The internet is open and free. But it’s able to host platforms/communities making other types of tradeoffs, as your examples show. When the internet was smaller (less open), it didn’t have the demand to support such a broad range of choices, which seems like a worse state of affairs to me.
Public school is open and safe-ish. When schools need more freedom, they trade away openness to get it. Only advanced chemistry students who’ve proven their capabilities are allowed to use the Bunsen burners. Only the older students are allowed to go off campus for lunch. Private schools and homeschooling is great too, but if your choice was a private school or no school at all, that seems like a worse state of affairs as well.
Scientific research is free and safe. But to get grants, publications, tenure, and grad students, you have to prove your merit as a scientist. So it’s rather closed.
So it seems to me that openness is useful when we can use it to create a neutral platform for accessing lots of options where different tradeoffs are being made. Openness is like the top of the funnel: we’re happy to trade it away for progressively more safe/free spaces that are well-suited to our individual abilities and preferences. But we need that open funnel-top to start navigating our way there in the first place. I agree that there are tradeoffs, but I don’t think it makes sense to be against openness.
But we certainly shouldn’t be enforcing openness where it’s not optimal. For example, we should not be enforcing that all students must go to public school. We should not force people to associate their identity with their internet activity.
The internet is open and free. But it’s able to host platforms/communities making other types of tradeoffs, as your examples show. When the internet was smaller (less open), it didn’t have the demand to support such a broad range of choices, which seems like a worse state of affairs to me.
Public school is open and safe-ish. When schools need more freedom, they trade away openness to get it. Only advanced chemistry students who’ve proven their capabilities are allowed to use the Bunsen burners. Only the older students are allowed to go off campus for lunch. Private schools and homeschooling is great too, but if your choice was a private school or no school at all, that seems like a worse state of affairs as well.
Scientific research is free and safe. But to get grants, publications, tenure, and grad students, you have to prove your merit as a scientist. So it’s rather closed.
So it seems to me that openness is useful when we can use it to create a neutral platform for accessing lots of options where different tradeoffs are being made. Openness is like the top of the funnel: we’re happy to trade it away for progressively more safe/free spaces that are well-suited to our individual abilities and preferences. But we need that open funnel-top to start navigating our way there in the first place. I agree that there are tradeoffs, but I don’t think it makes sense to be against openness.
But we certainly shouldn’t be enforcing openness where it’s not optimal. For example, we should not be enforcing that all students must go to public school. We should not force people to associate their identity with their internet activity.