Who Benefits From Technology?

Many will answer this question without hesitation, “For the people”. We really want and expect this to be the case. However, when we examine today’s technology world, we face with many restrictions and manipulation of the people.

Even though most of us are not aware of it, most of the technologies we use today aims to make the user dependent and benefit from the user, in other words, to exploit them. They are so successful in making us addicted to their products that many restrictive practices seem perfectly normal. And an expected behavior for the ‘business’.

For example, you might consider that is normal and ethical when a software forces you to install another product even though that is nor mandatory to make the software work. Or when a software you purchased doesn’t allow you to install it on more than one device, and does not allow to sell your software to your friends. These restrictions are very common in software industry nowadays.

Since the early days of information technologies, we observe two different approaches to the technology. The first one is prioritizes the joy of the development and benefits of the technology. Most importantly, hacking a product she uses for her own purposes is considered as a proper way to benefit from technology according to the this approach. The second approach considers technology as an opportunity to make more profit, and technology is developed for more money rather than being developed for people. For such an approach, the benefits that technology will bring to the human race are not a concern. All concerns are economic and the ultimate goal is to make people dependent on their products. Hence they can build a monopoly. In this way, they can make profit without having to put much effort into developing technology. Even if another company develops a better technology, it is very difficult to disseminate it because of the marketing advantage of the monopoly company.

The technology companies that have a market power can easily force people to use their own proprietary software by promoting their own proprietary standards. Some examples to these standards are: docx, pptx, xlsx, ai, pdf and etc. Once these proprietary standards are spread, it is very difficult to move on to the open standards because of the compatibility issues. For example, Windows intentionally does not support Ext4 file system for purpose of making it difficult to use alternative operating systems. Despite the Ext4 file system is better than NTFS. As mentioned before, this approach condemns people to use worse technology.

Since people are condemned to the technology that is worse, it is possible to see the Windows OS in public devices, cash machines or embedded systems. Whereas, a customized GNU/Linux distribution is much more budget friendly and reliable these use cases. However, the people who is going to use these devices have been made addicted to the Windows by Microsoft. This addiction allowed Microsoft to gain market advantage over their alternatives. If a company’s market power allows it to spread its own product more, and policies of this company allows them to restrict their users and make them addictive to their products, we can’t expect a benefit for the society.

Fortunately, it was not too late for some computer scientists and hackers to realize that their culture of sharing and cooperation was being destroyed by companies. The fact that computer science spent its infancy with a culture of sharing and cooperation ensured that the first approach we mentioned before was never lost and that the war of technological freedom, which still continues today, can be fought.

Today, free software and open source solutions are proving their success, and companies had to choose these open source solutions because they have to provide better technology for their products. In recent years, many open source technologies and standards are created by big tech companies for benefiting the wisdom and skills of the open source community. However, it is still very difficult to overcome the standards that have become widespread.

For making our future to be more beautiful and free, we should fight for our technology as in all areas of life and not accept restrictions. Therefore, we should prefer free software and keep it alive.