Discussion
I mean, find me a single American tech organisation that *isn’t* full of right wing libertarians.
That’s the secret lurking in open source - it’s actually a weird combo of gun-toting anti-government survivalists and radical progressives* who have managed for years to share some similar goals because politics wasn’t mentioned. But then software ate the world; software *is* politics, and vice versa.
* (I’m in the second camp, I’m sure the first camp would use different words for me.)
But then software ate the world;
software *is* politics, and vice versa.
Which is why I use and support antiX
Doing as much as possible to stay clean of AI ( pretty much impossible) and staunchly antifascist.
@Floppy Copyright & copyleft all getting a bit ouroboros as America contemplates reality as non-binary.
You could see the same in GDS - an anti-state government that put it in place as a way to slash the civil service, but full of progressives who truly wanted to make citizen’s lives easier. The truce held until it started to threaten those who thought themselves to be the real power (HMRC, DWP, Treasury), at which point it was shredded.
(Note: I never worked at GDS, I crashed and burned in the interview as @psd can attest; this is *my* reading of the history from the outside)
@Floppy the people and the technology both reflect that it was developed for the most part in the era of ascendent neoliberal ideology and governance
@Floppy It’s funny that you say that. I’ve never given it much thought, but some comments and attitudes by FOSS gurus do come across as err not very nice. Even dictatorial and authoritarian.
@TerryBTwo there’s a good bit about it at the start of David Golumbia’s “The Politics of Bitcoin”. Worth a read.
@Floppy I got into webdev in the late 90s when we were all making it up as we went along
Nobody had a computer science degree, lots of people had done other jobs first, and found thier way to this new technolgy via art or maths.
People who go from school to uni to well paid job have had fewer chances to learn empathy.
The myth of meritocracy cuts off compassion.
@Floppy We should also mention the significant proportion of Open Source software was developed in men's “spare time” that was only “spare” thanks to women's unrecognised domestic labour to support them
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