> It feels nice knowing that it cannot be taken away from me by anyone.

Just make sure this stays science fiction.

“It was a pleasure to burn. It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history. With his symbolic helmet numbered 451 on his stolid head, and his eyes all orange flame with the thought of what came next, he flicked the igniter and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that burned the evening sky red and yellow and black. He strode in a swarm of fireflies. He wanted above all, like the old joke, to shove a marshmallow on a stick in the furnace, while the flapping pigeon-winged books died on the porch and lawn of the house. While the books went up in sparkling whirls and blew away on a wind turned dark with burning.” ― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Imagine if the material being burned was instead the only remaining record of billions of hate filled Tweets and Facebook posts.

Sometimes we have to remember the bad things in order to never let them happen again.

Though my country fought at the side of the axis during WWII, the government did not sent the local jews to the camps. I was at a gathering where a jewish woman who was a girl at the time talked about her experiences during the war. Truly moving experience that gave me much deeper understanding of the times, what people have been, and what they are capable of both good and bad.

> We don't even own the things we write ourselves

This has been a big point of contention on YouTube. Entire channels being taken down because the licensed music they used contained samples that weren’t properly licensed themselves. It’s crazy.

On the other hand, technology changes fast. A 1 petabyte SSD could hold all music ever recorded at reasonable compression. AI upscaling is making great strides in video compression. Most people already run a “server” of sorts at home in the form of e.g. a HomePod, PS4 or a Philips Hue bridge. Tech literacy is way up, too. I’m hopeful for the future.

> Entire channels being taken down because the licensed music they used contained samples that weren’t properly licensed themselves.

One has to wonder why this happens at a time where it's never been easier to build your own mini-YouTube, for your own content. The problem is cultural, not technical.

It’s not though. Sure, it’s pretty easy to self host videos but YouTube is much more than that. It’s the only open access video platform with a good (existing?) monetisation strategy, for example.

> Tech literacy is way up, too.

I'm surprised to read that. Is that really what you see?

I'd say I see the opposite as being true.

My guess at the phenomena going on:

The visibility of of technologically illiterate people is higher than ever. The number of people who are technologically literate is also higher than ever. The proportion of people in digital spaces who are technologically illiterate is higher than it was in the past. More people in the digitally connected world has decreased the average literacy level of that digitally connected world. But the absolute number of technologically literate people as well as the proportion of the overall population who are technologically literate has certainly increased.

Is that consistent with your observations & experience?

To use an analogy to get at the point I think he is making, a bunch of medieval peasants reading the bible and nothing else isn't what we would call literacy.

And I know the immediate response is that, in fact, those things are what lead to actual literacy, etc, etc. But the point I'm trying to make is that using prepacked apps, on a locked down device, in exactly the way the developer intends you to, to create content that you irrevocably license to the corporation that created the app isn't "tech literacy" any more than memorizing the bible and never reading anything else is what we would "written literacy".

Most people use tech in an entirely consumptive manner, and again, we wouldn't call someone who can only read but not write, literate. A person who can't use tech to empower themselves outside of the predefined forms set by the companies that made their devices is not tech literate, even though they may navigate those forms with great speed and fluidity.

Modifying your analogy...

But if rather than biblically literate medieval peasants, we had biblically literate medieval scholars founding universities to study not only the Bible but also the classics, mathematics, the sciences, the arts, we would have the early foundations of the modern world. Consider that the oldest universities (Bolonga in 1088, Oxford in 1096, Salamanca in 1134, Paris in 1150, Cambridge in 1209, and Padua in 1222, and Toulouse in 1229) were primarily founded by Christian scholars who sought administrative and academic freedom (e.g. Padua's founding) because of their convictions based on the Bible that free inquiry is essential to finding truth.

My analogy, implied for tech, would be that free access to source code and technology is necessary to build strong foundations for technological freedom, as the biblical source code was necessary for building strong foundations for free academic inquiry. Jesus himself connects his word with knowing the truth and says the result is freedom - see John chapter 8.

The Bible as a source of religious power is a great analogy. John Wycliffe, William Tyndale, Johannes Gutenberg, and others in some cases risked and lost their lives and their freedom (Wycliffe was confined in Black Hall and his body was exhumed to be burned, Tyndale was strangled and burned at the stake) to make it widely printed and available to the common people in their vernacular.

Eg. “The Anti-Wycliffite Statute of 1401 extended persecution to Wycliffe's remaining followers. The "Constitutions of Oxford" of 1408 aimed to reclaim authority in all ecclesiastical matters, and specifically named John Wycliffe as it banned certain writings, and noted that translation of Scripture into English by unlicensed laity was a crime punishable by charges of heresy.” — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wycliffe#Last_days

I think the point GP is trying to make, is that tech literate people where even smaller before, not that all the people with consumer devices has reached tech literacy, but also now ironically thanks to tech, we're more exposed to the tech illiterate individuals who are using this devices.

Sadly, I'm not as confident as he is. I remember acting as tech support for my family who was of course tech illiterate. A common theme was to receive a complain of "something not working on the system" without further explanation, which was perfectly understandable even if frustrating. Nowdays, I receive the same kind of complains from developers at work.

We have gone from a deep understanding by nesessity to shallow opportunistic horizontal exploration in less than 3 decades. Until the 90's getting into CS/IT meant knowing your way up from the hardware through assembly and memory layout into higher languages and fundamental data structures finally into an application layer. As computers became more powerful and knowledge started to be packaged into virtual runtime and massive linraries and SDK's. the grounding was lost. and certainly post '00 the exponential rise of the internet changed tech towards stringing together poorly understood googled bits of code that might just work until we pass a test.

Now there are undeniably advantages to both paradigms. But the average developer in industry being in the dark about anything beyond the surface layer, and who's expertise is more about quirks with api X rather than how X would be coded at all is a logical consequence.

Yes this describes exactly what I meant, and is the reason I am a free software activist.

Today’s tech doesn’t allow humans to ask questions, and I’m sad to see that many aren’t even aware that there are a lot of awesome things outside of the dominant corporate systems/tools which is exciting and interesting.

I don’t consider the using of black box corporate apps to be tech literacy. Not even close.

If my parents are a yardstick of Western retirees, they havent improved their understanding of windows or email in the last 20 years let alone the new web platforms sigh

Are you serious? There are far more hardware and software engineers than ever before. How could tech literacy not be up?

I can see both perspectives being possible, but I think what's under contention is less “proportion of computational literacy across the entire populace” and more something like “relative weight of control inputs to the social systems that build dominant technology coming from people who have computational literacy”. Thought experiments with much more obvious unequal channels, for instance: we wouldn't necessarily be in this situation if the major tech makers had a mysterious-wizard-enforced pact to design primarily based on the feedback of computationally literate academics; conversely, if we had a very computationally literate population, but an authoritarian government whom all the major tech makers had to answer to who wanted to keep the genie in the bottle, that could just as well be the situation in the OP. (This is not to pass judgment on other possible outcomes of those situations. I'm also using “computational literacy” here because “tech literacy” feels a bit too wide, even if “tech” has come to commonly be a metonym for “computer tech”.)

The geek/MOP/sociopath triangle wouldn't be a terrible description of the “subculture takeover” that seems to have occurred.

>> While I won't be able to convince most of my friends or family to keep their own files for all of their valued content, since it can be a difficult hassle for nontechnical users

This IMHO is what should be a priority for someone - the FSF or EFF I dont know. The reason people keep handing over their freedom is often convenience. Free tools need to be as easy to setup and use as tools that take away peoples freedom.

Absolutely, but this seems hard to attain. For-profit tools inherently have millions (or billions) of dollars to put into not only improving their UX, but also into advertising and making their product viral, sometimes at the cost of users (e.g. data harvesting).

I'm not sure who really has enough money, drive, and talent, to be able to do this but with free software.

Money is not the main problem here.

The problem here is that, if you prize security, privacy, or decentralization above anything else, you must make trade offs by increasing some friction.

The more centralized information you have, the better your UX can be.

To some extent, I suppose so.

On the other hand, if you prize data collection or centralization, you must make some trade offs, including increasing some friction, as well.

The less you seek to control your users, the better their experience can be.

A tiny anecdote, with Jitsi Meet you can send a link to a meeting, someone who’s never used it before can click it, and they’re there. No need to set up or be logged into any account, install an application, or even find a small web client link at the bottom of what’s more or less a malware ad.

If you primarily care about user experience and lack of friction, accepting both centralized and decentralized approaches as means to an end, you usually end up with something centralized.

Trust me, as a screen reader user who often transmits high-quality audio, I know that a web client just won't cut it in more advanced scenarios. WebRTC implementations work... kind of. Sometimes. An actual app gives you much more flexibility and control, and makes the UX much better.

This really hit me with flash self-uninstalling this month. All that content just systematically erased via the viewer disappearing. Flash was trash but it was a lot of the golden age of the net.

Open formats and viewers live on, closed formats and viewers fade away. I've stopped investing my time and energy in the latter as much as possible.

Shame about all that Flash content...

What do you invest your time and energy into, then? The "web format" isn't open in a meaningful way either when it's dictated by a monopoly, to fit their business needs in a closed ecosystem of servers at hardcoded IPs/certificates and a "browser" pretending to be open but overwhelmed with features to the point nobody can compete in the name of self-declared "web standards".

> What do you invest your time and energy into, then?

Libreoffice instead of MS Office, GNU/Linux instead of Windows or Mac, Firefox instead of other browsers, distributed social networks based on free software (Mastodon, PeerTube, Pixelfeld) instead of the monopolies, Librem 5 instead of IPhone, Pinetab instead of IPad, Pinetime instead of Apple Watch, Bandcamp instead of Spotify and many more:

https://prism-break.org/en/

I've gathered together what's left of it and invest in that. Through much trial and error, I've figured out the bits which work in both Chrome and the rest of the 25 years worth of historic browsers and write for that.

Sounds interesting. Care to publish your results (yes I know caniuse however I'm more after a core set of browser APIs/features defining a "real" long-term standard)? Btw I myself have also put quite some effort in distilling a HTML DTD grammar from WHATWG/W3C materials [1], defending it in conferences, etc.

[1]: http://sgmljs.net/docs/html52.html

nothing formal paper-like for now, but live demo and code in my profile.

Same here. People make fun of me when I buy DVDs/BRs, but I'm too attached to some classics to take the chance that they'll be censored, removed, modified.

> While I won't be able to convince most of my friends or family to keep their own files for all of their valued content, since it can be a difficult hassle for nontechnical users

hey, it's a difficult hassle for technical users too. And the flip side of this is I don't want to lose all my data if my hard drive dies. I think ideally you keep your data both locally and encrypted in the cloud, but that isn't trivial to do.

Or just have a spare hard drive outside the house on which you backup the hard drive every few months or so. This is what I do to protect my media files.

which is even more of a hassle, and more difficult to automate. Not to mention you need somewhere outside of your house to keep said hard drive.

> It feels nice knowing that it cannot be taken away from me by anyone.

One of the main reasons why I download stuff (YouTube videos/articles), so I can always revisit it whenever I want to.

You could argue that you never really owned the music. You owned a copy of it, but not the right to copy it.

Of course, this wasn't very enforceable in the era of cassette tapes and CDs, or even the era of hard-drives full of mp3s. And even just owning a copy was pretty nice, for example you could lend it to someone else, and sell or give it away when you were done with it.

That's the point. You owned a copy. You could lend it, sell it. Nowadays when the content store you bought your content from is closed, your content is gone. You die? Your content is gone as well. Account gets banned for some reason? Content is gone. Furthermore, data about you consuming the content are sent to the store. I don't want any of that.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/08/first-sale-why-it-matt...

Makes sense. Copyright before digital goods seemed to strike a pretty acceptable balance. I can't mass-produce and sell a textbook that someone else owns the copyright to, but I can give it to my friend who's taking the class after me. The author makes a living, and purchasers gain a reasonable set of rights.

How do we get to a digital analogue of this? The physical-book copyright system probably wouldn't work well if everyone had a printing press and unlimited free paper, which is effectively what computers have given us.

Or maybe it would work fine. It's trivially easy (although maybe not legal) for me to download DRM-free copies of most ebooks that I want to read, and I still pay for them. Maybe enough people think that way that authors would still make a living.

> You owned a copy of it, but not the right to copy it.

In the US, the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 explicitly legalized personal and noncommercial copying (e.g. mix tapes) and established a tape tax to compensate record companies (!), musicians, songwriters, and music publishers.

Indeed "Rip. Mix. Burn." was Apple's slogan for iTunes in 2001, and it seems to have depended on the AHRA (and "music CD-R" media, which included the tape tax.)

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Apple subsequently argued that iPods were exempt from the tape tax and made it hard to record music off of iPods onto other media. One could imagine an alternate world where Apple('s customers) paid the AHRA tape tax and Apple enabled easy "rip/mix/burn" across iPhones and other devices.

I think in an alternate world where Apple enabled easy rip/mix/burn we would end up in the same place we are now - with Spotify and other streaming services dominating.

There's an old idea that once you release something you have created into the wild it is no longer really yours, but ours. Copyright and IP have never really prevented artistic theft, just slowed the ability to make money using someone else's IP. However, when you consider things such as the success of "Old Country Road" where a core characteristic of the song was a sample not originated from the artist themself, you can see how copyright and IP law really don't mean anything in the world of art. Information still wants to be free

"Artistic theft" isn't really ethically theft if someone has simply copied a work.

Imagine a small village. If John makes an axe, and Jim sees it and copies it, did Jim steal John's axe? Seems like there's only theft occurring if Jim claims to have designed it himself---stealing some of John's reputation as the designer and first maker of that kind of axe. Doesn't the whole village benefit from more abundant chopped wood? Or perhaps from cheaper lumber prices? True, John now has competition chopping wood, but perhaps he's got an advantage as a designer and he'll soon specialize as a carpenter or tool designer rather than just a wood chopper. Couldn't it be possible that copying ideas and attributing the persons who originate them enriches the entire village---including those who came up with the new ideas?

I find Christian philosopher Vern Poythress's ethical reasons why we should advocate for changing copyright laws to be insightful and persuasive... and I learned the axe inventor example from his article, https://frame-poythress.org/copyrights-and-copying-why-the-l....

In a world that is rapidly changing into tightly controlled presentation channels, banning of not tightly controlled information sharing channels, and ubiquitous AI backed bots sifting through any exchange in search of even the most farfetched resemblance and where spurious strikes mean tried guilty and sentenced until proven innocent, that point of view might be a tad naive.

Information never wanted to be free. It has no will. The freedom was the result of many people willing to stand against its confinement.

Owned is the wrong word, then. Possessed is probably a better term.

In the US we have the first-sale doctrine. So you own your copy. You can sell your copy of a book or a CD, even though the publisher might like to prevent that.

This is why I buy digital material I like and keep it locally with the copies backed up in few places around the globe on rented servers. Not hosting my source codes, software etc on clouds either. All on my own servers with backups/standby elsewhere.