The Wrong Approach

The information explosion has left many people trying to grapple with the complexities of modern life, and perhaps the most common method used to avoid going insane amid the pressures is to abstract the complexity. Most of us don't look at a television and try to understand how the signal is encoded by the camera and transmitted through the air until it is received by a digital tuner that somehow translates the signal back into a picture to display on the screen. Instead we abstract it by declaring that "someone has solved the problem of television signals, and I'll just accept that it has been solved until I am required to understand more for some reason." I would even venture that few people take the time when they make their toast in the morning to think about the processes involved in making their bread warm and toasty.

At the GNU Public Dictatorship we believe that such abstractions are a necessary part of living in the modern world and that without them most of us would either go insane trying to understand our gadgets or just get rid of them altogether. We do not, however, believe that people should feel empowered to actually simplify things that they do not understand (assuming of course, that they were not the creator or owner of the thing they do not understand). A recent example in Birmingham, UK illustrates this false sense of empowerment quite well. Because the city leaders don't want to understand the grammatical rules surrounding the apostrophe they prefer to get rid of it altogether, at least within the confines of their influence. This concept, followed to a logical conclusion, does not make a whole lot of sense. No TV manufacturer would suddenly declare that digital signals are too complex, and they are going to ignore important sections of the specification. It just doesn't make sense. Rest assured that no such things will happen under our stewardship.