image transcription:
big collage of people captioned, “the only people I wouldn’t have minded being billionaires”
names(and a bit of info, which is not included in the collage) of people in collage(from top left, row-wise):
- Alexandra Elbakyan, creator of Sci-Hub. perhaps the single-most important person in the scientific community regarding access to research papers.
- Linus Torvalds, creator of linux kernel and git, courtesy of which we have GNU/Linux.
- David Revoy, french artist famous for his pepper&carrot, a libre webcomic. inspiration for artists who are into free software movement
- Richard Stallman, arch-hacker who started it all. founded the GNU project, free software movement, Emacs, GCC, GPL, concept of copyleft, among many other things. champions for free software to this day(is undergoing treatment for cancer at the moment).
- Jean-Baptiste Kempf, president of VLC media player for 2 decades now
- Ian Murdock, founder of Debian GNU/Linux and Debian manifesto. died too soon.
- Alexis Kauffmann, creator of framasoft, a French nonprofit organisation that champions free software. known for providing alternatives to centralised services, notable one being framapad and peertube.
- Aaron Swartz, a brilliant programmer who created RSS, markdown, creative commons, and is known for his involvement in creation of reddit. he also died too soon.
- Bram Moolenaar, creator of vim, a charityware.
on the bottom right is the text reading, “plus the thousands of free software enthusiasts working tirelessly.”
Because in countries with functioning democracies, political power is narrowly scoped (your electors give you a mandate to do certain things, and if you act contrary to those interests you loose your power) and fleeting (you only have power as long as your electors continue to entrust that power to you, and can remove that power if they decide you are no longer fit to wield it).
Money, by contrast, is permanent (capital breeds capital) and unaccountable (you can choose to use the power your wealth grants without any regard for what others think - even if people disapprove, they can’t stop you spending it)
"The government has a defect: it’s potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they’re pure tyrannies.”
— Noam Chomsky
(Not exactly the same, but very similar.)