I guess it does make me a little bitter to have spent my whole life around people who have been advocating for and working towards making the way we use computing less exploitative and more life-affirming, and contributing to that in small ways as I'm able, and then to see a few rich jerks turn the whole thing into a wealth-concentration scheme _and_ many of the people whose wealth they're trying to take blame it on the people who have been working towards a world that wouldn't have given them that power in the first place.
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There is part of me that thinks, well, this stuff doesn't really matter that much, right? Like, if we can just ignore AI and software freedom and right to repair and so forth, maybe we could get a lot more done. Maybe it would make working on the real issues easier.
But that's not true! It's not true at all! Tech companies suppress discussion of Palestine and climate change all the time! Facebook took all the shit us privacy freaks have been whinging about for two decades and *caused a genocide*. We may be able to say the same of Flock in a few years, though I hope it doesn't come to that.
Unfortunately, it matters a lot.
A lot of the grief, for me, comes from recognizing that the things I grew up with as immutable and have spent my energy fighting, to various levels - factory farming, oil, the surveillance state - didn't used to exist; they're all battles we lost at one time or another, some very recently.
Knowing that there are kids growing up now who may think of AI as just another battle we lost a long time ago, and knowing that _I am one of the people who lost that for them_, is really heartbreaking.
@noracodes I appreciate you sharing this.
It is, perhaps, a small comfort to be able to say that I've been consistent and on the record about my position since 2021, when I was one of the first people to confirm that Microsoft was training Copilot on unlicensed and GPL-licensed code on GitHub.
Small, because it didn't do shit.
And, equally, it makes me sick seeing people who I thought of as mostly in it for the political side of the movement, who I thought cared about free software because it makes people less dependent on companies that wish us harm, clap like seals waiting for the next tasty treat when those exact same companies show them a neat trick that saves some time.
Is this really how it works? People with a lot of money decide society will be worse, and it just... is, after three or four years?