Linux is the new civil disobedience.
This is not a prophetic vision of any sort, just my brain spewing forth implications of what has already been prophesied, including a lot of stuff before I ever came along. As always, this is merely what I see.
Please do not assume that because I promote the Network Civilization I am suggesting it is all good. It is not. For one thing, it still carries vast baggage from Western Civilization. For another thing, it holds the potential for empowering a new and even more heartless plutocrat class. Even as I promote engaging it, I also promote refusing to bow to the false gods it will bring with it.
You haven’t seen anything until geeks and nerds run the world.
There will surely be a displacement as the old guard are eclipsed by the new. This should be entertaining, because we cannot estimate too precisely how it will look. The timing will seem painfully slow as we go through it, but at some point it will be obvious in retrospect. There is a whole generation — at least one — that has yet to write its story and define what passes for the culture of the future. It won’t be us; we are just building the infrastructure. There is already a fairly serious rejection of our ways, our sense of consciousness.
In the foreseeable future, as the current crop of plutocrats seek to improve their grip on power and jockey amongst themselves for supremacy, electronic networking will become even more critical. What it is now will become for a time the single most powerful means for asserting government control. You could elect to simply drop out of it; that’s viable with serious effort and persistence. Or you could operate on the fringes and never quite be a slave to the system.
Their greatest strength is their greatest weakness. They have to have the networking, but there’s no way to control it in the traditional sense. It’s developing and changing too quickly. They won’t catch today’s Internet criminals until the criminal methods are obsolete. The line between crook and cop and CEO are already hard to see; on the Net they will soon disappear. That is, in the sense of how you will have to operate on the Internet, it won’t matter whose goons you face.
Nor is this a matter of building a hacker army of freedom fighters. The single biggest threat is not someone who provokes the powers that be, but the folks who operate freely without paying the virtual bribes and tolls, without surrendering control of their computers. They will call us leeches at best, and more likely sling the term “cyber-terrorist”. They’ll make noises about how we possess such great technical savvy, but that will be the propaganda. Truth: not elite, but not a slave, either.
There won’t be a doomsday virus; there will be several from different sources. Maybe we’ll never really know who is responsible, but these attacks will probably fight each other — fighting over who gets to rule the Net. It’ll be the ultimate cyberwar, and most users and victims will never understand it. It won’t matter who wins, because it will probably affect just about every Windows computer connected to the Net. Not in the sense of making them all quit working; that would not serve any useful purpose. No, it will destroy what little pretense of freedom still can be had running Windows. Imagine enforced virtual nudity inside a tightly packed urban area.
The most hardened operating systems are also the hardest to use for every day business. Those that are easiest to obtain and use are the least secure. Chances are good you can stand on some ground between the extremes and come out well. Linux is there in that middle ground, as well as a few others. I suppose various agencies could attempt to regulate and restrict the use of alternate OSes, but it seems doubtful. Force the Open Source developers to compromise? “See you in Hell first,” would be a typical response to that. If anything were to bring serious principled retaliation, that would do it. Think of Anonymous on steroids. Not all of them, but just enough of the Open Source developers would rather scorch the virtual earth of the Internet than allow such a thing.
So they’ll let us go so long as there aren’t too many of us, and it doesn’t interfere with their bigger plans. And we don’t care, because those plans will collapse on their own, dead and rotten from the inside. The simple act of pursuing our own individual concerns while running something not easily captured by any outside agency will be enough. Just do what you gotta do. By doing it without their controls, we have already set the facade to crumbling.
I’m betting on Debian Linux. If that appeals to you, grab the free book (see the previous blog post) and get started. I’ll be here to help. That’s a central element in my ostensible mission here as Internet pastor. If you stick with Windows or whatever, I’ll still be here to help. Every little bit counts, regardless of the methods used. The simple act of people slipping past the cloying advertising and regulatory controls, not easily tracked around the Net by either government, marketers or hackers — that’s all it takes to play a critical role in facing the Network Civilization from a position of strength.
Simply having an agenda not controlled by the powers that be makes you a rebel.
Addenda: For once I’m going to link to a post by Vox Day:
Let me explain. The core problem is that the newer Microsoft operating systems do something incredibly stupid. In order to navigate all the complex crap that now surrounds diverse aspects of the increasingly crufty operating system, many installation programs now create a virtual administrator that has control over the various files and directories being used during the installation process. This virtual administrator does not exist, and by virtue of not existing, is not synonymous with any of the actual human administrators who actually use the computer.
Perhaps you already see the intrinsic problem there. If something goes wrong during the installation or update process, the real administrators do not have access to the files that were under the control of this nonexistent administrator. The real admin can see what’s there, but he can’t do anything about it. He doesn’t have access and he can’t give himself access. And if that protected file or folder is one that is required by an application installer that has somehow gone haywire, the user is screwed and will not be able to reinstall or use that application without either restoring a previous OS state or completely reinstalling Windows.
He goes on to suggest using a Live-Run Linux distro because it can mount Windows file systems and delete files without any interference. I’m not sure why he never saw that elsewhere in his research, because a lot of us independent computer technicians have been doing that for years. It is in principle what the run-from-CD AV rescue disks do, by launching Linux and mounting the file system to tinker without interference from the running system.
I included this so you’ll understand just how it is my dark visions might be plausible. This is why malware has become more perplexing, because the system allows ghost administrators complete control using system secrets MS can’t keep secret from hackers. If you absolutely must have Windows, consider using VMWare and running an XP or Win2K VM on your Linux desktop with VMWare. This allows you to control whether your Windows VM ever sees the Net at all.
In response to an offline question: MS sells installer certificates that Windows will accept. This certificate provides a ghost administrator authority that the system owner is not permitted to counteract. These certificates are supposed to prevent hacking into the software for pirating, but as Vox noted, it also prevents any part of the system arguing with the installer when it has to do unusual things. So, for example, Trend Micro does a search for competitors’ products and requires you to remove them before it will install. The big AV and other security outfits pay big bucks for this kind of access, and there are various levels of authority a software vendor can get. Take at look at SysInternals, very powerful system tools that MS got when they bought the company. They work even better because they now come with MS’s own certificates. MS owns Skype, too. Governments create spyware and MS gives them keys, too, but that is only a slight hindrance to the AV companies if they don’t cooperate with said governments. Then again, if MS wanted to, they could create the government’s “backdoor” access through security updates, which have MS’s own certificate backing them.
