Negative campaigning

I've had several conversations recently about free and open source software advocacy and "negative campaigning." It seems that some people in the free and open source software communities, drawing a analogy to political smear campaigns, have taken the position that any negative campaigning, on any issue, is to be avoided in free and open source software advocacy.

My first response is simple. I believe that there is a fundamental difference between speaking out against policies or actions and smear campaigns the employ untrue or suspect claims, ad hominem attacks, and that attempt to avoid a real conversation about issues. I have no reservations about categorically condemning the latter form of smear campaigning in campaigns for software freedom or for anything else.

Defending a position on other types of negative campaigning is more complicated. Free and open source software advocacy has seen attacks on proprietary software, software patents, DRM, centralized network services, and the firms behind these practices. I have supported and participated in "negative" campaigns on all of the issues. I've done so because I believe that if one is taking an ethical position, it is justified, and often necessary, to not only speak about the benefits of freedom but against acts of dispossession and disenfranchisement.

Perhaps the strongest argument in favor of negative campaigning against injustice and unethical practices can be described through the example of other "negative" campaigns that most people seem to intuitively support. For example, should a campaign for abolishing child labor talk only about how great a value adult workers are to their employers or how happy kids are when they don't work? Should a campaign trying to abolish land mines talk only about the benefits of bomb-free fields and intact lower limbs? Should a free speech organization only speak out about the social welfare brought by a free press and never against acts of censorship? These may seem like outlandish comparisons but you can find people writing, only a couple centuries ago, about how slavery should be abolished by arguing in favor of the benefits of paid labor. Now maybe the economic arguments in favor of paid work over slavery were right. But today these arguments seems to be somewhere between irrelevant and offensive. Whether slavery is more or less efficient is a moot point; we reject it because we believe it is wrong.

More importantly, perhaps, our societies have rejected censorship landmines, child labor, and slavery because we have treated these issues as ethical prerogatives and as intolerable practices to be eradicated. Rather than having to argue that paid labor is better than slavery, we argue that slavery is wrong. In doing so, we create an ethical responsibility to find alternatives. And then, as a society, we do. In all of these cases, we have efficiently worked to build a better world because we felt that the alternatives -- or the status quo -- was unconscionable. In the most effective social movements, unambiguously negative messages have been instrumental in success.

Now I’m not trying suggest that these causes have equal ethical weight as the movement for software freedom. They don't. But I do believe that the free software mission is similar in kind, if not in importance.

Of course, you may not agree with my statement that user control over technology is an ethical issue. If you don’t, you might come to different conclusions about what comprises appropriate tactics and strategies for free software’s promotion. This is an important point because acknowledging it lets our communities focus on our real differences. We can argue about the appropriateness of negative campaigning forever and never make any progress if our real difference in opinion is how and why free software is important.

For those that do treat technological empowerment as an ethical ideal, it is both justified and essential to speak about both the benefits of software freedom and against the systematic disempowerment others.