Cory Doctorow created a masterpiece in his For The Win novel. While everyone should thoroughly enjoy it, Anarchist will find it especially gripping.
I just realized that I haven’t mentioned this book already here and I think it’s high time I do.
During my recent vacation I went through Cory Doctorow’s latest novel: For The Win and it was immediately a favourite. It’s not often that a book which can extract such strong sentiments out of me but this one did it spades. I kept alternating between anger, excitement, happiness and so on, as I was rooting for the heroes, feeling their pain and being gripped to my seat by the very believable action happening inside.
I don’t know if Cory is an anarchist but he seems to have got the practice of anarcho-syndicalism down pat. The only thing that I think would have been improved is if the organizers of the International Workers of the World Wide Web (IWWWW, or Webblies. I kid you not, these were some of the more awesome concepts he came up with) were more decentralized rather than basically being controlled by a few of the heroes and therefore suffering tragic blows when those heroes where directly assaulted. But then again, this is a story and I’m no author so I don’t know how much one can avoid having main actors in the story that one can identify with. Also, while distribution of power is always the optimal way to organize a union, in the real life gritty practice, that can get sidetracked. So in a sense perhaps the book was more realistic this way, while also pointing out the flaws of even a small centralization.
On the other hand, it’s obvious how much research and knowledge Cory has invested in learning about gaming and especially MMORPGs and their surrounding Agorism. This is something that might make the novel a bit more difficult to follow for internet/gaming illiterates but on the other hand it will be easier to identify with for a younger audience which has grown into this culture, and perhaps introduce them to the dark underbelly of the beast they’re feeding every month, the dark world around it and the surrounding lives of those who try to make a living out of it.
All in all, I can’t recommend this book enough. It’s not written for anarchists in any sense but I can only imagine that anarchists will love it. But I also believe that it will also provide a realistic example of what Anarchist struggle is in practice to all those who prefer to imagine us as either Terrorists or Hippies.
Buy it if you can or download it for free if you can’t. Since it’s published in a Copyleft license, you’re free to read and distribute and I hope that, like me, you’ll also choose to talk and write about it. It’s definitely worth it and it’s easily the best book I’ve read in the last 3 years.
A few examples to drive the point through of how morality can be make to be a more interesting proposition in games.
Following my article on morality in video games yesterday and the resulting thoughtful discussion in reddit, I noticed that some people have trouble grasping what is wrong with the way morals work in video games or how they could possibly be improved within the framework of a video game’s limitations. One claimed that we can never have better morality without inventing a full-fledged AI first while another pointed out that a simple morality based on the reaction of others to your own actions would be the most realistic.
It occurs to me that perhaps the best way to illustrate what I’m talking about when I claim that video games are the best artistic way to explore ethics, is to present some examples as they would appear in a game and in a way that is compatible with current technology and some of the ideas I presented in my previous article. Hopefully this will clarify a bit my vision of a how a better moral system might work.
Since I started with Fallout 3, I’m going to continue using it as an example setting. In case you’re not familiar with this particular post-apocalyptic world, you may not understand some of the concepts I’m talking about such as “Supermutants” or “Ghouls”. In that case, perhaps you can find this link of some use.
Example 1: Lets imagine that our character has entered a bar in one of the smaller and more isolated cities to find a contact of his. While inside, he notices that the Ghoul waiter is being harassed by the patrons of the place as well as the owner. It seems that this place has a very strong anti-ghoul (or perhaps pro-human) sentiment. If the character intervenes at this point and comes to the defence of the waiter, the situation quickly escalates to hostilities as the xenophobic crowd labels you as a ghoul-lover and treats you accordingly. Your contact avoids you due to the amount of attention you brought to yourself (and you may even lose your quest). The prices in that town rise. People treat you with contempt etc. If your dialogue options are too aggressive you may end in a fight and by killing one or two people there, you make the guards come and attempt take you into custody and so on.
Lets say now that instead of intervening in defence of the ghoul, you join in the abuse and finally put the last drop. The Ghoul runs away and subsequently leaves the city. You forget about this event until one day you visit another village (perhaps a ghoul one) and find out that the one ghoul is now mayor or some other important personality for your current quest. Subsequently you get into a situation.
Or lets say that you opt not to do anything and let the situation unfold as it will. Unfortunately soon enough the ghoul is pushed over the edge by an unruly patron and things escalate dramatically. The ghoul pulls out a live grenade and tries to take himself and everyone else out. You survive, but perhaps some important personalities in that city don’t, such as the contact you were trying to see. Your inactivity lost you the quest.
Now the way this event is scripted is so that there are no perfect solution and no way to avoid taking the consequences of your (in)action. This is an attempt to simulate how the real life works, where there’s no clear “good” path, sometimes inactivity is as bad as doing evil, and very often, doing the good deed is far more costly than not. The interesting part comes from the fact that sometimes you may not like any of the available options but you still need to make one which lies in some kind of grey area. This makes people not only agonize on which choice is better but significantly adds to the replay value as next time you’ll make another choice to see where it leads you.
Now lets add some of the ideas I brought last time. In the case of factions the effects will be predictable. Doing nothing will probably leave you neutral in the eyes of the current settlement and perhaps lower you status in the eyes of Ghouls. Opposing the crowd will significantly drop your reputation in the current settlement and improve your ghoul standing, while abusing the ghoul will drop your reputation for ghouls and perhaps the new settlement you’ll find it later while increasing your reputation for the current settlement.
Now lets also consider that we have implemented alternative moral scales to the good/evil and one of them is about xenophobia/xenophilia. Lets say that during the course of the game you’ve spent significant time defending other ghouls and supermutants from abuse, you’ve helped in their quests and so on. As a result, you are very xenophilic towards impure humans. Now the game changes the script and due to your reputation, the ghoul comes to you explicitly for assistance. Do you turn it down and lose “karma” in that scale or do you follow your principles and help it despite the steep consequences? This might become even more agonizing since losing karma in that scale might disable (or make more difficult to acquire) a particular perk which relies on you having enough of a rank in it. On the other hand, if you have spent most of the game treating impure humans like shit and are xenophobic instead, when you initiate any discussion with the ghoul you can’t avoid but escalating the situation to the grenade situation (i.e. all other dialogue options are disabled). Now your intolerant nature (which you’ve built-up in the rest of the game) has cost you a quest or perhaps some serious amount of money in the future.
Much of this example is not really that much different in what has been implemented many times already but there’s one significant difference. You see, most of the time, when game designers create such a scenario, they can’t avoid giving you some blatantly obvious “good” choices and some blatantly obvious “bad” choices and then limit you to choose among them. They would for example create a dialogue path that completely defused the situation and let everyone happy, or a scenario where you kill someone, or one where you ask for money in some way. But the tough part about morality is that there’s more often than not, no “good” choices to choose from and the player is forced to make some tough decisions that he’ll have to live with.
Even the scenario above for example, limits the consequences of my actions generally to my own character, but occasionally, it is far more gripping to see events that don’t affect your character in a material way, but rather deal simply with morality. This is where the multiple morality scales can make the game better, as they will serve to record such choices or inaction and affect you in more subtle ways, such as in which perks will become available to you. Lets see another examples of how this might work.
Example 2:You are along the wasteland and see a bunch of slavers transporting a bunch of slaves for sale. Helping the slaves would move, lets say your liberty scale towards liberty. Doing nothing would move it slightly towards domination, buying the slaves and freeing them would move, lets say, your pacifism scale towards peace and so on.
This is an example where doing nothing does not have direct negative consequences (for non-role players that is) but if you really wanted to play a liberty oriented character, ignoring all instances of slavery would likely cause an issue in obtaining some perks or joining some faction and so on.
Example 3: A city you are visiting is being attacked by raiders. You help drive them back but then the townspeople drive off and capture the remaining ones. When they come back, they decide to turn them into their slaves as punishment for their crimes. Allowing this to stand will decrease your liberty scale but increase your justice scale. Trying to stop this would increase your liberty scale but might ruin your relations with the city. Joining the hunting party might decrease your liberty scale even more.
This kinds of actions will allow you to flesh out and move your character to a specific orientation even if you’re not particularly interested in role playing (i.e. if you haven’t decided before hand what your personality will be). Then as the game progresses, you can see how what actions come to your naturally affect the views of everyone else about your character. You may think for example that you only work for a fair price but others might see you as uncaring and slavery supporting (because you didn’t free those poor slaves). Or you may think that you are someone who protects the weak, but you also end up looking domineering.
In short, I hope my examples clarified that morality in video games should not simply be about material rewards but about making players realize that there’s no easy answers that one can pick as the “good” or “bad” ones and even neutrality has a cost. By making these effects either indirect or simply leave them to the imagination of the player, we can provide the basis for some interesting thinking as well as the opportunity for a good role play experience.
RPGs are the perfect art medium to explore moral issues. Here are some of my thoughts on how we can move towards this.
I recently started replaying Fallout 3 but this time with the addition of a few truly excellent modifications. I won’t got much into this other than to say that Fallout 3 seems to be 100% better when modded but the main thing that struck me as I was going through the quests is how unfulfilling the moral choices and the relevant moral system is. It’s nothing more than a Good/Evil scale which seems to telepathically travel around the world making everyone have similar reaction to your character.
I can’t help but be disappointed by it, especially for a game which for some reason has been praised for its wealth of moral options. I guess this is to a large extent due to its open nature and the number of side-quests to take which generally devolves to helping some person for free, helping some person for a reward, or killing them and taking their stuff. Much of this is caused of course by the limitations imposed by full voice acting but that doesn’t change the fact that one feels severely restricted.
Fallout does better than most still, you often have a choice on how to help them and so on, but then the arbitrary karma rewards/punishments come around and travel telepathically around the world which really takes away from the immersion. Fortunately I have a mod which can hide the Karma messages but I can’t escape their effects which makes it very weird when a village I’ve saved from certain doom starts being hostile to me because I murdered a tribe of cannibals and took their stuff, on the other side of the world.
The only way I’ve figured I can immerse myself in such a game is to decide before hand what my alignment will be in terms of a few ambiguous moral rules and stick to them, come what may. For example in the current iteration for example, I’m trying to play a “the needs of the many overweight the rights of the few” kind of character, who is also extremely xenophobic in terms of “weirdos” (i.e. all that are not “proper” humans) and see where that gets me. This leads me to be very nice and fuzzy to humans but extremely callous and downright evil to everyone else. Karma can’t represent this in any meaningful way and thus I end up stuck in the middle as “neutral citizen”, while my relations to most people, human or not, are generally cold. This only is interesting because I keep the experiences of my character in my own imagination as the game does not provide me with any real effect from my actions and even then, the game insists on making things difficult.
For example, in the scenario with the Cannibals Raiders above, I managed to let me talk to their leader at some point but there was no possible combination of dialogue to make them hostile to me once they became friendly. Sure, I could choose between 3 different options to resolve the quest I was in peacefully (all pretty much similar), but none of them fit the personality I’d chosen for my character: The fact that I do not deal with freaks and especially cannibals. There wasn’t even a dialogue choice I could choose to tell them that I was about to wipe them from the face of the earth. I could only proceed to an unprovoked attack which more so ended up triggering a game bug making me fail my quest if I didn’t do it right.
So I started thinking how this could possibly be improved in some significant way so as to capture the more complex effects of my morality. I had a few ideas but then I found this video online and I noticed that it had expressed a part of my thoughts very concisely.
So obviously the concept of factions would go a long way to make the moral system more realistic. Just imagine if one faction asked you to perform a quest which went against the interests of another faction who, when you ended up causing them enough trouble, would mark you as KOS or something. Or if one faction improved their impression of you after word that you wiped out their enemies spread around. Fallout 2 in fact had this, where the reputation system kept track of how each settlement viewed you but in this third iteration, they decided to dumb down the game to the simple good/evil dichotomy.
But further than factions, I’m thinking that games are truly the artistic means where it’s the best way to explore moral issues. Books and movies can only give you a perspective but it’s limited by the ideas of the author and how much one can identify with the characters. However RPGs are made for identifying with the main characters and the freedom to explore paths we wouldn’t normally experience or choose allows for some really interesting thoughts.
Imagine for example, if instead of one Good vs Evil scale, we had more than one, not necessarily as a graph like the video above suggest, but rather as separate counters which moved to either side depending on your actions in the world. Lets imagine for example a gender equality scale where a new character starts in the middle. Depending on the character’s interaction with males or females of the world (i.e. you should get on occasion phrases which allowed you to marginalize particular genders, such as dismissing the opinion of a female or something) this counter would move in either direction.
Now lets say that you have started acting like a misogynist. Initially you would have a few dialogue options which would allow you to move your scale to ther misogynist side of the scale. As you started to move towards it, more and more of your dialogue options would involve being outright sexist, until for example, you wouldn’t be able to refer to females without calling them “chicks” or “bitches”, even to their face. Now obviously this should create friction in the interaction with the women of the world and even a lot of the males through their dialogue, making for example feminist storekeepers have higher prices, women companions desert you and so on. On the other hand, you could make it so that the player who reaches the far ends of misogyny be eligible for special perks (like the one which is already in the game giving extra damage vs females), special quests and so on. The fact that the initial steps one made into misogyny (i.e. the dialogue options one selected) might not be obvious and yet eventually the player discovers him/herself having progressed towards it might be an interesting result for people who have not even considered how their words and behaviour can be perceived. Not only does this make an interestnig role playing experience, but it might provide people with a new perspective.
Likewise, someone staying in the middle of the scale, at equality, could also be eligible for a perk and might get positive reactions from similarly minded people or factions or negative reactions from sexists.
Other similar scales could easily explore stuff such as racism (even if that is limited to the fantasy races of the game like Super Mutants and Ghouls) freedom of personal choice, mutual aid, respect for property, charity and so on. Therefore, you would not have good or evil characters but you could have a more detailed map of a personality which would be really tough to claim as simply good or evil.
For example. how would you label a person who is really strong in standing by and protecting his people but does not respect those who do not follow traditional values or are not human? How about the one who respects the individuality of everyone but sees all interactions with others through monetary exchanges? How about the one who believes that might makes right and that the more powerful deserve to rule but that one should always protect those who cannot protect themselves?
Most people would probably find a mix of good and bad aspects in each of these examples and the good about an RPG is that it allows you to Role Play such a character and see the world through their eyes. Sure, this is nonetheless limited by the developer’s creativity and possibly impossible to properly represent in the dialogue of a full-voice acted game but even so, you can still go at least halfway through a faction system plus specialised abilities and quests in case someone reaches an extreme moral value.
I hope we’ll see something like this in the future or even better, perhaps this is something that could be modded into the already existing games. Certainly when one can implement a scale for good and evil, one can also implement 3 scales for the moral values they’d like to explore in their game. One could even go for more, but as the video above mentioned, sometimes exploring only a particular moral value can be far deeper than a shallow good vs evil concept which cheapens the morality of the game rather than enrich it.
I was a cautiously-neutral to the service of Kiva. Even though I was excited when I first discovered it, the criticisms of micro-lending and the fact that such a service is impossible to make any actual change and serves mostly to give a “feel-good” feeling to people in the developed nations made me lose a lot of that excitement.
Still I still had made a few loans at the beginning, and as those were paid back, I simply re-loaned them to people who would be charged as close to 0% interest as possible. Unfortunately. Kiva makes this selection extemely hard. Harder than it needs to be. Not only do they not display the interest the partner will charge to the person you are considering giving a loan to, but the interest rate charged by a partner is also the last thing you’ll find about them. It’s like Kiva is consciously trying to cover up the absurd fees some of their partners are charging. They do not even provide a search function based on interest rates which would at least come extremely handy.
But still, until now I was tolerant to the idea of Kiva mostly because even though most of their partners where charging a high amount, it was still lower than the median rates of their area. However this has now changed for the worse. Not only do most partners now seem to hover around the median, but I’ve just seen one of the most digusting examples I could find within Kiva
This partner charges double the interest and makes double the profit that most lenders in their country. This is a loan-shark put simply. And yet. This is a Kiva partner. Pathetic. I don’t even know if this partner existed like this from the beginning of Kiva or if they increased their interest rates later on. Their URL number seems to indicate that they were one of the earliest.
This is the last straw for me. I can’t even remain neutral in the face of how Kiva uses the mutual-aid sentiments of people to support the debt-enslavement and debt-abuse of the most unfortunate. Until Kiva can provide a way where people can discover those partners which charge close to 0% interest (Do you have any anymore Kiva?), then I would suggest you stay away from it. It seems Kiva is simply becoming a useful tool in the hands of those who only wish to profit on the backs of the poor.
PMOG Announces that they are going to open their source. They create a page for it, claiming that they are released under the GPL. But things are not as they seem…
Continuing with my reporting of the wacky antics over at The Nethernet (check the previous articles I’ve written on this) I’ve just now noticed that they’ve apparently and silently liberated their source code under the Affero GPL. This is indeed good news and precisely what I was calling for when I they first declared that they’re shutting down the game 1 year ago.
It seems they had announced that they were going to open their source a few months ago but since I had stopped monitoring their blog since the new relaunch, I missed it. Since April which was their latest update, it appears that there’s been no more information forthcoming and the final release of the source was never properly announced. Put that down to the fact that they seem to have fired their old community manager ((I just noticed that this is quite an old post. It seems that Burdenday is still active in the community on a semi-official role)) and perhaps they have neglected to pick up his duties.
In any case, nobody seems to have picked up on this and doing a quick search online reveals no results. Looking deeper, it seems that the code has not actually been published on GitHub yet, even though the page about being open source currently exists and seemingly links to GitHub repositories. Those repositories do not exist however and it appears that I’m not the only one who has noticed this. I have no idea what is going on to tell you the truth. The forums are almost dead and the main devs of The Nethernet don’t seem to be taking much of an active role in their community (which is a pretty bad idea in the first place).
The only thing I can assume is that they are still preparing the code for an open source publishing but for the life of me, I can’t imagine what’s taking them so long. The original announcement was about 2 months ago and yet there’s been no progress yet. Unfortunately this also means that their community is slowly stagnating as there’s nothing new coming to the game, no events happening, no excitement from the ones who should be the most excited (the devs) etc. The more they wait before completing their move to open source, the more likely that they’ll simply end up releasing it after any and all interest in the game has died. It would be a sad tale indeed.
Anyway, I’m interested to see what, if any, will come out of this. Hopefully they’ll proceed with the code liberation and this very interesting concept for a game can finally be truly expanded through community effort and creativity.
BANG! Is a children’s book about cosmogenesis which I feel stands in an uncomfortable divide of its intended audience. Nevertheless, it’s quite cool.
Recently I was contacted by James Dunbar about his new comic book BANG! where it seems he’s doing some good ol’ self-promotion of it. James seems to have send an email to a number of people including me, explaining the concept and providing a link to the free online version of the book. I promised I’d take a look when time allows and here I am.
BANG! reads like a children’s book, with a rhyming style and lots of pictures. It tries to explain cosmogenesis and the Big Bang theory in as simple terms as possible. Unfortunately, even though the effort is admirable, the complex concepts within the book are unlikely to be grasped by children (although, of course, I could be wrong. I have to run this by my girlfriend who’s dealing with children’s books a lot). I guess it would make a good gift for teenagers but I’m afraid that the style might turn them off as it might sound like it’s made for a younger audience. It seems to me that it’s a difficult situation where the style is made for the young while the content is made for the older, therefore making it hard to use by either.
Nevertheless the concept is very well done, the large majority of the rhymes work and the art is pretty good in itself. As an adult, I enjoyed the simple and concise way it presented those complex concepts in ways that made them look as interesting as they really are. Being a children’s book does not mean that it’s not enjoyable by adults. Plus, I am really curious to see how children will actually react to it (if you have any practical examples, do tell).
The only thing that dissapointed me is that James opted to go for copyrights and place big scary copyright warnings all over the place. He should have realized that the value of his work does not lie in the ability to replicate it, which is in fact why he’s allowing everyone to read it online and sends it away as a promotion. The value of the book lies in being able to sell paper backs, and this would not have been prevented had he licensed it under a Creative Commons license.Hopefully he’ll change his mind in the future and follow a similar tactic like Cory Doctorow who gives away all his books for free online under CC licenses. Not only do you make it far less controversial for people to promote your work via sharing and posting online (as they do not have to fear about violating your copyrights) but you also create goodwill about your name.
Anyway, I thought I’d give you all a heads up to check it out if you haven’t already (as I’ve seen other atheist bloggers have promoted it) and give a thumbs up to James for the good work. I’m not waiting for the one about abiogenesis and evolution, hopefully under copylefts this time 😉
Does anyone else consider this quite telling about the ones making anti-feminist comments?
Ok, this is starting to become a trend. It’s the third time now (that I remember) that someone I’ve been arguing online with about feminism in one way or another, with me on the side of feminism of course, has assumed that I am a female. The last example was more subtle, but of course the best one was this comment where the misogynist insisted that I’m a female even after I explictly said I’m not.
I guess this happens a lot in reddit because I do not have an avatar and my username is fairly neutral in gender. This generally means that it’s assumed that I’m a man 90% of the time. The only exception is when I argue for feminism.
I generally do not bother to correct them up until the point where they’ve put their foot in their mouth as I find the hilarity that ensues after making such assumptions excellent. I do not deny that I’m a male when asked directly or when obvious female traits are implied (such as menstruation), but I do not act like a female nor do I try to trick them. In fact, I continue speaking as normal, as I would speak if they knew I was a male, which seems to confuse them greatly since their brain doesn’t eem to be able to compute someone acting/speaking “manly” and yet defending feminism.
The funniest must have been the one who accused me that I was simply stubbornly refusing to hear a “man’s opinion”. For some reason he stopped replying after I told him that I was presenting a man’s opinion. 🙂
Anyway, does anyone else consider this quite telling about the ones making anti-feminist comments? I can’t really put my finger on why I think this is damning however. What do y’all think?
I’ve spent the better part of last week arguing in length with a Pareconist in the comments of the Division by Zer0 about, what else, Parecon. The discussion grew enormously large with multiple threads and arguments all over the place, to the point of having around 10 replies per day, per person. As it progressed, it became increasingly frustrating because of the way the other person went around arguing his point.
You see, when I entered into this conversation, I was cautiously neutral about Parecon, I considered that it’s unnecessary and most likely unworkable on a large scale but didn’t have any other particular issue with it any more than I have with mutualism. However after I finished this discussion (I’ve simply stopped wasting my time) I am now pretty much hostile to the idea of Parecon.
And it’s one person’s arguments that managed to do this.
To be precise, it wasn’t just the arguments themselves. Those were simply wrong most of the time. It was the sheer amount of bad arguments which gave me the distressing impression that I was wasting my time arguing with someone who was fractally wrong and therefore this discussion could only grow longer and longer with no end in sight. But if that wasn’t enough, that person had some of the worst ways to put his point forward. Uncharitable interpretations of what I said. Jumping to conclusions on what I suggested or what my ideas are. “Scare quotes”. Unbased assertions. Red herrings. Parecon-lingo (which I assume makes perfect sense to those familiar with their terminology but not for me) used as a definite argument etc.
The most blatant example was when I was classified as a Mutualist as soon as I pointed out the distinction between Private Property and Possession. This persisted even after I explicitly explained that I was in fact, a Anarcho-Communist and I do not support money or markets. This was then used to argue against Mutualism, over my continuous explanation that I might not be the best person to defend it.This was just the top of the iceberg.
If you’ve ever been into such a debate, you certainly know how frustrating it becomes to have to constantly correct the assertions and interpretations of the other person every time you reply. You get the feeling that they’re just interested in “winning” the argument rather than understand your position; throwing half-thought conclusions at every step is only a way to make people give up.
Perhaps this might have made some sense in a public forum where people are watching the discussion, although I’m pretty certain that the audience would quickly see through those tactics. However it makes even less sense to do this in the comments of private blog. A discussion held here is unlikely to be seen by anyone other than the blog owner and thus the only possible point would be to make that person rethink their position. Does anyone think they will achieve this by frustrating them? In my case, it brought the completely opposite reaction. I am now hostile to Parecon and have a really sour taste of Pareconists. In any future discussion on this issue, I’m very likely to (even subconsciously) recall the experience I had last week and take immediately the anti-Parecon side.
The way that that Parecon was argued for gave me the distinct impression that it’s very badly thought out and will lead to even worse results than what I originally expected. I got the impression that those promoting it have far more in common with Social Democrats and other ideologies which take a very bad view on “human nature” and then use to to argue for authoritarian measures as a way to limit those bad aspects. Some of the arguments sounded downright horrifying, especially coming from an anarchist, such as the idea that all productive means should be collectivized forcefully if necessary, for “the common good”.
I thus have to wonder, what can people arguing this way be possibly thinking? Are they trying to create vocal opposition to their ideas? If you’re going to go to another person’s blog to argue your ideas, at least try to be convincing instead of frustrating.
This goes doubly as much of course to my actual Anarchist peers. I’d hate for people to get the wrong idea of our movement just because we can’t avoid misrepresenting their position for emotional effect to the invisible audience. Also it’s very important to keep oneself grounded in science. The owner of the blog may make unbased assertions on “human nature” for example, but you won’t achieve much by simply stating the opposite. Rather, point to the empirical evidence that counters humans as being inherently greedy, egoistical, crass individualist or requiring hierarchies. Keep a few links handy in your bookmarks or make your own little groups. Even if the blog owner denies the evidence, it might still convince anyone reading the comments in the future.
It also makes little sense to argue in length with people in denial and reaching the point of insults. It will only make them more hostile and nobody else will see the argument anyway as very few people bother to even start going through comment wars. It’s far better to make your point as concisely and factually as possible and bow out once you notice that no actual progress is being made. Not only will you be able to find another discussion which will be more constructive, you’ll save yourself quite a lot of annoyingment.
And as much as this applies to commenters in other people’s blogs, it doubly applies to blog owners themselves. I care very little to convince commenters who do not wish to be convinced and I will not waste my time countering endless bad arguments while being annoyed by how much my position is misrepresented instead. The people arguing this way may end up “winning” the argument by driving their opponent away, but it will only be a Pyrrhic victory in the grand scheme of things.
PS: As for Parecon, I’m still fairly ignorant of it, but needless to say, the latest discussion did not make me eager to learn more, any more than frothing at the mouth creationists make me eager to learn about Christianity. However I did look around for some LibCom opinions on Parecon and it basically seems that they are mirroring my own sentiments. I suggest you check out this debate between libcom.org and ppsuk.org.uk which has been abandoned by the latter. The last salvo from libcom is exactly where I stand currently.
Do you still remember Ryzom? the MMORPG that was closing back in 2006, was attempted to have its source liberated by the Free Software enthusiasts, got taken over by another company, which subsequently bankrypted and the whole thing stalled? Well it seems that finally, 4 years after the original suggestion was made, Ryzom has been released into the wild as a pure Affero GPL3 Free Software, assets and everything. Exciting!
I just got an email announcing this and even though it took a helluva long time to get this through, it’s nevertheless better than never. Since I’ve covered this subjects twice in the Division by Zer0 already, I thought I should at least announce this exciting development and finally close this chapter of the saga.
I am extremely glad that this has finally happened. I’m very interested if the liberation of the code will manage to re-energize a game which has been practically on life-support for the past 4 years (and wasn’t doing very well before that anyway). I’m interested to see if the first completely free software game which can arguably be called to be of commercial quality, will manage to make any kind of effect in the MMORPG area.
Now that the doors are open, it can be extended in ways that were never considered or followed due to cost constraints. The community can finally start fixing the bugs and then add custom content which can quickly be improved upon and replicated elsewhere.The Affero GPL license will make certain that the improvement made on the game and the code will be shared back to the community for all to enjoy.
The biggest problem is naturally that the game’s code and graphics will be quite dated by now as the game was initially released in 2004 and commercial development seems to have stopped since 2006. The good thing is that it’s now free nature will not require it to compete for price with the big commercial games and the bazaar development it will follow should hopefully allow it to challenge them for content. Still, the huge delay of 4 years and the understandable death of its community in this time will be very hard to recover.
It seem to be quite a common phenomenon that detractors of Free software will attemp to bring up Richard Stallman and specifically something he might have said at one time or another, most usually quoted out of context and with the most uncharitable intepretation possible. This is then used as some kind of proof for the sinister motive of Free Software. Here’s one such example:
Stallman has repeatedly said that he thinks that programmers are overpaid and that skilled laborers should do their jobs for free or for a pittance (and therefore unskilled management is the only way to justify large salaries from technology), and it isn’t too hard to draw the inference that the GNU license, the philosophy of which makes it much harder for coders to get paid for their work, is his way of acting on his opinions.
Notice how we do not get to see exactly what Stallman said or in what context. Rather, we get the quoter’s personal interpretation which basically asserts a specific set of outcomes which looks to be the worst possible. It furthermore inserts a sinister motive behind the GPL which is really requires a huge stretch of the imagination.
This is pure rhetoric people, and it’s the kind that displays intellectual dishonesty which rivals the Barefoot Bum. I can’t avoid getting annoyed when such a stunning amount of bullshit is said with a straight face because I can immediately, subconsciously even, see the logical fallacies and attempts at misdirection.
However it is important to counter the basic point of anti-Free Software tirade.
Stallman’s words are not infallible
Even if we accept the absurd intepretation such as the above as being true, even if we accept that Richard Stallman has some sinister motive behind the conception of the GNU Public License, it would still not make it the driving idea behind Free Software. The reason for this is simple: Richard Stallman is not a Messiah. Yes, he is a very influential figure in the free software movement. Yes, he is the one who can be said to have started it all. Yes, he does really follow what he preaches. But that’s it!
The arguments that Stallman makes, stand on their own accord and not because Stallman said them. However the rhetoric above tries to imply exactly that: That because he said it, it must be a part of the free software movement. But we are not a pack of sheep. We do not blindly follow what Stallman or RMS or Torvalds says (atlthough you will certainly find some individuals who are like that, same as with any public figure). We look at the arguments each of them presents, judge them and then espouse or reject them.
Thus even if Stallman’s secret plan was indeed to “eliminate independent coding as a profession”, the people would modify and implement his core idea in a way that it wouldn’t achieve this result. This is because such a result would be against the best interests of the coders that embrace it. Of course such a sinister plot is absurd on its face and the free software ideology is embraced on its merits as one promoting greater freedom for users and developers.
It is then that people with an axe to grind against FOSS imply that we’re simply being naive and being led like lamb to the slaughter by promises of freedom. There is not argument to back this up however, only shaky correlation and misunderstood economics. But this serves only as a handy personal delusion for those who make these arguments as they are incapable of explaining why people would embrace an idea that they consider obviously evil. It can’t be that they’re missing something, it must be that everyone espousing it is either stupid or evil.
The ironic part is how the people making such accusation have a double standard when public figures from the SW development paradigm they support say obviously wrong stuff such as wishing to take all the fun out of making video games. But it’s ok to quote mine and misinterpret Free Software figures because, after all, you have a point to prove.
To summarize, Stallman says a lot of things, some of the objectionable. I disagree with a lot of what he says, much like I disagree with a lot of what Torvalds or Raymond say. I may disagree with less things that Stallman says than any of the previous two figures, but this very far from deciding that the uncharitable interpretation of a paraphrased quote mine is representative of the whole free software movement and its purpose.
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I just realized that I haven’t mentioned this book already here and I think it’s high time I do.
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