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Zhi Zhu 🕸️
Zhi Zhu 🕸️
@ZhiZhu@newsie.social  ·  activity timestamp 9 hours ago

"You know what's better than refusing to use a #technology because you hate its creators? Seizing that technology and making it your own. Don't like the fact that a convicted monopolist has a death-grip on networking? Steal its protocol, release a free #software version of it, and leave it in your dust...

That's how we make good #tech... by liberating the technology from its monstrous forebears and making free and open versions of it:"
- @pluralistic

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/19/now-we-are-six/

#News #World

Text from article:
Let's start with some context. If you don't want to use technology that was created under immoral circumstances or that sprang from an immoral mind, then you are totally fucked. I mean, all the way down to the silicon chips in your device, which can never be fully disentangled from the odious, paranoid racist William Shockley, who won the Nobel Prize for co-inventing the silicon transistor:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/24/the-traitorous-eight-and-the-battle-of-germanium-valley/

Further, we wouldn't have the packet-switched network that delivered these words to you without the contributions of the literal war-criminals at the RAND corporation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET

Refusing to use a technology because the people who developed it were indefensible creeps is a self-owning dead-end. You know what's better than refusing to use a technology because you hate its creators? Seizing that technology and making it your own. Don't like the fact that a convicted monopolist has a death-grip on networking? Steal its protocol, release a free software version of it, and leave it in your dust:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/samba-versus-smb-adversarial-interoperability-judo-network-effects

That's how we make good tech: not by insisting that all its inputs be free from sin, but by purging that wickedness by liberating the technology from its monstrous forebears and making free and open versions of it:
Text from article: Let's start with some context. If you don't want to use technology that was created under immoral circumstances or that sprang from an immoral mind, then you are totally fucked. I mean, all the way down to the silicon chips in your device, which can never be fully disentangled from the odious, paranoid racist William Shockley, who won the Nobel Prize for co-inventing the silicon transistor: https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/24/the-traitorous-eight-and-the-battle-of-germanium-valley/ Further, we wouldn't have the packet-switched network that delivered these words to you without the contributions of the literal war-criminals at the RAND corporation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET Refusing to use a technology because the people who developed it were indefensible creeps is a self-owning dead-end. You know what's better than refusing to use a technology because you hate its creators? Seizing that technology and making it your own. Don't like the fact that a convicted monopolist has a death-grip on networking? Steal its protocol, release a free software version of it, and leave it in your dust: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/samba-versus-smb-adversarial-interoperability-judo-network-effects That's how we make good tech: not by insisting that all its inputs be free from sin, but by purging that wickedness by liberating the technology from its monstrous forebears and making free and open versions of it:
Text from article: Let's start with some context. If you don't want to use technology that was created under immoral circumstances or that sprang from an immoral mind, then you are totally fucked. I mean, all the way down to the silicon chips in your device, which can never be fully disentangled from the odious, paranoid racist William Shockley, who won the Nobel Prize for co-inventing the silicon transistor: https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/24/the-traitorous-eight-and-the-battle-of-germanium-valley/ Further, we wouldn't have the packet-switched network that delivered these words to you without the contributions of the literal war-criminals at the RAND corporation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET Refusing to use a technology because the people who developed it were indefensible creeps is a self-owning dead-end. You know what's better than refusing to use a technology because you hate its creators? Seizing that technology and making it your own. Don't like the fact that a convicted monopolist has a death-grip on networking? Steal its protocol, release a free software version of it, and leave it in your dust: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/samba-versus-smb-adversarial-interoperability-judo-network-effects That's how we make good tech: not by insisting that all its inputs be free from sin, but by purging that wickedness by liberating the technology from its monstrous forebears and making free and open versions of it:
https://pluralistic.net

Pluralistic: Six Years of Pluralistic (19 Feb 2026)

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