Independently Poor: A Twist on FU Money – a.k.a. “FU, Money”

It doesn't feel that weird to me, but there's a reason her blog would resonate with me in particular.

I was homeless myself, briefly, half a lifetime ago. I ended up dedicating my life to coding free and open-source audio DSP software, which I do to this day under the name 'airwindows'.

Part of my motivation for this choice is a determination to give functional tools to a community that may have artistic ability and the ability to learn audio production skills, but can't come up with the money to do this using cutting-edge hardware. CPU cycles are impossibly cheap, ESPECIALLY if you are able to do functional work on 'last year's' computers, which is why I take pains to code stuff that doesn't require current computer systems (particularly significant on Mac OSX, which deprecates stuff like mad to render older systems nonfunctional).

In my opinion, you should be able to not only blog, but do a professional grade mix on a digital audio workstation using only a cast-off semi-working laptop from years ago that somebody no longer needed. Your bottleneck would be monitoring: professional quality speakers and amplification are harder to come by that way, but even then modern advances in class D amplification and a bit of ingenuity go a long way (I run a subwoofer where the speaker part was insanely cheap, because I used cardboard builders tubes for enclosures, capped on both ends by inexpensive woofers, and doubled for more cone area)

With intelligence and effort it is more than possible to break the link between access to capital, and potential performance. You can compete on the grounds of ability and quality and increasingly remove access to capital as a gatekeeping mechanism.

If you don't do that, one might conclude that poor people are lower quality and not capable of worthwhile things.

One resource that my work does NOT address is mental attitude: I can make a person think, 'I now have the tools to pursue audio production' by giving the tools, but I can't make a person think, 'I can step back and think about life and the world I'm in, outside the narrow lens of capitalist status seeking'. It's nice that Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Google employees and trust fund kids can view life outside the immediate struggle to not die: I think that's very civilized and laudable, in a way it's the whole point of being human. This blog about 'FU, Money' is an alternate path to the same goal.

By limiting yourself to choices that do not cause loss of choice in the future, are you still free to choose anything? You value this freedom so much that you limit the choices you can make significantly only to retain this freedom, but unless you "cash in" that freedom at some point to make a choice without restrictions (which will probably limit your freedom of choice in the future) you are living with a limited choice-space just the same.

> It promotes the idea that not only can beggars be choosers, they need to be if they are ever to resolve their problems.

I wish you had said this directly in the article because I had a tough time figuring out your point.

Thanks to covid, I have experienced how it must be to not have fu money.

I'm not entirely sure why, but many companies are now hoping to take advantage of the rise in unemployment by trying to lock in highly skilled workers at a low salary. The way those job offers were presented, it seemed like they were feeling like my savior in a shining armor for offering job openings in these challenging times. But they were asking for lots of experience, unpaid overtime, yet offered less than what I currently make for part-time. Their main argumentation point was that it's better to be underpaid than to be unemployed.

I assume that that's how most people who don't have fu money are treated, because they are not in a situation that allows them to negotiate. But of course, accepting such an offer might prevent you from accumulating a safety deposit in the future.

Maybe the best way is to go with Aladdin: If you don't have anything, act like you own everything.

One-upper?