image transcription:
big collage of people captioned, “the only people I wouldn’t have minded being billionaires”
names(and a bit of info, which is not included in the collage) of people in collage(from top left, row-wise):
- Alexandra Elbakyan, creator of Sci-Hub. perhaps the single-most important person in the scientific community regarding access to research papers.
- Linus Torvalds, creator of linux kernel and git, courtesy of which we have GNU/Linux.
- David Revoy, french artist famous for his pepper&carrot, a libre webcomic. inspiration for artists who are into free software movement
- Richard Stallman, arch-hacker who started it all. founded the GNU project, free software movement, Emacs, GCC, GPL, concept of copyleft, among many other things. champions for free software to this day(is undergoing treatment for cancer at the moment).
- Jean-Baptiste Kempf, president of VLC media player for 2 decades now
- Ian Murdock, founder of Debian GNU/Linux and Debian manifesto. died too soon.
- Alexis Kauffmann, creator of framasoft, a French nonprofit organisation that champions free software. known for providing alternatives to centralised services, notable one being framapad and peertube.
- Aaron Swartz, a brilliant programmer who created RSS, markdown, creative commons, and is known for his involvement in creation of reddit. he also died too soon.
- Bram Moolenaar, creator of vim, a charityware.
on the bottom right is the text reading, “plus the thousands of free software enthusiasts working tirelessly.”
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No one should have that much power.
I wouldn’t have trusted Fred Rogers with a billion dollars, and he’s practically the only famous stranger I could have seen trusting with my newborn alone.
It’s a society warping level of wealth. No single, unelected, unaccountable person should possess that much uniltateral power.
The global
allowanceencouragement of such an exploitative, reckless goal is why we are in our various bleak situations.I think they aren’t billionaires precisely because they worked for the good of the internet/knowledge.
If they indeed became billionaires that would imply that how they conduct themselves had completely been altered along with their core beliefs.
None of them. I don’t care who they are, nobody should be a billionaire.
It’s nice to appreciate people who do good things, but keep in mind that the only way people become billionaires is by exploiting people. So I would not want any of these people to be billionaires because it would mean they got that wealth not by doing good things, but by owning ridiculous amounts of capital and exploiting people.
Rant over, sorry.
I have a standing theory that once a person is no longer concerned about their welfare or the welfare of their descendants, they go crazy.
Like, once you reach a point where survival is no longer a problem, that part of your brain goes nuts. It’s not a flawless theory, since philanthropy is a thing and people like Dean Kamen exist, but it’s a thing that seems to happen an awful lot.
Survival no longer is a problem to literally everyone in north america. yeah people die, but, when was the last time you have heard of anyone who is not anorexic starving to death? People still talk like survival is an issue, but that’s because they actually mean not being comfortable.
This is simply not true. Starvation isn’t the only thing that kills people - they die of easily treatable medical issues all the time because of lack of health insurance. Unhoused people die of exposure every summer and winter.
I mean i tried to make it painfully obvious I wasn’t talking about medical conditions, car accidents, or crackheads being stupid, but i guess i had to come back and spell it out.
