Condemn bad actions (don't accept them as inevitable)
The scale of brash, undisguised intellectual theft currently (2023-2024) happening in Big Tech is apparently easy for some folks to dismiss as a natural phenomenon or even turn it around and blame the victim!
Say it with me: taking resources which were freely made available to the public, ingesting them in a secretive and phenomenally expensive process, and selling them back to us is not inevitable.
It is not the "fault" of people like myself who have been creating and freely sharing things for decades on our own websites as well as platforms such as Reddit or StackOverflow out of a sense of community and goodwill that these things are now taken and used for private profit in acts of large-scale appropriation.
There is nothing natural about this.
I’m just about as individualistic a person as you can hope to find. A "lone wolf". Someone who "marches to the beat of his own drummer". I hate "just because" answers and hive minds, group-think, design by committee. I even used to chafe at John Donne’s "no man is an island" because I’ll be an island if I want to be damnit!
But I’ve come to understand that I am part of a community in the most fundamental possible way.
Here’s some more context from John Donne’s Meditation 17 (luminarium.org):
"No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."
In other words, in the end, we’re all in this together. Memento mori.
Or in the words of Jim Morrison from Five to One (1968): "No one here gets out alive."
I remember a satirical bumper sticker, often seen on the back of an RV or boat that said, "He who dies with the most toys wins." It was funny and I knew the owner meant it in jest. But then I learned that there are some people for whom this is not a joke at all, but actual words of affirmation.
Growth, expansion, and hording at all costs is not natural and not good.
"Ha ha, humans are like cancer on the planet." No. Some specific humans act like cancer. And others may carry out their bidding intentionally or otherwise. But that doesn’t make it a basic truth about human nature as a whole. It does not have to be this way.
I invite you to read about the origin of "the tragedy of the commons" (wikipedia.org). While it feels almost like invoking Godwin’s law to point out that the origin essay’s author, Garrett Hardin (wikipedia.org) was not a nice guy:
"Hardin held hardline anti-immigrant positions as well as positions on eugenics and multiethnicism that have led multiple sources to label him a white nationalist. The Southern Poverty Law Center described his publications as 'frank in their racism and quasi-fascist ethnonationalism'.
But it’s not cheating to point this out. Hardin’s support for eugenics is fundamental to the type of negative thinking that produced his essay.
A must-read is The Myth of the Tragedy of the Commons by Ian Angus.
Angus explains:
"Hardin used the word 'tragedy' as Aristotle did, to refer to a dramatic outcome that is the inevitable but unplanned result of a character’s actions. He called the destruction of the commons through overuse a tragedy not because it is sad, but because it is the inevitable result of shared use of the pasture. 'Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.'"
But it’s based on a nasty assumption about human nature:
"In short, Hardin’s conclusion was predetermined by his assumptions. 'It is to be expected' that each herdsman will try to maximize the size of his herd - and each one does exactly that. It’s a circular argument that proves nothing.
"Hardin assumed that human nature is selfish and unchanging, and that society is just an assemblage of self-interested individuals who don’t care about the impact of their actions on the community. The same idea, explicitly or implicitly, is a fundamental component of mainstream (i.e., pro-capitalist) economic theory.
But:
"All the evidence (not to mention common sense) shows that this is absurd: people are social beings, and society is much more than the arithmetic sum of its members. Even capitalist society, which rewards the most anti-social behaviour, has not crushed human cooperation and solidarity. The very fact that for centuries 'rational herdsmen' did not overgraze the commons disproves Hardin’s most fundamental assumptions — but that hasn’t stopped him or his disciples from erecting policy castles on foundations of sand."
At its heart, things like "the tragedy of the commons" are actively bad because they promote a cynical and fatalistic view that people will always abuse any resource and "boys will be boys," so we should really stop complaining and just "deal with it."
But that’s crap. I do not accept that.
I’ll say it again: there is nothing inevitable about using the goodwill of others to enrich oneself at the expense of the community. This is bad behavior and it needs to be called out as such. We should not not brush it off with fatalism and we should certainly not reward and celebrate it.
(Later, I waxed long on this in I’m an American software developer and the "broligarchs" don’t speak for me)