[nkoren]

Moglen is of course correct about the problems of privacy and corporate ownership of social networks -- but then goes on to take an absolutist position which is both strategically indefensible and ethically bankrupt.

First, a key concept: there is no such thing as absolute freedom. Freedom can exist at many different levels, some of which are mutually exclusive; sometimes abrogations of lower-order freedoms are required to create higher-order freedoms. The archetypal example of this is the law which arbitrarily restricts you from driving on one side of the road. This is a small loss of freedom, but when applied universally, it creates the far greater freedom to drive for long distances without substantial risk of a head-on collision.

Now, with social networks and the like, freedoms are created and freedoms are taken away. The problem which Moglen identifies -- and is absolutely correct to call out -- is that there is absolutely no legitimate reason to abrogate the freedoms that are being abrogated. Where he goes wrong is in denying the reality of the freedoms that are being created: namely the most powerful one-to-many communications platforms in history. The citizens of Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya are categorically not less free because they used Facebook to organise their revolutions. Whatever freedoms they lose on account of Facebook, pale in significance to the freedoms Facebook has allowed them to create.

Whether this calculation holds true in other societies is a perfectly legitimate subject for debate; where Moglen goes wrong is in denying that it's a debatable subject whatsoever.

I had the same problem with Richard Stallman, when I recently attended one of his boilerplate talks. While I greatly respect what he has accomplished and agree with the majority of his opinions, he had absolutely no concept that there could possibly be greater freedoms outside of his narrow domain. It was all too easy to picture him castigating, say, Syrian activists for distributing videos of atrocities using non-free codecs, captured by camera phones with non-free firmware. Stallman's position would seem to be that if you can't document an atrocity with fully free software and hardware, then you shouldn't document it at all. This is where he -- and Moglen -- take a swan dive from the moral high ground into the swamp of ethical bankruptcy in which all true zealots swim.

The bottom line is that there are greater freedoms and lessor freedoms. The world has collectively decided that the freedoms created by one-to-many communications networks are greater than the freedoms that are (unnecessarily) being lost in the process. Sometimes this decision is clearly correct (Tunisia, Egypt, etc.); other times it probably isn't. What's certain is that asking people to forego what they (often correctly) perceive as the greater freedom, in order to fix an unnecessary abrogation of the lesser freedom, is not an ethically defensible position to take.

Please don't get me wrong: unlike road-direction restrictions, there's no reason why social networks need to be compromising our freedoms the way that they are. I'd much rather see social networks created by open-standard distributed protocols rather than centralised corporate systems, just as I'd much rather see mobile phones with fully free firmware that encode video with free codecs. I think it's absolutely worth trying to create all of those things. But simply ignoring the genuine freedoms that are created despite the faults of these platforms is not ethically legitimate.

Ethics aside, it's also bad strategy, and just won't work. If you're obligated to give up your car before writing about global warming, or obligated to become a vegan before writing about animal cruelty, or obligated to take monastic vows before writing about conflict in domestic relationships -- then you'll probably never write about any of these issues. And that won't help anybody, will it?

[jwallaceparker]

>> Ethics aside, it's also bad strategy, and just won't work. If you're obligated to give up your car before writing about global warming, or obligated to become a vegan before writing about animal cruelty, or obligated to take monastic vows before writing about conflict in domestic relationships -- then you'll probably never write about any of these issues. And that won't help anybody, will it?

I find Moglen's absolutist point of view on this issue refreshing.

You're not obligated to give up your car or go vegan to write about certain issues, but you're a hypocrite if you don't acknowledge your own contribution to a problem.

Two examples:

Al Gore did a great job spreading the word about global warming, but he still has a larger carbon footprint than most Americans (it's well-documented).

Jonathan Safran Foer became vegan when he researched and wrote his book "Eating Animals" about animal cruelty.

We need more people like Foer, do we not?

[mfringel]

I find that point to be orthogonal.

That's like saying that everyone at Occupy Wall Street had forswear all material goods in order to be considered "valid" protesters.

Discarding someone's argument due to a lack of complete purity is just plain facile.

[jwallaceparker]

>> That's like saying that everyone at Occupy Wall Street had forswear all material goods in order to be considered "valid" protesters.

No, it isn't.

Occupy Wall Street isn't about giving up all material goods. A better analogy is a OWS protester who is a manager at one of the banks that got bailed out.

>> Discarding someone's argument due to a lack of complete purity is just plain facile.

I never said the arguments should be discarded. I acknowledged that Al Gore did a good job spreading the word about global warming.

I'm just saying it's refreshing when someone actually stands behind their argument by making a personal change or sacrifice.

[icebraining]

So what if he is an hypocrite? Since when do we expect journalists to be virtuous? They're simply reporting the facts. Their life is completely irrelevant.

Jonathan Safran Foer became vegan when he researched and wrote his book "Eating Animals" about animal cruelty.

We need more people like Foer, do we not?

Sure, people doing what they preach is great, if you choose a value we agree with. But I'm sure you'd prefer if Breivik had been an hypocrite and not done what he believed to be right.

[scott_s]

Thank you for a clear explanation of the same problems I had with Moglen's position, and an equally clear explanation of the problem I have with Stallman's positions on what I feel is his limited view of "freedom."

I've read many people, particularly on HN, say they are glad such extremes exist as a counter-balance. I disagree. I think that they muddy the discourse by presenting yet more things to argue with. I would rather see people advocating for privacy and software freedoms while advocating stances that I also think are reasonable and defensible. The difficulty with that, though, is that people who hold such views tend not to be professional advocates.

[freshhawk]

I think you are putting too much faith in the ability of facebook-like services to do useful things like the organization and communication that happened in the arab spring protests.

It's entirely possible this was a one time event. I wouldn't trust these services (especially facebook) not to cooperate fully with whoever is in power for censorship/identification purposes. If they don't cooperate they'll just be blocked anyway.

Surely the newness of this type of communication created these one-to-many communication freedoms, but I doubt it's accurate that these freedoms were/are anything but temporary.

That's not even counting the disagreement over how much of the communication was actually done on american social platforms vs existing text message infrastructure.

I agree that Moglen at least gets close to a absolutist position on this kind of thing (and Stallman is a good example of a similar position) but I don't accept that the positives of any contribution to Arab Spring style protests outweigh the negatives of literally informing on yourself and your friends to a private commercial surveillance network (which is indeed the literal truth even if I used Moglen's inflammatory language).