A Fan of Freedom: Thoughts on the Biography of RMS
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All of us narratize our lives; we all reinvent our own histories to some extent. But one of the perils of reinventing yourself as a prophet/visionary is that you can end up forgetting who you were before the vision.
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Again, one of the most interesting things about RMS’s story is the respects in which it is not unique, but representative of themes which recur constantly in the lives of people like us.
… and many other signature traits Sam ascribes to RMS as an individual were actually considered pretty normal and unsurprising where we came from.
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We were all of us misfits out to impeach God. Rebels against mundanity, stupidity, the ordinary. We wore short hair when the fashion was long and long when the fashion was short. Like RMS, we were — and are still — essentially compelled to go where intellect and imagination and ethical conviction leads us, regardless of whether that’s comfortable or socially acceptable.
What distinguishes RMS (and myself) from Seth Beidbart and Don Hopkins and Alan Walker and Mark Miller and other members of this pack is not that our character is essentially different, nor even that our ability is necessarily greater. It’s just that, for whatever reasons of historical accident, RMS and I went public with it. We have projected our interests and personalities outside the subcultural venues in which they are considered normal.
All of us more or less always expected people to find our intellects impressive, but I’m often bemused at the extent to which our other shared traits strike people as exceptional. What other way is there for us to be? What else could we be but driven, rigidly ethical, ruthlessly analytical, anti-authoritarian, idealistic, careless of normal social rewards, countersuggestible, etc., etc. It’s in our wiring. We’re self-analytical, too; we can see that wiring. We have little choice in what we are.
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Again, my theme here is that Richard’s experience was nowhere near as exceptional as FAIF makes it sound. Many of the brightest hackers all over the world were coming, in their individual ways, to the same cusp point. Richard’s genius was that he exteriorized his personal journey as a plan for a movement, then mythologized it and took it on the road — providing a model for me when I felt it necessary to do the same thing ten years later.
… While it took individual vision and moral courage to act out this feeling as thoroughly as Richard did, the sense of obligation, of being elected by the fact of one’s own capability wouldn’t have surprised any hacker of that day or today. Hackers often react like this. See something that needs doing, do it — don’t count the cost. In this respect as in many others, RMS was as much a product of the hacker culture as a shaper of it.
I don’t say these things to take anything away from Richard. just to place him in the context that FAIF is missing. He did act. He did change the world, if not perhaps in the exact direction and degree he intended. RMS put his stamp on the hacker culture so pervasively that it is sometimes difficult to tell where Richard’s reinvention of himself ends and the cultural matrix around him begins. I admired him greatly for that even as I disagreed with him, having no clue that within a few years I would be doing the same sort of thing myself.
And that points up perhaps the biggest difference between us, beyond theory or ideology. Richard would never have described himself the way Linus Torvalds and I later did, as accidental revolutionaries. Linus and I had to be dragged into that role and we still aren’t entirely comfortable with it, but for the man who became RMS, it was purposeful revolution from the beginning. Because when you’re a genius in the secularized-Jewish tradition that produced Spinoza and Marx, that’s what you do — you seize on a big moral idea and redeem the world with it.
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… Because there is indeed a sense in which RMS is winning, but not at the exact game he wanted to play.
RMS’s artifacts — GCC, Emacs, the GNU General Public License — really have changed the world. The process of open, collaborative development he did so much to help invent is triumphing. His code and his license have succeeded; it is only his rhetoric and moralizing that have failed. The tragedy is that RMS himself values his moralizing more than his code.
Had it not been so, had RMS been a bit less consumed by his big moral idea and a bit better salesman, the hacker culture would not have landed on me the job of saying what he could not. I might have been a fully paid-up member of his crusade, rather than winding up as an unwilling rival.
I often think I would have preferred that outcome. Perhaps then RMS’s story would have had the happy, redemptive outcome FAIF projects. But that’s not the history we got. Instead, I think RMS will never be satisfied with the victory he gets, even as it transforms the world.