become monopolies. They don't want to compete and cooperate. They want to "disrupt" and overthrow some existing source of wealth.

There are political, legal, and technological challenges we can make to this pattern, but if we come from a place of acknowledging no alternatives, we're not going to be at our most effective. And given that the likely result of most challenges will be a dormant phase, we should always be cultivating and sharing our knowledge of our available tools in order trian for the next challenge.

5. The Nothing, The Protocol, The Dumb, and The Physical

Other "Alternatives" include using nothing. We don't have to use Youtube. The alternative could be nothing. Netflix sees a frontier in the time when we could be sleeping. Sleep isn't nothing, but our "nothing," especially if defined as any moment of disconnection is certainly worth defending.

As for protocol, if you want an alternative to your email service, the protocol is available to tinker with. The technical roadblocks are not as hard as the ones around trust. Getting a server set up might be tough. Securing the server might be tough. Being a trusted service in the eyes of the existing services to not be considered spam is a different type of challenge.

You want a smart-light alternative? Maybe you want a clapper, or a dimmer switch. Maybe you want a dumb-light. Or maybe you do really want to control it from your phone. Barely any of the "internet of things" features require an internet connection for functionality alone. And certainly you could have some sort of platform on a personal server, say a raspberry pi, in your house that wouldn't need to send all of your information somewhere. Or I guess we can just have networked neighborhoods full of Nest cameras on the doors, thermostats that won't turn your heat on if you don't have the latest software update, and I don't know... all this.

Also important is that not all alternatives are software or hardware. Maybe the best alternative to Amazon is a library. Maybe your calorie tracker or calendar could just be a notebook. Maybe your email could be the mail. Maybe your youtube could be the park or the woods.

If we say that there is no alternative to these services, we're denying the legitimacy of physical space. To the extent that unsurveiled and unmediated space exists, we should defend it, in our minds at the very least.

6. New Models for a New World

If we're preparing for ecological collapse, which I would say we should to some degree, or maybe to 4 degrees unfortunately, I think we're facing a radically different perception of ecology and energy usage. Maybe we need to recognize ads (the model that drives these a lot of these no-alternative monopolies) as wasted energy.

Maybe we need to reconsider how travel works, which impacts airbnb signficantly. Here's a present, but nascent challenger, a couple older ones, and a list of related alternatives.

Maybe the future of websites is private servers run from solar panels. If, for whatever reason, we're in a spot where we need to drastically reduce energy usage, or produce some of our own, we'll still need each other and to communicate somehow. Maybe a minimalist form of "private cloud" will play a role. Maybe that internet looks a little different.

If we need to produce our own food or technology, there's a place for plants. Even if they're dormant now, the seeds are everywhere.