It's quite a meandering essay, between the unnecessary guilt tripping, hamfisted correlations and inactionable observations. I completely disagree with the central thesis - computing is not an apartheid industry, the desire to automate work is not paramount to slavery. There
are arguments to be made about the impact of computing on exploitative neocolonial attitudes, but the essay ignores them to bloviate about the virtues of individualism against conformity. How can we address the "specter of the plantation" while real-world Congolese children are being sent into cobalt mines to supply your next iPhone? We're putting the philosophical cart before the horse here. White collar workers can't be exonerated because "the boss made me do it", they're equally as complicit in oppressing minorities to exploit them for their material resource value and turn their legacy into a Macbook. White collar employees
are the villain - we fill the seats, accept stupidly unfair compensation, and then blame other people when shit hits the fan. If nobody did the work, the bosses wouldn't get the pay. Moral flexibility is the ultimate currency for these privileged few.
Stallman's philosophy is not only simpler, but it's more actionable if you're a dissatisfied leftist. You want to make corporations hurt like hell? You want to be the boogeyman that fights for individual rights on the side of the law? Become their liability, write copyleft software. Complaining about learned helplessness is not a liberal attitude and it doesn't progress individual rights, correlating computing to the plantation is a backwards heuristic that prevents genuine liberal solutions from being considered.
