@pluralistic

Thank you for delivering MULTIPLE talks here in #bloomingtonIN and for signing our books!

As you signed @pluralistic , "Disenshittify or die!"

So, a story about how I #disenshittify ... by force!

This story starts when I was working at #IndianaUniversity for #UITS in IT Client Services. My job was "Special Projects". I worked for a director and basically made magic happen.

Early November 2014, someone from a human interface robotics lab handed me a new piece of #hardware called the #ThalmicMyo . It was an upper armband with 8 myoelectric sensors that could measure electrical muscle function, and do stuff on a computer with that data! The base idea was that you could do the following: hand wave outward, inward, spread out, fist, and thumbs up.

So, being CrankyLinuxUser, I wanted a #FLOSS toolchain to get and do my own thing with it. Whoops, only worked for #MSWindows .

Forum requests were met with silence. "Sorry you cant get the data", was the refrain. Lies.

So I used my #IU account and requested academic access. They IMMEDIATELY chimed up and said that access could easily be granted at $5000/year . UH huh.

So, I made them a target.

Took a few weeks. BUT I eventually got a shitty BUT working toolchain on Linux to use really basic machine learning. This is just a linear regression k-nearest-neighbors. No LLM fuckery. Theirs could do 5 gestures. Mine could do 10.

I initially released it on #HackerNews or YCombinator, not realizing that Thalmic Myo was VC funded by YC. And holy shit that was a #MartinHench moment where I fell into a WHOLE LOT OF SHIT. My article was auto-killed. My account on HN was shadowbanned. Ruh roh.

I had some contacts at @hackaday and I sent them my findings, my responses from HN, and my repo... and a really hostile Youtube video (one of my gestures was a middle finger to Thalmic).

On Nov 18, 2014, at 730am eastern, my phone blew up, figuratively speaking. Ping. Ping ping. PIIIIIIINNNNNGGGGG until 12pm.

The page is still up on HaD, by the way. https://hackaday.com/2014/11/18/thalmic-labs-shuts-down-free-developer-access/

At 12pm or thereabouts, Thalmic Myo announced that they made an official decision to "allow raw data access"! I was not only successful for my hardware, but hardware freedom for EVERYONE with this platform.

Normally, the story would stop. I handed back the borrowed hardware to the lab that loaned it to me. I know they were able to do some cool prosthetic automation with it. But that's not my specialty. I made it so they could. My director permitted me to buy a few for our office to continue and loan them out as well.

...... 3 months later

I get a call on my office phone doing a customer survey. Told them that the hardware was great. "What about our API?" I told them that I made my own, and I was the one that forced your company to open source 3 months back. Ive never heard silence so LOUD. She asked me to stand by.

She transferred me to the CTO. We had a spirited conversation. I basically told him that I think ignoring the FLOSS and hacker community was your first and fatal mistake. You were a hardware business. You can do the VC thing and gatekeep, but that just angers people. And what you were in was a MASSIVE awesome piece of unique hardware nobody else had. He told me that their original idea was a powerpoint slide advance. I gave him perhaps 6 different major ideas to jump off on.

Nothing else happened, for a while.

3 more months later.......

I get a reddit DM out of the blue. Saw my name, and connected the dots. (S)He was an engineer at Thalmic during the time I released my Linux FLOSS code. They told me that I basically flip-turned the whole company upside down. I broke their business model of #Extraction and #enshittification and forced #FLOSS on them without a choice. They thanked me for my contribution.

Later n, the company got acquired or died. I'm not sure. I moved on and no longer had any of the hardware. Although, the basic idea is actually pretty cheap to construct these days. The only hard part is the AgCl electrode plating.

So when people ask what they can do, there's a LOT we can do. And a SINGLE PERSON can change the course of history. Sure, sometimes being in the right place at the right time is a big part, but there's so many of these moments.

Just wanted to contribute back @pluralistic to the movement you've founded.