I’ve spent years championing Linux as the only escape from Big Tech, but I’m starting to get twitchy.
While we’re distracted by the Steam Deck making Linux “mainstream,” the corporate players and politicians are busy building a digital cage. Between California’s AB-1043 mandates and Microsoft’s “Face Check” infrastructure, I’m worried we’re heading for a hard schism: “Sanitised Linux” vs the “Free Rebel” distros.
If the compliant, age-gated version becomes the industry standard, where does that leave the rest of us? Digital exile?
I’ve put some thoughts together on why the “Golden Cage” is closing in and why education, not mandates, is the only real fix.
This is a very importrant thing to keep in mind. Liberalism is exceptional at appropriation and assimilation, and there is already a tremendous amount of corporate influence on the trajectory of Linux development. Since the open source nature of Linux is fairly robust, this would mean that control would look a lot like accessibility and feature competition (think how Android has effectively muscled out alternative ‘open source’ mobile OS’s and functions as one of the most expansive data collection systems in the world). It likely would not be as immediate as this suggests, for exactly the same reason Linux is so preferable to proprietary operating systems, but examples like Zorin’s successful marketing campaign and paid services do point to a trajectory of corporatization separate from what exists in Redhat and Ubuntu.
As liberal states seek more power over information and computing, they will direct regulations into favourable conditions for capitalization, as they always do, and will reward corporations that comply. The big threat is the amount of resources that private capital wields with state support and how this may pressure independent developers to comply as well.
It sucks but at the end of the day, it’s not illegal to post code. The code without the nonsense can be seperate from the released system. So if they fuck everyone with age verification and all this other Orwellian crap, you just get the distro “in development” that does not have it integrated yet. Wink wink.
Oh, no it wouldnt be like “we’re mandating this through legislation,” because that is typically really hard to defend. They’re more likely to simply provide subsidies or some sort of financial benefit to larger, more compliant entities.
Systemd is already having to revert an age verification merge because the Linux community flipped shit and the Dev who did it was getting death threats.
I think you’re underestimating how much of a problem liberal states are in their use of soft power. I don’t doubt that most Linux users and devs would resist, I’m saying that it would definitely be a threat for liberal states to dedicate resources to influencing norms and access. They don’t need to “win” as in complete and utter domination of every aspect of development for Linux to have a massive and negative effect. Think about how much more labour the US state has at is disposal than the entirety of the Linux community; how much more resources it has that could be dedicated to the privileging of projects that do comply.
Yes, how to resist is certainly important to consider, but there’s no way to design that resistance if you ignore the tools at their disposal. Look at how big Zorin got from just a timely marketing campaign or the fact that corporate- and enterprise-oriented revenue models are already deeply influential on the landscape even without state promotion.