[nl]

This article makes me angry, and the groupthink of most the replies I read here supporting Moglen make me angry too.

You know what causes a real ecological disaster?

Washing Machines.

Yes, FUCKING washing machines.

They use too much of one of the worlds rarest resources (clean water), contribute to global warming and pollute the waste water with phosphates.

On the other hand, they have freed up half the worlds workforce from backbreaking manual labor and contributed to society enough that no less than Hans Rosling calls them the greatest invention of the industrial revolution[1]

Facebook allows companies to sell advertising and allows law enforcement to track you.

On the other hand, it allows quicker and easier communication than ever before, and contributed to the Arab Spring to the point where the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt are known as "the Facebook revolutions" [2][3]

Convenience has costs, but who is Moglen to judge if those costs are worthwhile for everyone?

[1] http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_and_the_magic_washing_... (watch this video - it's really good)

[2] http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/09/so-was...

[3] http://www.technologyreview.com/web/38379/

Edit: To all those claiming this is a strawman - it's not. Moglen failed to point out the benefits of social networking, and I'm using an analogy to show that most things have costs and benefits. Please don't get distracted into an argument about that.

I'd love to see people try and explain how Moglen is right about Twitter (which has much lower privacy costs than Facebook).

[skore]

Wow, that's quite a straw man you have there.

Washing machines are tools. Facebook is a platform. If Mr. Moglen was attacking the postal service or mobile phones, you'd have a point. But he is talking about a centralized service that gives unprecedented power to the ones in control of the service and the jurisdictions it falls under.

I can stand in front of my washing machine and say, with total clarity, that I'm the only one in charge of it at that time. If I had a facebook account, there would be no such thing. And that doesn't even get to Mr. Moglens deeper point - that usage of facebook spreads the problem into your social graph.

As for the "facebook revolutions" you cite - that's quite a rosy picture you paint there. In reality, those services were used to track protesters and there have been coordinating handouts urging participants not to use social media for that reason. Furthermore, after these 'revolutions' have cooled down, it's still unclear what we will end up with. I would conclude that at most, those services served as catalysts and their convenience came at quite a cost indeed. But it's not Arab Youth + Facebook = Functioning Democracy.

[nl]

My response is far from a strawman.

Moglen pointed out all the problems with Facebook (and Twitter) without showing the benefits.

[skore]

So you say it's not a straw man. Maybe you have some more words left to explain yourself on that point?

He was asked for the problems. It's not his job to advertise social networking services.

One of the big figures of Software Freedom is asked about the drawbacks of social networking services and you start your argument with saying that he doesn't talk about the benefits. And then you compare the drawbacks to the ecological damage of washing machines (with the recent advances in efficiency, nobody is making as strong a point against them as you are trying to force). Nope, sorry, that's a straw man. And a very weak one at that.

I think if anything, having those three big issues out there (privacy violations, tracking by government, careless spreading of the two into the social graph), Mr. Moglen would be correct to say that the cost is already too great to be weighed against with any benefits.

[nl]

A straw man is a component of an argument and is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent's position.[1] To "attack a straw man" is to create the illusion of having refuted a proposition by replacing it with a superficially similar yet unequivalent proposition (the "straw man"), and refuting it, without ever having actually refuted the original position.

I don't think I misrepresented Moglen's position in anyway. He only spoke about the negative aspects of social networking, but nothing about the conveniences. Argument by analogy isn't a strawman.

I agree that recent advances in washing machines have improved them, and that the environmental impact of them is far outweighed by the convenience.

Indeed, that is my point.

For me - and many others - the convenience and advantages of social networking outweighs the costs. I make that decision in full knowledge of those costs, and I think it is fair to point out that there are advantages as well as costs.

[skore]

Mr. Moglen is well known to speak against and was asked to comment on the drawbacks of social networks. You are attacking a straw man if you complain that he isn't talking about the benefits.

    Person A: Sunny days are good.
    Person B: If all days were sunny, we'd never have rain, and without rain, we'd have famine and death. Therefore, you are wrong.
    Problem: B has misrepresented A's claim by falsely suggesting that A claimed that only sunny days are good, and then B refuted the misrepresented version of the claim, rather than refuting A's original assertion.

You are picking a discussion that Mr. Moglen was not having.

The benefits of social networks are self evident - they enable communication in an unprecedented way. His argument is that the drawbacks he is talking about are unnecessary and dangerous and that some of the technology may seem useful, but is actually just thinly disguised non-social behavior ("keeping up" with somebody may border on "stalking"). You have not addressed any of his arguments while complaining that he didn't address points that nobody was discussing to begin with.

So yes, one more, final, time - your argument is a straw man.

[nl]

Wait - so I'm not allowed to attack omissions in his arguments?

That's like saying when Rick Santorum points out what he sees as problems with gay marriage no one can point out the benefits because it is a strawman.

That's ridiculous!

[kelnos]

Except that Moglen is effectively saying that it would be good if every day was a sunny day. He's taking the absolutist position that social networks are always bad and anyone who uses them is a part of the problem.

[pingswept]

> Maybe you have some more words left to explain yourself on that point?

You could make the same point more civilly.

[skore]

I apologize for being slightly uncivil (although I saw it as stating my question deliberately terse), but "it's not a straw man" isn't really a good response against a claim that your argument is a straw man, don't you think?

[pingswept]

Apology accepted. I do agree that "it's not a straw man" is a weak rebuttal, but that's more reason to keep the tone civil-- so that people will argue with you sensibly.

[Adaptive]

I agree that washing machines are great. I've lived in places without them for years at a time. It's doable but hand washing is time consuming and not fun. Phosphates are a separate issue. There is phosphate free detergent. There are low water use machines. It's being solved.

Let's look at another example of convenience that isn't being solved very well: my car.

My car is incredibly convenient. Often I'd rather drive than take the bus. And you can't beat it for hauling stuff around. Better than my bike, for sure.

Cars have freed up the world's pedestrians from footwrecking walking!

But there's a lot going on here. Cars, roads, the death of public transport (cf trolly cars in LA http://www.usc.edu/libraries/archives/la/historic/redcars/ ). America, at least, was sold on the car by businesses that had a vested interest in seeing the car succeed. Cities dismantled public transport systems at the behest of these same powerful lobbies.

And today our cities are outgrowths of the personal motor vehicle. (Electric cars don't solve anything here, it's still energy being produced).

While I think that you make a point worth considering, I believe that we should error on the side of suspicion when utility, or less nobly, convenience, comes at an initially small cost and is heavily promoted by... whom, exactly?

I worked in advertising long enough to look squarely to the data-finance industrial complex (tongue only partially in cheek when using that phrase) whenever personal information is involved.

Convenience has costs. Moglen may not have the right to judge but we need noisy people that remind us there is a problem.

[nl]

Moglen may not have the right to judge but we need noisy people that remind us there is a problem

On HN we sometime need people to remind us there are benefits, too.

[franklindholm]

Firstly, strawman.

Secondly, the idea of wasting the "worlds rarest resources" is completely dependent on where you live. I, for example, live in a part of the world with a huge excess of clean water, and there is absolutely no sustainable way to export our water to those parts of the world that have a shortage of clean water. Building pipe lines to those parts of the world would be ridiculous expensive. Transporting it by truck would pollute excessively.

So if we didn't use this clean water all of it would just be transported by nature to ground water reservoirs, out in the ocean and get mixed with the salt water or evaporate into the atmosphere.

I won't go into the points about washing machines adding to global warming and pollution of the water, that could very well be true.

[waitwhat]

Facebook [...] contributed to the Arab Spring to the point where the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt are known as "the Facebook revolutions"

They're certainly known as "Facebook revolutions" (or "Twitter uprisings" or whatever) by foreign media organisations looking for a gimmicky hook to hang a story on, but I honestly doubt that regular Tunisians and Egyptians really use that phrase themselves other than as talking heads when dealing with said media organisations.

I think it's a pretty safe bet that most people just call it "last year."

[nl]

I want to meet Mark Zuckerberg one day and thank him [...] I'm talking on behalf of Egypt. [...] This revolution started online. This revolution started on Facebook. This revolution started [...] in June 2010 when hundreds of thousands of Egyptians started collaborating content. We would post a video on Facebook that would be shared by 60,000 people on their walls within a few hours. I've always said that if you want to liberate a society just give them the Internet.

Wael Ghonim: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/11/egypt-facebook-revo...

[waitwhat]

I don't dispute that Facebook played some part in the revolution, just whether the people whose revolution it was actually call it a Facebook Revolution.

Related anecdatum: I live in an ex-Soviet Republic. It is rare for someone here to actually say "The Foo Revolution"; instead people talk about "the early 90s" or "after independence".

(Also: your quote is taken from an interview with one of those foreign media organisations who had already decided that Facebook was the hook they were going to hang the story on.)

[Confusion]

Clean water is not fundamentally a scarce resource. Almost nothing is. The only actually scarce resource, and the one everything depends on, is energy. Given enough energy, we can clean all the water we want and distribute it anywhere we want. Given enough energy, we could recycle everything down to the smallest granule of rare earth metals. We would only get into trouble once we would be using all of the stuff at the same time, but then, given enough energy, we could mine the moon, asteroids, other planets. Given enough energy, everyone would be warm and fed, without any ecological problems, because we could clean all waste and recycle everything.

In the end, it all comes down to energy. If some countries would spend even a fraction of their defense budgets on solar, water, wind or fusion power research, we would be there in a jiffy. We could have had more energy than we could ever use by now. Our progress is much slower than it could be, because energy is kept scarce.

[jonhendry]

Um, no. You might as well say that scarcity of energy is the only thing between us and free ponies for everyone.

Even if energy were free, there'd still be the question of paying for the facilities to purify the water. The kinds of places where clean water is scarce now tend not to have much money, or much clout, with which to get such facilities built. More likely you'd get wealthy people wasting vaster quantities of clean water, while the poor remained without clean water despite the theoretically easy availability of the required water purification equipment.

[Confusion]

  You might as well say that scarcity of energy is the only 
  thing between us and free ponies for everyone.

That's exactly what I'm saying, with the caveat that it will take time to get to the situation where everyone can turn the energy into free ponies. As you rightly point out, there is infrastructure required to make use of the free energy. However, if you would have free energy, that infrastructure will get much cheaper. The richer will sponsor infrastructure for the poorer, as has started happening more and more. We are slowly but surely succeeding in improving the living conditions of the poorest. The component cost of energy in everything is not to be underestimated. If you could eliminate that, things would drastically change.

The energy is there for the picking, but no country or company is trying hard enough. And why should they? What would they gain? That's the problem.

[ColdAsIce]

"On the other hand, it allows quicker and easier communication than ever before, and contributed to the Arab Spring to the point where the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt are known as "the Facebook revolutions""

From an interview by an 17 year old Tunisian protester when asked how did social media influence the protesters actions:

"Only after we organized and burned down a third of the police stations in less than a day, foreign media asked us about these social media networks. By then it was already to late to use them, they where shut down. We kept burning the remaining police stations."