Post by @MaddieM4@raphus.social

I think there are a lot of people who are frustrated to see people call out the EFF, FSF, and even (today!) Internet Archive, for doing various dumb things that undercut the movements and values they exist in pretense of serving. I can maybe even get it a little, given that Old Twitter could be very toxic about always needing a villain of the week - the online left is not always cognizant of its ability to lolcow people.

I saw a reply that mentioned me earlier! "If we stop funding the EFF, who will legally defend Mastodon in court cases?" And my thinking is, "well the EFF was just publicly signalling like it wouldn't anyway." It is not a bad thing, actually, that we're burning away the fairweather fluff that exist as vanity projects for rich people, but with good PR.

Feeling the cognitive capture and trust capture that these institutions have on people, while doing a reread of Joe vs Elan, is kind of a trippy and pointed juxtaposition.

https://elan.school/27-outside-time/

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Ben Ramsey

@ramsey@phpc.social 3 hr. ago

@MaddieM4 As someone who’s followed and supported all of these organizations for ~25 years, it’s difficult to view them as “vanity projects for rich people.” I won’t defend them, but I can’t see them as evil just yet. I suspect others who are defending them find themselves in a similar situation.

MaddieM4

@MaddieM4@raphus.social 3 hr. ago

@ramsey I've financially supported more than a few of them myself over the years*, and it's possible I'm being too harsh because I feel swindled. Continuing to support them feels like it would be sunk cost fallacy, for me.

*I do still have my shirt from LibrePlanet 2014, where I met RMS and got to experience him being weird in person. Not his legendary heights of weird, just oddly mournful that the PC police had made "dickless computing" an unfashionable pun to skewer diskless computing. Sigh.

MaddieM4

@MaddieM4@raphus.social 1 hr. ago

@ramsey Reading this back, I also think I need to draw a line between "vanity project" and "evil." I think a lot of these places aren't evil per se. They just don't exist to do good - they exist to make someone with a lot of money *feel* like they're doing good. This can, and up to a point *does*, overlap with actually doing useful and positive things for the world.

But it's still a loose proxy. That's what we're seeing: situations where vanity and charity don't overlap, and it becomes clear which force is animating these organizations, and the answer isn't flattering. That doesn't mean donated money is totally wasted, it means there's a complex trust issue at play, where I have to be honest with myself "this place is primarily about someone's ego and incidentally about fighting oppression - what floating point percentage of my donation will do something that matters?"

I'm not saying they can't act as allies, but when you're relying on them as allies, you're scraping the bottom of a barrel.

Ben Ramsey

@ramsey@phpc.social 1 hr. ago

@MaddieM4 Good point. The discourse is so polarizing on any topic these days, when someone is critical of anything, the automatic reaction is to assume a good vs. evil stance, hence the defensiveness others are displaying and my statement that I can’t view them as evil.