I hear concerns of the coming U.S. presidential election due November 3rd. President Trump does not promise a peaceful transition of power should he lose. 300 lawsuits have been instigated on how ballots should be counted, with many more likely to come in the event of an unfavorable for the incumbent. Several groups, representing both sides of the political spectrum, are preparing for mass demonstrations. Many people fear that these demonstrations may lead to violent clashes or be accompanied with arson and looting.
President Trump is known as a conservative. In reality he is the exact opposite thereof, for he is constantly disregarding precedents and established norms. No president before him exhibited similar behavior. Division and intolerance is the defining characteristic of contemporary politics. This is so in the United States as well as many other countries. Differences in opinions are virulent. Quite often the very facts are disputed: someone's truth is another's falsehood. This environment allowed Donald Trump, a businessman with no political experience, to become president. Modern internet media has much to do with the situation we have now. The newer media companies like Facebook derive their revenue from ads. They understand that the more attentive people are the more effective the ads become. To this end Facebook feeds content suited to one's cravings. Sophisticated algorithms have been developed for this purpose. Traditional media, the newspapers and magazines, do have political inclinations but they try to portray both sides of the issue. Citizens who make decisions based on what they read are at least aware that others are likely to behave differently. This does not apply to the new digital media: those who get news and hear opinions mostly from such sources often end up in a cocoon which shields them from divergent opinions. GNU occupies a place in this state of affairs. GNU software and its offspring play a crucial role in the systems of Google, Facebook, Twitter and many others. These companies do not want to distribute working copies of their programs so they put them in servers and let people access them. This is possible because the internet is highly reliable. Free software provides the foundation of such stability. Without GNU, the internet would have been a very different entity from what we have now. Major players who define the digital industry would never have taken off. Indeed many of the core engineers of Silicon Valley firms and elsewhere would not have learned programming. I believe people who converge here do not think that GNU should be held responsible for Trump's ascendancy or the intolerance, delusions and other ills which have spread through society. We live in the "information age" but in reality, people are not well informed. So I have a question to you: What went wrong?
