Today, leftists signal this protean capacity of capital with the -washing suffix: #greenwashing, #genderwashing, #queerwashing, #wokewashing - all the ways capital cloaks itself in liberatory, progressive values, while still serving as a force for extraction, exploitation, and political corruption.

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A smart capitalist is someone who, sensing outrage at a world run by 150 old white guys in boardrooms, proposes replacing half of them with women, queers, and people of color. This is a superficial maneuver, sure, but it's an incredibly effective one.

In "Open (For Business): Big Tech, Concentrated Power, and the Political Economy of Open AI," a new working paper, @Mer__edith, @davidthewid and #SarahBMyers document a new kind of -washing: #openwashing:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4543807

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Openwashing is the trick that large "AI" companies use to evade regulation and neutralizing critics, by casting themselves as forces of ethical capitalism, committed to the virtue of #openness. No one should be surprised to learn that the products of the "open" wing of an industry whose products are neither "artificial," nor "intelligent," are also not "open." Every word AI huxters say is a lie; including "and," and "the."

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So what work does the "open" in "open AI" do? "Open" here is supposed to invoke the "open" in "#OpenSource," a movement that emphasizes a software development methodology that promotes code #transparency, #reusability and #extensibility, which are three important virtues.

But "open source" itself is an offshoot of a more foundational movement, the #FreeSoftware movement, whose goal is to promote *freedom*, and whose *method* is openness.

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The point of #SoftwareFreedom was #TechnologicalSelfDetermination, the right of technology users to decide not just what their technology *does*, but who it does it *to* and who it does it *for*:

https://locusmag.com/2022/01/cory-doctorow-science-fiction-is-a-luddite-literature/

The open source split from free software was ostensibly driven by the need to reassure investors and businesspeople so they would join the movement.

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Cory Doctorow: Science Fiction is a Luddite Literature

From 1811-1816, a secret society styling themselves “the Luddites” smashed textile machinery in the mills of England. Today, we use “Luddite” as a pejorative referring to backwards, anti-technology…

^{Locus Online}

The "free" in free software is (deliberately) ambiguous, a bit of wordplay that sometimes misleads people into thinking it means "#FreeAsInBeer" when really it means "#FreeAsInSpeech" (in Romance languages, these distinctions are captured by translating "free" as "libre" rather than "gratis").

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The idea behind open source was to rebrand free software in a less ambiguous - and more instrumental - package that stressed cost-savings and software quality, as well as "ecosystem benefits" from a co-operative form of development that recruited tinkerers, independents, and rivals to contribute to a robust infrastructural commons.

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But "open" doesn't merely resolve the linguistic ambiguity of libre vs gratis - it does so by removing the "liberty" from "libre," the "freedom" from "free." "Open" changes the pole-star that movement participants follow as they set their course. Rather than asking "Which course of action makes us more free?" they ask, "Which course of action makes our software better?"

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Thus, by dribs and drabs, freedom leeches out of openness. Today's tech giants have mobilized "open" to create a two-tier system: the largest tech firms enjoy broad freedom themselves - they alone get to decide how their software stack is configured. But for all of us who rely on that (increasingly unavoidable) software stack, all we have is "open": the ability to peer inside that software and see how it works, and perhaps suggest improvements to it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBknF2yUZZ8

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How markets coopted free software's most powerful weapon (LibrePlanet '18 Keynote) — Benj. Mako Hill

[To skip introduction full of thanking people and stuff, start at 3:19.]Description: In my closing keynote address for LibrePlanet 2018, I suggest that a gr...

^YouTube