Customer Is Not Always Right

The other half of my complaint — too much of Open Source is so developer centric it can quickly become anti-user — is sometimes the user wants the wrong thing.

But it’s not so easy to untangle this mess, since there are more than two actors in every scene. We might attempt to say the old “customer is king” approach is a major element in what makes Windows vulnerable to every drive-by infection and hijacking. Actually, that becomes the excuse for doing things wrong which encourages the hijackings. Never forget, you who buy a Windows PC are not the customer; advertisers are the customer. Your eyeballs are sold to advertisers. Windows is merely a platform for delivering the user to commercial interests.

Thus, we identify a very real world power which goes by many names, but perhaps a tamer label would be the global merchant culture. It has its own language, customs, and concerns. You might also call it the corporate culture, since that’s how we experience it most of the time. Corporations compete vividly amongst themselves, but will present a united front against government and customer interference. You only think you know what you want because the merchants have manipulated us forever, it seems. Do some research into the background of Edward Bernays. His ilk have sought, and mostly succeeded, in shaping demand to whatever the corporations determine will make them the most money.

Apple does this, too, but simply uses a different flavor of manipulation.

What we are getting at here is nobody really cares what you want. Whether manipulated or not, some of what you might want is plain evil. I can assure you some of what I want is evil, and I struggle to quiet that lustful nagging. There is a God in Heaven to Whom we are accountable. At the same time, He has forbidden me exercising all my options for limiting your evil choices, since I have too much to do limiting my own.

In my computer ministry, I don’t much care what people want to do with their computers. I care in the sense I will pray for porn addicts, but the real issue for me is not their porn habit. The real issue is how insecure computer OSes and software makes the Internet a very much worse place than it has to be. If there were not so much money to be made in keeping computers vulnerable, the Net would be more boring, but more usable to me, at least. The most marketable, most sought after data passed over the Net wires happens to be consumable only with the the most vulnerable junk software available. The vast majority of the people using the Internet want things which get in the way of what the Net is all about in the first place.

But I am in no position to dictate my wishes to the world. We already have enough of that arrogance, so I’m always crushing down my urges in that direction and simply doing what little I can to help. Whenever possible, I try to convince people to use Ubuntu or CentOS. All software stinks, but those two stink least in my nostrils. For now. This at least offers a great deal more protection than any version of Windows with any amount of protective add-ons when facing the predator-infested waters of the Internet. Every so often, researchers who aren’t beholden to the corporate culture will reveal some new way in which MS delivers clients to their partners in corporate perfidy. If I were really worried about morality viewed in the typical logic of Western absolutes, I would be trying to destroy all computers.

Thus, bad as Open Source may be, it’s slightly better than Windows. Apple is some of both, just snottier and more expensive. Then again, if I could afford a really nice Mac, I’d use that simply because it’s a better Unix than Linux, and a whole lot prettier to view.