hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr0061.txt

Episode: 61
Title: HPR0061: Punk Computing
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0061/hpr0061.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 10:53:32

---

All right, let's chill it up
Welcome to Hacker Public Radio. This is Clat 2. I'm going to be your host for this episode.
I wanted to talk a little bit about punks, anarchists, and computers.
This is probably not going to be so much for the experienced Linux user as it is more for the punk and anarchist
or someone who might lean toward that direction who is not familiar with Linux.
This is not going to be an introduction to Linux, however.
If you are a punk or an anarchist or you lean in that direction,
you might have traditionally, if it were maybe 10 years ago,
simply have escued computers entirely as part of the protest against, you know,
whatever current society you're protesting.
But now computers are pretty much everywhere, and they can actually help the punk cause
the anarchist cause in the community quite a bit, just the way that they help every other community,
you know, good communication, sort of coordinating the community together,
being able to access one another, whether you're in a really small town in Idaho
or whether you're in this huge, you know, Mexico city or Madrid.
So computers are obviously important.
Everyone's really going to be able to get a lot of benefit from them,
and a lot of people are using computers running the typical windows,
possibly the slightly less common OS 10,
and a punk or anarchist kind of just using computers simply to talk to people
across the world might be surprised to find out that the operating system,
the environment of the actual computer that they're using,
is part of a huge syndicate, a big racket basically in itself.
And I know to a lot of people it seems like windows just kind of comes with the computer.
You buy the computer or you get the computer from, you know, you inherit it from someone,
but actually the system that you're using is a product,
and it's a source of quite a lot of money, and it's got a huge,
it's basically at the epicenter of a huge global economy.
You can interpret that anyway you want, but if you're not supporting it,
then you probably shouldn't be using it.
And for a lot of time, you know, you kind of use it because you don't really realize
that there's anything else out there, but actually there is something else out there
that doesn't belong to anyone, and offers complete freedom,
complete freedom from corporations,
complete freedom from relying on anyone else really to support you,
to get back to your data, should you need to recall your data in two years,
have the formats changed, things like that.
So this other solution obviously is Linux,
and Linux is something that's easy to get into,
and there's a lot of great podcasts on that very subject,
and there's a lot of great stuff online about it,
so I'm not going to go too deep into it right now.
It's more of an, I guess, an economic argument that I have in terms of why you need to use Linux,
rather than, for instance, stealing Windows or OS10.
In the software world, it's practically legal, although it's not,
but I mean, it's very well known that if you need a software package,
there are places that you can find them, you know,
you go to the wares of sites and you download,
or you download LymeWire and start downloading whatever you need,
and any punk or anarchist going to think that there's nothing wrong with that,
and in fact that it's helping, that it hurts, for instance, Windows or Mac,
or whoever you're getting the wares from,
so that you don't have to buy that product from that company,
you kind of in your mind, you think, well, at least I'm not paying for it,
I'm stealing it, and in that way, I'm hurting the corporation,
but in fact, of course you're not, and in order to understand why you're not,
I mean, traditionally, if you go steal something from a big corporation,
yes, they have to account for that loss,
the money that they've lost from that sale,
they have to kind of drum up somehow,
with intellectual property and intangible goods,
obviously, it doesn't quite work the same way.
If everyone's stealing a product, you might think, well, surely,
if no one's buying this, it's going to hurt the company eventually,
but in fact, people using it is supporting the company.
Let's imagine that I wanted to get you into a prison.
Now, if I don't have the means, if I don't have the power,
or the authority to come to your house,
put you in handcuffs and drag you away forcibly and throw you in prison,
what would be a good way for me to get you into a prison?
You know what I would do is I would make this prison, I would build it,
and I would put this really nice looking front on it.
I would make it look really, really pretty.
I would also possibly charge people to get in.
I would like to make it basically a club, you know,
and you can't get into the prison,
but it's really, really cool to be in that prison.
And in order to get to the prison, you have to know somebody,
or you have to pay somebody.
I would even put a guard out in front of that prison,
so that people couldn't get in, even if they want to.
Okay, so any good punk or anarchist,
you're just going to follow the logic,
or it's a knee jerk reaction, you're going to think,
well, if they're not going to let me in,
I'm going to get in anyway, and so you're going to sneak in.
So maybe you'll find a back door, window,
or you'll crawl over the wall, or whatever,
and you get in, and you think in your mind
that you've just gotten around like this evil corporation,
and you've screwed them over, and you've gotten into the prison for free.
But what you didn't realize is that that building was a prison,
and now you're inside, and they're not going to let you out.
And that's the way that the computer industry,
the proprietary computer industry, functions.
You might have stolen the operating system.
You might have Windows XP that, you know,
and you're circumventing whatever kind of verification,
you know, kind of a check-in, and what do they call it,
genuine advantage, or whatever.
You know, you might have circumvented all of that stuff,
but you're still using their product.
And eventually, at some point, that product is going to,
the fact that you're using that product,
is it's tying you to that company.
And this doesn't matter whether it's Windows, or OS10.
Either of those two, you're using, or even Adobe,
like if you're using Photoshop, things like that.
You are now tied down to basically whatever that company decides.
You're kind of at their mercy.
And even hearing that, you might not really realize
exactly what you're at their mercy for.
Like, okay, so a big deal, you're making flyers in Photoshop,
or you're recording your music in GarageBand,
or Logic Pro, and you're releasing your albums,
or you're coordinating things with Excel,
and Outlook, and things like that, organizing protests,
or whatever you're doing.
Well, to understand how you're being tied to this company,
again, you have to kind of stay with me
with a little bit of an analogy.
So you have to understand what these computer companies
actually deal in in terms of currency.
And one of the major, major currencies
of the modern computer industry is information.
And do you think about it?
How do they get information from people?
Like this whole business model of everything, pretty much,
right now, is really geared toward getting people's information.
And at first, it starts out with really innocuous,
kind of boring information, your name,
your address, your phone number, things like that,
your age, your occupation, what company you work for,
how many people are in the company?
What your paycheck is?
Are you a student?
Do you rent or own the house?
All that good stuff.
So the really, the easiest stuff, your name,
your address, your phone number, your birthday,
is the stuff like that.
Pretty much all the company has to do is offer like free email,
and you'll go sign up, and you'll give them all your information
without really thinking about it.
And you might give them fake information,
so the next step after that is sales.
So you go on to a record store online,
or you find a good album on eBay that you want to buy,
or something like that.
And in order to make that purchase, of course,
you have to register for the site.
And if you give them fake information,
they won't let you purchase, because they're checking all these facts
against whatever credit card or bank card or whatever you're using.
And so it continues.
And with proprietary OS operating systems,
they even make you give their information to them
just if you want to use the computer.
So you buy this computer, or you inherit a computer from someone,
and you go to install the software, or you turn it on,
and if it's a fresh install of the operating system,
it's asking you all kinds of information
that there's just no reason a computer
that you just want to do some typing on,
or surfing the web on, should need to know all of this information
about you, but you don't have a choice you have to put it in,
so you enter it all in.
And now who knows where that information has gone.
Okay, so this is personal information about you.
What about the information that you generate on your computer,
and you're going to want to access later on.
So if I've made a lot of, if I've written a lot of articles
that I've written or something like that,
if I've done that in a proprietary format like Microsoft Office,
what guarantees that in two years,
when there's a new version of Office,
what guarantees that I'm going to be able to open that information back up
and get to my, to the stuff that I've written?
Well, honestly, nothing guarantees that.
It's on the end user, it's on you as the computer user,
to make sure that your data is being updated constantly
into the latest formats that the company comes out with.
And what does this force you into?
Well, it forces you into making purchases,
because now you have to purchase from them the latest and greatest version
of whatever software you initially created your data in.
So suddenly, everything that's important to you,
whether it's photos, music that you've purchased from their online store,
text documents that you've written, emails that you've received,
all of this information that quite possibly could be really,
really important to you, because so much of our lives now is on a computer.
All of this stuff is basically subject now to whether you are going to come up with a cache
to make sure that you are completely up to date.
And, you know, it's a real pity if you've got so much data
that you're not able to open up all those files in the latest version
of whatever software package it is and make sure it is up to date.
So if you skip a couple of versions,
you could be screwed no matter what.
And this is a real, real danger because it actually happens a lot more often
than you might realize, especially in the non-techie world.
If you're, if you're listening to this podcast, you're probably at least interested
in technical things, things that go on in the computer.
There's a lot of people who are not so technically inclined.
And a lot of people don't get a new computer every two years,
like a lot of techie people do.
Whether they just inherit like something that someone thought was broken
and they take it home and they tinker with it and they repair it
or whether they actually go out and purchase the computer.
But a lot of people don't update that often.
And so when people bring data into someone such as myself who is technical
and they say, well, this is from my old computer
and I can't seem to open it in my new computer.
I mean, a lot of times they've skipped so many versions of the software
that they were using it, using to create that data
and that there's really little or no chance
that they're going to be able to get that data out of that format
and into something that can actually read it.
So it happens all the time.
You have to really be careful with it if you're dealing with proprietary operating systems.
Now on Linux, you don't have that problem because there's not the same culture
in the delivery method of the new product.
There's no motivation for Linux, which is a free environment.
There's no motivation for them to come out with new versions of something
that break everything else behind it
or make it more complex for you to access your data
so that you have to purchase the latest and greatest stuff all the time
in order to stay up to date, kind of keeping up with the business.
There's not really that kind of business side of things in Linux.
It's just about your data, you having control over your data
and not being subject to anyone or any company
that is going to be providing you with these tools
and that also has the alternate motive of making money off of all of that.
To be free from all of these corporate schemes,
you're just going to need a computer system that runs a user environment
that belongs to you and belongs to no one and has no ulterior motive.
And the name of that operating system, that environment, is Linux
and you can find a lot of information about it online.
There's Ubuntu.com, there's Fedora, Project.org.
It offers you not only solidarity, but it also offers you the chance
to be able to run software on older hardware.
So if you are trying to be a computer user without supporting the market
that just forces new product on people every, at least every six months,
more often it's every two months.
If you're trying to stay away from that, there are Linux distributions
for things that are very, very old and that it runs fine on older hardware.
So if you've got access to an older computer, Linux might very well be the way
that you're able to use that computer at all, so give that a shot.
And of course, Linux is the ultimate DIY project.
Linux is for a community and it's by that same community.
It is, it's very punk without even knowing, I think, that it's punk.
So, and it's very anarchist without knowing it's anarchist.
So if you go that way, Linux, you'll find that you'll fit right into the Linux community.
This has been Hacker Public Radio.
My name is Klatt too.
Be sure to check back at hackerpublicradio.org for new episodes.
Thank you for listening to Hacker Public Radio.
HPR is sponsored by Carol.net.
She'll head on over to C-A-R-O dot N-C for all of her team.
Thank you.