Brian Proffitt over at LinuxToday posted a rebuke of an InfoWorld troll experiment in which a writer purposefully tried to incite an entity known as the "Linux community" to attack him. Such actions are unbelievably stupid by any measure of sanity, and the Web does not need further proof that cyberspace is filled with highly destructive, undercooked man-children who make real-life threats over everything from books about Java to who has the better rogue talent spec in World of Warcraft. There are so many bad assumptions in the InfoWorld writer's thesis -- for instance, the illusion of a single, cohesive "Linux community" -- that I hardly know where to start. But Brian Proffitt isn't entirely in the correct frame of reference either. Yes, there are a lot of violent Linux people, and they are the dominant public face of Linux for many technology news readers, but there is another side to this story on the publishing end of things. Brian's right in that he should be more discriminating with his news picks, but I have the feeling his job is going to get tougher as the rise of Linux blogs and advocacy sites make it more difficult to find reliable and authoritative Linux-oriented stories.
In his criticism of the InfoWorld tripe, Proffitt compares the InfoWorld blogger to someone walking into a Boston bar and insulting the Red Sox, or hitting a beehive with a stick. What he seems to have overlooked is that with these analogies, he's admitted that Linux advocates can be violent, angry brutes who enjoy participating in online harassment and abuse. You know that bees have stingers, and that sports fans in bars could potentially be violent if incited, but I did not know until now that I was expected to think that Linux advocates were equally dangerous. I mean I did think that, but I didn't realize that this was supposed to be as obvious as the notion that bees have stingers. Proffitt in essence concedes that there is a large contingent of dangerous Linux people who will come out and sting if there is a perceived attack on the hive, and that purposefully stirring up trouble will draw the reaction the effort deserves.
This really is true; there really are some unbelievably horrid people in the free software and open source worlds. First, though, let's establish the fact that there is no "Linux community." This is a term used when someone wants to either credit or blame Linux as an operating system, free software as a techno-religion, or open source as a development model. There is no central community structure; Linux as a community is, in the most optimistic light, a large number of individual software development projects that are designed to work with one another in some way, supported loosely by a group of partisan distro fiefdoms and financially enabled by a handful of corporations who make money on services and hardware products peripheral to Linux. People only invoke the "Linux community" when they want to marvel at or place blame upon something associated with Linux. In this case, it's online violence.
Proffitt goes on to cite a frequently regurgitated accusation among Linux activists -- that InfoWorld posted the tedious, sickeningly sanctimonious 5-part troll post to get more Web traffic (and therefore ad dollars). Perhaps this is true, and there are a small minority of media productions that really do make money primarily off of this philosophy, but InfoWorld does not seem to be one of them. The only consistent effort I have seen -- reading between 50 and 100 tech news stories per day -- to bash Linux beehives to make money is Dan Lyons at Forbes. He is part of a psychotically-fashioned sect of the news media that makes money off of other people's anger. Howard Stern, Sean Hannity, Alan Colmes, Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Ted Nugent, and Al Franken are all in this same category. They are making money off of readers, listeners, and viewers who have a masochistic urge to be infuriated. On the one hand you have writers and pundits who enjoy upsetting people, and on the other you have people who enjoy being upset.
InfoWorld does not fit this pattern, nor does the befuddled author of the five articles that bash Ubuntu, so I think Brian Proffitt's accusation is unjustified (unless he knows something I don't about InfoWorld and its parent company, IDG, which produces the various LinuxWorld Conference & Expo events). More than likely, the InfoWorld blogger was trying to teach us all a lesson about... something. What specifically, I don't really know, but I'm sure he had some good and sound reasons when he started the 5-part anti-Ubuntu series, even if they did not translate into print correctly.
Speaking of Dan Lyons, look at him now, with his famous (and terribly written) Steve Jobs blog and his hugely profitable book deal. Linux advocates have been shouting for years about what a monster he is, but who really is to blame? The monster writing things that upset people, or the people who are easily upset and feed that monster with their online clicks? Lyons at least admitted he was wrong about the SCO Group and hinted that there was some measure of personal antagonism in it for him, referring to Linux advocates as "nerds" on Forbes.com and "freetards" on his terrible blog. Rob Enderle said that he took up the anti-Linux, pro-SCO cause in his writing primarily because of the rabid Linux activists who viciously attacked him. Enderle did not, to use Brian Proffitt's metaphor, swat the hive -- the hive came and attacked him, and he took it upon himself to get revenge for it. Keep in mind that both Lyons and Enderle were working with a company history and inside information at SCO that made its court case against IBM (with regard to SCO code illegally included in the Linux kernel) look lopsided in SCO's favor. From their frame of reference, the Linux people were the aggressors.
I think it goes a little deeper than the people who like being upset. There is a growing mass of Linux advocates who have a strong need to act out against people like Lyons. When Bill O'Reilly rants and raves on television, people yell back at their television sets and complain about it over beers at taverns and at the weekly poker game. But there are some Linux people who, given the greater power and freedom of the Web, have taken it upon themselves to exact revenge against writers who speak out against Linux and/or free software.
Revenge is a messy business; innocent people will get hurt, perfectly reciprocal harm is almost never possible, vengeance does not return reality to its previous unharmed state, and righteous anger never ends with a feeling of justice. History is replete with examples of these facts. Just like Enderle and Lyons wanted revenge against the Linux people who attacked them, the Linux advocates needed revenge against them for what they perceived as ad hominem attacks.
There is something far worse than overreacting Forbes editors and IT analysts, though, and that's where we come back to the InfoWorld blogger. He is like many writers in the technology world -- he is an activist first, a journalist second. I did this too, for the middle portion of my writing career, while under the toxic influence of the pathetically underqualified and overhyped SourceForge Inc. editorial staff, but I've since reformed. The trouble is that when you write about technology and you learn so much about it, you start to think of yourself as a supreme expert. Once you reach that self-assessment, you begin to think that your opinions and preferences are better than other people's because they don't know as much as you do. You assume that you know better -- you make an emotional connection to what you think is right -- and once that happens, you start to justify spreading misinformation or omitting important details that don't jive with your beliefs so that your readers will form the "right" opinions. You begin to adopt the attitude that it's okay to lie if you know you are right.
And so we have Linux journalist-activists, who know that they are right -- people like Pamela Jones of Groklaw; Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols of eWeek, Linux Watch, and DesktopLinux.com; Joe Barr of Linux.com; Dana Blankenhorn of ZDNet Blogs, and this whole site, which is dedicated to free software advocacy-journalism, among a few others. They print pro-Linux, pro-GPL, pro-GNU, pro-FSF, pro-Stallman, anti-Microsoft, anti-SCO, and sometimes even anti-BSD articles and news stories. They have created this gang of angry Linux activists, and feed them with both glowing propaganda and blistering invective. If these clowns were standing on stage in front of a group of people and incited them with misinformation, omitted information, advocacy, and harsh rebukes of genuine criticism, and that group went out to threaten people's lives and destroy private property, they would be charged with a crime. But when they do it on the Web, and the result is death threats, DDoS attacks, crapflooding of comment sections and forums, and racial slurs and other hate speech -- even while outwardly feigning disgust at such actions -- they ignore the damage, or make half-hearted pleas for the attacks to stop so that the entire "community" is not tarnished. It is these activist-journalists that do the tarnishing, not the people they incite and influence. Even if they don't directly incite online violence, they actively attempt to build an atmosphere in which it is agreeable to take revenge against dissent.
Pamela Jones created Daniel Lyons with her snarky, irreverent commentaries on Linux as our sacrament, Richard Stallman as our computational lord and savior, and SCO as the unreasonably evil anti-Christ. Over the past few years, Lyons and Jones have acted as shadow brothers, variously attacking each other in direct and indirect ways on Forbes.com and Groklaw.net, trying to show how much of a moron the other was for staunchly defending his or her tightly-held beliefs. It's not over, though. It continues to this day, with fact-free paranoid investigations into how many ex-Microsoft employees work for what investment group or tech patent firm, or what big evil corporation could be funding which anti-Linux journalists. We will have more Dan Lyonses with the rise of advocacy blogs and the willingness of sites like Linux Today to link to them as though they were reliable news and information sources. As long as these literary turds are floating in the pool of the Web, spreading their attack-vocacy and inciting online violence against people who disagree -- even if the dissenters are despicable -- we will all, as Linux users and technology news readers, suffer.
So yes, Brian, as an LT reader I want you to cut out the trolls, but I want you to do it on both sides. Cast off the InfoWorld bloggers and the Pamela Joneses with equal enthusiasm -- that will be the greatest service to your readers, even if they end up attacking you for it.
There's more to say on this subject, but this isn't the right time to print it.
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