The Rebel Voice Gets Quieter
It started with a forum thread about iTunes alternatives. Somewhere past the usual troll detours, I found Songbird—a media player built around a small gothic bird, open source, principled, the kind of software that makes you feel briefly like a person with integrity. I downloaded it. And then the old feeling came back: I want to change everything. Right now. From scratch.
The conflict is permanent. I hate large corporations. I love Apple. These two facts coexist badly and always have. The anti-corporate side flares up when I’m tired or reading about DRM, and it wants everything—open source, Linux, the death of vertical integration, computing owned by no one in particular. So I killed my browser download, pulled up Ubuntu, and sat there looking at my Mac, which had no idea what I was considering doing to it.
Then I looked at the screen. The arranged tabs in Safari. The red badge on Mail. Adium’s quiet presence indicator. And the question I always end up asking: do you actually want to give this up? The rebel side said yes—Apple’s purpose is to extract money as elegantly as possible, and your love of the interface is just the extraction working as intended. The other side said no—nothing runs like this, and that’s not just brand loyalty, it’s a true observation about the tools. Back and forth, the same loop it always is.
I didn’t want Linux because it was better. Not because I enjoy typing terminal commands until my wifi finally wakes up. I wanted it purely because it felt freer. But then I pulled on that thread: is it actually free? Linux is alive today largely because large corporations decided to keep it alive—IBM, Canonical, Red Hat, others with clear financial interests in its survival. Behind the distributions are still companies. Still money. Still the logic of profit, wearing different clothes. And the rebel voice got smaller. I found that genuinely sad.
I have a recurring image of the aftermath: some future figure booting a live CD from the rubble, building a new OS from whatever’s left, naming it after someone lost. HEAVEN OS. Compiled in a basement while Silicon Valley lies in ash. Until then I’ll stay on Mac OS X, because the alternative isn’t actually what I imagined it was. I’ve disabled the iTunes Store, at least—on principle, because I don’t want my music player to function primarily as a storefront. It changes nothing in the larger picture. But I also joined Attac today, an organization that by its own admission isn’t entirely sure what it wants. I find that strangely comforting. It reminds me of myself.