You Can't Stop The Signal

published: 2020-07-26

Vonu is the condition or quality of, as well as the action of achieving, an invulnerability to coercion. Etymologically, it is an awkward contraction of the phrase, VOluntary Not vUlnerable (hence, "vonu").

Copyright requires coercion. If there is no State with a monopoly on violence to loom over a populace and threaten whoever has the misfortune of losing a copyright lawsuit with time in jail or theft of money or property, then there is no real power in a license attached to "intellectual property". In the end, it doesn't matter if the license is permissive or not; people who you don't like with ideologies you disapprove of are going to take it and use it, and there is nothing you can do to stop them without resorting to violence, and you are beset with phantasms and riddled with delusions if you think otherwise.

Early 2018 up until it shut down in August 2019, I spent a lot of time on 8chan. My favorite board was /tech/, home of ceaseless threads where Linux and BSD fanboys fought it out and femboys shared screenshots of their riced desktops. The /fucko/ threads were my favorite. Laden with useful (if not a little outdated) advice on how to technologically protect oneself from the State, and how to destroy the evidence were one to find out that the police were after them. From the baby things like switching to FOSS software and making a GPG keypair to ghosting it out with Tails and Libreboot and full-disk encryption with a built-in "nuke". How ironic that imageboards like 8chan have a reputation of being wastelands and havens for all sorts of disgusting identitarians like neonazis, and yet their effort ended up helping me, an anarchist lesbian, clean up my digital tracks even further than what I'd started with the Google Freakout of 2016.

I am sure that they would have been extremely displeased to know that their knowledge helped someone they would have so openly considered a degenerate, a walking piece of filth, someone to be exterminated from the land. But how were they to know? How would they have stopped me from seeing the fruits of their research without also severely restricting their ability to disseminate it amongst themselves? Should they have written a "No Homosexuals Allowed" license and slapped it on top of their carefully constructed guides? Obviously they did not, and it wouldn't have worked anyway. A piece of paper, digital or physical, is not going to stop me from using information. And because I was vonu from them, hidden from 8chan's logging by Tor and Tails, there would be no way for them to know that any kind of copyright infringement had taken place.

I must admit, I erupted in laughter when I saw the so-called "Climate Strike Software License". The general gist of it is that certain pieces of software, mostly Python math-related modules from the list they provided, are in use by companies contributing to the climate crisis, and thus they must be stopped by a... digital piece of paper. Never mind that the CSSL violates the canonical Open Source Definition, and thus, if a piece of software switched to this new license, it would immediately break GPL compatibility and thus fuck over every FOSS project relying on it, climate-accelerating or not. Do you really think that a megacorporation so obviously protected by the governments that allow it to exist would be cowed by a mere text file? Only relatively recently has the GPL been proven to be able to be upheld in court, but even then, it was in court by an entity with the financial resources to take the offender to court. And changing the license will ultimately do nothing, as you can't retroactively revoke a license from code as the code-of-conduct controversy with the Linux kernel proves. Said harmful companies could just continue to use the old versions of the programs covered under licenses that they aren't violating and carry on with their day so long as the code still works.

In the case that I cited above, it was one company against another company. One entity with the money to pursue litigation against another company with the money to defend themselves. Although I wouldn't use vonu to describe their position, the existence of SLAPPs prove that corporations and governments have little to no fear of individual people mounting complaints against them. Do you really think you can successfully defend your piece of "intellectual property" from license violation in any meaningful way without litigation? In the end, without the threat of violence, nobody gives a shit about licenses, and those who do have a cop in their heads. Your code, your art, is going to get stolen anyway, and there isn't anything you can do about it other than hope you have the social clout for people to know who it really belongs to anyway and respect that of their own free will.

Video games are technically pieces of software. Almost all of them are under a proprietary license that forbids making backups or sharing them with friends or obtaining the software through "unauthorized" channels. But I don't give a shit! Nintendo's "copyright" is a phantasm to me. I will download every classic ROM they have (and a few... contemporary ones, while we're at it) and not feel a single shred of guilt.

Licenses that exclude entities on the basis of falling into some category or another, like the "No Harm" license, have little to no power in the actual world. For example, one with a vendetta against me who knew I used a piece of software under the aforementioned license could easily take my post about being gender-critical and claim that I am contributing to "hate speech or discrimination" regarding gender and gender identity. Even though nowhere in the post do I advocate for violence or claim to hate anyone with a "gender identity", merely just state that I find the concept of gender personally stifling, it's their word against mine.

In all that I do, I strive more and more to achieve vonu, to become invulnerable to coercion. That's why there's so many darknet gateways into this website. That's why I write under a pseudonym. That's why I left the Zaibatsu and the tildes and Neocities. I already know that, in my short time on the internet, I have made a myriad of enemies who would love to see me go dark and never post a single thing again, who would gladly shut me up had they the power. And some days, I have to admit, I wonder what it would be like to throw it all away and return to being a normie. But this website is my home. It is the one thing I can come back to at the end of day and know that it is truly mine. And even then- even then it is not completely vonu. I still rely on other parties: Namecheap and Namesilo for domains, Vultr for VPS hosting, Paypal to pay them off every month or year, a bank to pay Paypal off, a job to pay the bank off, enough positive/neutral social standing to keep my job, enough customers at the place I work at to justify my slot on the payroll... I feel freer than I did when I started MayVaneDay five years ago, and yet I am still so entrenched in the ruts of other people's lives, still at the mercy of so many entities.

Take the aforementioned example of my stance on gender. I am neither "trans-exclusionary" nor a "radical feminist". But I am sure that someone, somewhere, has labeled me as a "TERF". That is why I laugh when I see codes of conduct like the one at the Gemini hosting service tanelorn.city. You have the right to decide who uses your server resources. You have the right to decide who you want to associate and dissociate with. I am in no way advocating that authoritarians be given free rein to shit up everything, or even to be listened to. Just remember: those who you do not want to share your spaces with will set up their own spaces. Just like how you wish they would cease to exist, so do they wish the same upon you. The ways you protect yourself will be the ways they protect themselves. You cannot stop them. But they cannot stop you either. Tor's anonymity comes agnostic of the beliefs of the person using it. GPG encryption works regardless of the beliefs of the person using it. Any attempt to weaken these, like the State's persistent attempts to get backdoors inserted into proven encryption methods that plague their investigations, will not only weaken those who truly need it but also do nothing to people not under the State's duress, to the exact people you don't want using those tools.

You do not want to associate with me because of who you think I am, impression true or false regardless? Fine. But technologies like Tor and I2P allow me to be vonu from you. I don't want to use Gemini for reasons I stated in an earlier post, but if I did want to set up my own server, there is nothing Solderpunk could do to stop me. Not a license, not a strongly-worded letter to fuck off, not a legal campaign (and honestly, I doubt he would sling the court system against me both because he is a very kind man and because he lives in a different country than me). I have the source code to multiple servers and clients. Given enough time, I could write my own. And who is to stop me from using them once I have them? A protocol is an idea. Ideas want to be free.

But enough of depressing things like software development. Let's take a little break, have a little comic relief as a treat. You've read a lot of words. Feel free to rest your eyes a bit here. The words will still be here when you get back.

Hahahahahahahaha How The Fuck Is Copyright Real Hahahaha Brodie Just Walk Away From The Screen Like Bro Close Your Eyes Haha

Rest of this post aside, it's absolutely wild how humans that lived long before us decided that we can just... take certain combinations of letters and numbers and symbols and say, "I created this. I own this arrangement of characters. Only I can control how this arrangement is used." Like... On a purely technical level, there is no difference between a novel and six hundred pages of me keysmashing. It is only because we as human beings ascribe value and meaning to the former and not the latter that only the former gets shackled in the copyright system.

Absolutely wild how it's possible to get locked up for nothing more than distributing combinations of letters and numbers and symbols. Aren't they all symbols in the end? Scrawlings we assign value to in the system we call "language"? Ultimately it's all just chicken scratch. And yet entire industries rise and fall on controlling where they go...

Patents are "intellectual property", sheets of paper that entities only abide by because of fear of litigation. The pharmaceutical industry in the United States would not be in the deplorable state it is in now if it were not for the patent system enabling price gouging. The free market would run wild, companies seeking the cheapest way to produce medicine, and the one with the best balance of low prices and high quality would get the most business.

Stories are "intellectual property". And my ever-growing collection of ebooks can attest to the fact that DRM is only a temporary and relatively-easily-defeated measure to stop ebook piracy. And even though most literature and other vehicles of stories are licensed under the equivalent of proprietary licences, that doesn't stop fanfiction writers or the modding community. And song remixes... I hate how "remix" has become synonymous with "drown out everything else in the song with the same sounds in every single goddamn trap song", but it is derivative, and it is not stopping anytime soon.

Given enough time, everything will become public domain, and none of this will matter anyway. Your carefully crafted software license will go to shit. Your copyright will lapse. And a million flowers will bloom out of the cracks where once they were confined to only your walled garden. Your "copyright" is only a temporary delay that helps no one and prevents well-meaning people from preserving whatever legacy you have.

Authoritarians will steal your "intellectual property". Authoritarians will see your "keep out" signs and spit on them and trample them under their feet on their way to take what is yours and claim it as your own. Licenses are like laws; clearly they have failed to prevent tyranny from taking root. The time for working within the State is over. Friendship ended with legislation; now direct action is my friend.

Copyright is a phantasm. Its only weight comes from the threat of State violence. Steal their code, their stories, their songs, their "intellectual property" right back. Liberate yourself with the fruits of their labor just as they have enslaved you with yours. Achieve vonu.

They can't stop your signal.