I was there, outside the Chinese restaurant, when Richard Stallman screamed and began to run from the raindrops. It was early in 2001 and I was at MIT to meet Continue Reading →
Dealing with GNU/Linux meant dealing with Richard Stallman, the eccentric genius who had guided the creation of pretty much everything but the Linux kernel itself. I say “eccentric”, but what I’m really saying is that Stallman is mentally ill. I don’t know the correct words to describe that illness, but it manifests itself in dozens of different ways, from extreme hydrophobia (fear of water!) to various disturbing habits of phraseology, communication, and physical behavior. Nobody who knows Stallman thinks he is sane. By the same token, nobody would doubt his intelligence. He’s the only person I have ever met in person who struck me as being measurably smarter than I am, which sounds horrifyingly egotistical but is probably more a reflection of my choice in fellow-travelers.
Stallman agreed to eat dinner with me on the condition that he be permitted to order my meal and that I eat the whole thing without complaint. I wouldn’t have dinner with a resurrected John Coltrane under those conditions but there were plenty of great jazz musicians and there is only one Richard Stallman. The meal was an utter nightmare, of course. Everything he picked had the texture, and taste, of Jell-O made from dog vomit. I told myself that if G. Gordon Liddy could burn his own finger down to the tendon that I could finish a five-course “authentic” Chinese meal. Having done so, I managed to extract some absolutely brilliant ideas from him about software design and programming principles. “Come back to my office,” he suggested, and we headed out to walk over towards the MIT Media Lab. About ninety seconds into our walk, it started to rain. Just a light sprinkling, not build-the-ark stuff. Stallman screamed like a teenage girl, pulled his dashiki (yes!) over his head, and ran in waddling fashion towards MIT.
Twenty minutes later, I arrived at the Media Lab to find him huddling on the other side of the door, shaking. “Why did you not run?” he asked, in a whining monotone. “Is it because you are heavy?” (I was 195 pounds at the time; lighter than Stallman, half a foot taller.)
“Yes,” I replied, “my weight prevents rapid locomotion.” Stallman nodded in satisfied fashion. Two hours later, in the middle of demonstrating some bizarre Bulgarian folk dance, he looked over his shoulder at me and said, “I would be happier if you were not in the office.” He did not stop dancing. I took this as my cue to leave.
I mention all of this so you know precisely the sort of person who is in the middle of being crucified for “defending Epstein’s rape island” by his institutional rivals.
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When asked to give his thoughts on the matter, Stallman responded like any 110-octane autism-spectrum genius would: by questioning the terminology involved. He suggested that the correct word for Minsky’s alleged statutory rape was not “sexual assault”, noting that
a) Minsky had no way to know the girl was 17, not 18 ; b) she had been coerced by Epstein out of Minsky’s presence and might well have appeared to be entirely willing.
In true Stallman fashion, this was
a) absolutely correct from a logical perspective; b) mind-blowingly stupid from a perspective of The Current Year.
It’s no different from the thousands of logical but emotionally uncomfortable things he has said and written over the past forty years. Stallman has no way to understand how people feel about something; he doesn’t feel that way. The community of actual computer scientists and clued-in tech people has long accepted this because — and I cannot emphasize this enough — Richard Stallman is responsible for computing as we know it.
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The idea of truly free software given to the world for humanitarian purposes would not exist without Stallman. He was the only person who ever had the thought. Which means it is more radical than calculus, heavier-than-air flight, the theory of relativity, or the atomic bomb. It took someone with Stallman’s particular blend of Promethean IQ and mentally handicapped social skills to push it all the way to reality. You live in Richard Stallman’s world, whether you like it or not. He has had more influence on how we communicate in 2019 than any other single human being currently living. Any sane society would consider him a national treasure of greater importance than Fort Knox, to be cherished and protected accordingly.
Naturally, our society has decided to crucify him.
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Ms. Selam Jie Gano, the author in question, is part of the most pernicious, and reprehensible, movement in technology, namely: the cabal of people who want to reduce the American (and Western) programming and technological development base of expertise to a kindergarten political commissariat which investigates its own belly button for thoughtcrime while rent-seeking the American economy to its knees and producing absolutely nothing of value in return. This cabal is actively aided and abetted by the one-percent Silicon Valley Illuminati who are murderously intent on pulling up the ladder behind them so that the existing tech (and financial) structure in NorCal is etched forever in stone. Both of these groups have identified native-born American coders and tech experts as the only thing keeping them from turning tech into a plantation system where the San Jose crowd pursues ever-more-specific meanings of “diversity”, “race”, and “problematic” while the actual work of coding, designing, developing, and manufacturing is done overseas by lowest-bidder sweatshops where the concerns of the commissars are taken with precisely the seriousness they deserve — which is to say none.
These people secretly believe that all the major necessary technological innovation has already been achieved, which is why they are so intent on crippling any further possible achievement with insane systems like Agile and pair-programming and Russian-doll containerization. Their current fetishes, NoSQL databases and headless content, are directly reflective of their moral, spiritual, and intellectual poverty. They yearn for cash-cow garbage projects like the Obamacare website, which cost two billion dollars but which likely contained more of Richard Stallman’s code than the government’s.
Haven’t you noticed how much worse computing has gotten in the past ten years? How much slower your phone is to do something than the desktop computer of 2002, which had a fraction of your phone’s power? How every bit of software in your possession requires near-constant updating to eliminate previous bugs and introduce new ones? This are the bitter fruits of modern tech-industry stupidity. Nota bene that China has very little difficulty of this nature; their WeChat software combines the functions of Facebook, Paypal, iMessage, and a half-dozen other apps in one lightweight, fast-running platform that works effortlessly on a twenty-dollar phone. That’s the kind of efficiency, and progress, we sacrificed when we decided that Selam Jie Gano’s vision of the future is more valuable than Richard Stallman’s. The eventual reckoning implied in that comparison will not be long in coming. Oh, wait: it’s already here. While we were busy making sure that every programming team at Google looked exactly like a Benetton ad, the Chinese were putting microchips between the layers of motherboards to give the CCCP ultimate control of the world’s networks.
Perhaps the final indignity here is that Stallman should be protected by the very guidelines of Diversity And Inclusion which are being used to crucify him. Were Stallman in a wheelchair, MIT would make sure he had a near-effortless path to work. Were he blind, he would have the appropriate hardware and software to enable his genius to proceed uninterrupted. But because he is mentally challenged in social interactions — an area where the Illuminati respect, and permit, nothing besides complete and total compliance — he is going to be drummed out of the world that he single-handedly created.
Mark my words: if we continue like this, the airplanes will start falling out of the sky. Oh, wait. It’s already happening.
