Post
#SoftwareFreedom I have an itch… I have long considered the *app* paradigm to be a fundamentally anti-Free way to package and distribute informatic potentiality.
The "app" leases human compute resources unfairly and unilaterally to a remote entity. This design empowers the Enshittifier. The intermediating extractive platform brokers the lease, *as if* on your behalf, but (only now, obviously) actually guaranteeing a degree of your attention to the enclosure of the monopolist.
thread TBC…
The anti-Free aspects of the design of the "app" paradigm are:
Ⓐ Your screen space:
A company controls those pixels. The #desktopMetaphor is the root of this #enshittifiability, with "windows" defining a portal between your attention and the informatic space unilaterally controlled by the developer.
An alternative is how GNU and the shell work, where the human invokes the function, which humbly takes no more time than necessary and exits, leaving just what was requested.
#HCI #Informatics
Ⓑ Your computer's memory is obviously allocated and used up while the app is open. Again, not necessary in the contrasting paradigm of the Linux/GNU shell.
Ⓒ Your habits. A pretty icon clutters your desktop, requires maintenance, and you feel the sap on your life with subtle information overload. Certainly businesses generally try to make it worth it. That's the sale. But then comes #enshittification once you're invested.
wrt Ⓒ, the Linux/GNU shell contrasts, again, by respectfully minimizing their drain on your life, becoming part of the language of computation, a bigger single paradigm, rather than requiring significant direct attention.
The above is all true of "applications" before 2007, before #enshittificaton, when the platform model of intermediation hadn't geared down to tap the full energy of both sides yet.
Aside: this metaphor might have been too oblique. If you're driving a truck down hill, you gear *down* to limit speed. I am not a mechanic, but I think it works by literally leveraging the weight of the truck to thrash the engine oil around to the limits of its viscosity. I think it could have been a good metaphor for enshittification because with the throttle closed, you can look at the engine RPM spike, and get a sense for *how much potential energy you can waste while coasting.*
So I got started on this thread this morning about "apps," per se, because I see Freedom-aligned software development largely following the enshittification-aligned model where one's attention, pixels, ram, and habits, and sometimes data too, are handed to a developer. Even in cases of true dedication to freedom, a development effort may target an #HCI paradigm perfectly in-line with extractive business, as if to compete directly with exit-oriented libertarian-backed startups and platforms.
I am talking about popular apps like LibreOffice, Blender, and Firefox, and desktop skeuomorphism implementations like GNOME and KDE and the very way that these #HCI paradigms enable building and distributing apps.
I'm pointing fingers basically everywhere.
We are acting like *them.* Pretending we can play that game better by being Free, even without the plan including money for a phase of rapid growth.
Not really by choice. People know the language. They want apps. Free apps. And yeah, good.
@travisfw What does that say about systemd?
aside: exit-oriented libertarian-backed startups (IE: just "startups") are all monopolists. Thiel made this clear in his book Zero To One, and no startup would hesitate to agree with this particular point, that monopoly (ie market dominance) is definitely the goal whether or not they exit that way.
