About freedom and tools
Mako's post about the OLPC initiative got me thinking. He says there that the third world countries are on the verge of becoming "technologised", only there is one problem. The great multi-national corporations are interested in transforming them into "markets". Markets of consumers, that is.
Living in Romania, I can sadly confirm this. The vast majority of Romanians have become mindless drones which will blissfully consume whatever the TV has to offer. And I don't think this problem is specific to Romania. But I digress.
The way in which the OLPC laptop differs from, say, a mobile phone, is that you can program the thing. As in, you, the user, can modify it to suit your needs. You become from a mere consumer, a producer, someone who can solve his/her own needs, as well as the needs of people around him/her.
This difference is, I believe, an essential one. It's why the Internet is better than TV. It's true, the web is full of the same advertising and mind-control-crap you can see on TV. The difference is that people like you and me can participate as active content creators. And like this, in the sea of brain-numbing flashy banners, we can have islands of sanity. Places were people can think with their own brains, instead of going crazy for the latest brain washing machine.
The difference between "read-only" products and "read-write" ones I was referring to earlier can be seen in many places. Free software is one of them. Free culture is another one. The ability to modify the tools we use (and our environment too, for that matter) is what separated us from the apes in the first place: we were tool-making monkeys, initially.
But enough with the generalities: Take me, for instance. Initially, I switched from MS-DOS to Linux because I found Windows too buggy to be usable. Now, I hear that recent versions have improved, but I won't switch back exactly because of the freedom: Once you've seen the power freedom gives you, you can never go back. In Linux (or any other free OS, for that matter), I am not only allowed, but actively encouraged to fix the things I don't like. I can become a creator.
In a bare Linux installation, you have around half a dozen interpreters and compilers. Compare that to Windows or Solaris, where you have to pay hundreds of dollars just to get a half decent compiler.
So, my message to you, my dear readers (yes, all the three of you ;-) ), is to go, and start creating something. Stop being a consumer.
