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Android’s ideology

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MG Siegler of TechCrunch fame has a really interesting post up at his blog discussing the history and evolution of Android as a smartphone platform, and the role it has played in shaping the mobile industry:

Thanks to the Google/Verizon alliance on the matter, the FCC decided the compromised vision of Net Neutrality was just fine also. To be clear: Net Neutrality was thrown out in the wireless space because Google sided with Verizon’s ridiculous and horribly conflicted stance on the matter.

The open spectrum enemy, turned Net Neutrality enemy, became Google’s bedmate thanks to a business deal. Straight up. Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.

We got all of this thanks to Google’s desire for Android to take over the world. I commented earlier that they signed a deal with the devil — I wasn’t being facetious. They actually did! And they got away with it!

It’s a great look at the more political side of the OS wars, and one that I don’t always follow very closely, so I appreciated Siegler’s somewhat insider’s perspective.

I don’t know if I can commiserate with his conclusion, though:

I hate Android for the same reason that Severus Snape hates Harry Potter — the very sight reminds me of something so beautiful, that was taken. Except it’s worse. It’s as if Harry Potter has grown up to become Voldemort.

This kind of gets into the same debate that gets trudged up when we talk about artists with problematic personal lives: Orson Scott Card is a homophobe, Christopher Hitchens was misogynist, Rudyard Kipling was racist, Roman Polanski molested children, and Frank Miller was downright batshit. Does that mean we discount all that they gave the world because of their personal views? I still love Ender’s Game and The Dark Knight Rises and The Jungle Book for what they are, even though I’m fully aware of the personal biases of their creators.

Hell, I still love Narnia, even though I consider myself “militantly atheist” and that series was as openly Christian as it’s possible to be without being Left Behind.

(And yes, I have read all of Left Behind. I don’t want to talk about it.)

I think Neil Gaiman has a pretty healthy attitude towards how to deal with the works of art of people you disagree with politically:

If I were only allowed to read or enjoy art or listen to music made by people whose opinions and beliefs were the same as mine, I think the world would be a pretty dismal sort of a place. I love the work of many creators who self-avowedly believe or believed things that I consider to be “fairly wretched”, not to mention wrong-headed, lunatic, irresponsible or simply wrong. Worse yet: there are artists, actors, songwriters, authors, whose work I love, like or admire and who, biographers or historians tell us, actually did things that were utterly reprehensible. And worse even than that, there are all those things by Anonymous, who could have been or thought or done, well, anything, and we’ll never know…

The art isn’t the artist, the poem isn’t the poet; trust the tale, not the teller.

It sounds nice in theory, of course, but you do have to ask yourself: where does the line get drawn? I don’t use GoDaddy, I don’t shop at American Apparel, and I don’t eat at KFC. With artists or writers, you can at least make the argument that your enjoyment of the art is separate from the viewpoints that those artists espouse. But when continued usage of GoDaddy is directly enabling their funding of reprehensible acts, can you really still justify it to yourself that the service is separate from the politics?

Furthermore, using a phone that uses Android is arguably much more comparable to using GoDaddy than it is to reading a Frank Miller comic…so why am I okay with my HTC Phone? Maybe I find it hard to get worked up about stuff like that because it comes down to companies who are doing pretty well for themselves fighting with other companies who are doing pretty well for themselves, and upper-middle-class consumers who end up having to pay a little more for a slightly suboptimal experience. Net Neutrality is important, but it’s not, say, human rights. It’s not disenfranchisement and it’s not oppression–at least, not in any meaningful sense that I can get behind.

But to carry that argument to its logical extreme, what about FoxConn? What about sweatshops for clothing? When you sweep aside all of the posturing about the “ideology” of various industries, much of western luxury is only possible thanks to the deplorable actions that corporations engage upon in other parts of the world on behalf of the consumer.

Don’t get me wrong. Apple doesn’t pay FoxConn to drive its employees to suicide, and I would wager that most individual consumers would not want the latest gadgetry if they had to personally exchange it for the life of someone in a third-world country. But at the same time, much as with the problem of conflict diamonds, these luxury good industries still flourish because they manage to sweep the ugliness under the carpet, so that consumers–and even corporations, to a certain extent–are only exposed to it indirectly, via proxies.

I don’t have the answers here, because I don’t think easy answers exist. I think anyone who becomes involved in social justice of any sort eventually has to deal with these sorts of cognitive dissonances within their life. I’m being dismissive of Siegler getting upset about Google negatively influencing the prevailing standards of the mobile computing industry because I think those things aren’t bad enough to warrant a boycott, but it’s not like I source fair-trade clothing or eschew my smartphone in protest of more extensive human rights violations, either. That’s hypocritical of me, I know. After all, it’s easy to only give up the things that won’t have an actual impact on my life. My attempted forays into veganism have been half-hearted at best and I’ve been putting off reading Eating Animals because I’m afraid it’ll compel me to give up meat, and I like meat. Do I feel bad about that? Hell yes. But not badly enough to do something about it…for now.

I guess all I want to say is that things are never as black and white as they seem, and the ideologies that work for you don’t necessarily work for another. So ultimately, I’m not disagreeing with MG Siegler, per se….I’m just a little frustrated that he, like many strident techno-idealists, don’t necessarily see that other people disagree not because they’re ignorant, but because certain things that are important to people like Siegler just aren’t important to other people. But that’s always going to be a problem.


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