|
Who do you think is behind cancel culture? Social justice is like the Anti-Life Equation for bigcorps and other established institutions who are incensed that somewhere nerds are having fun without their official sanction. My eyes were opened when I heard a podcast in which a prominent cancelista put forth the idea that federated protocols were a Bad Thing because by requiring implementations to be protocol compatible, federated services caused "vendor lock-in" and stifled innovation. I thought, what in the seven hells is this? It's like something a professional propagandist for single-vendor services (think Slack, Salesforce, etc.) might say. Up there with Steve Ballmer declaring the GPL a cancer. Then the burblings of other open-source SJ types began to make more sense. Coraline Ada Ehmke declaring that the Open Source Definition made sense when the enemy was corporations, but now that the enemy was the fascist Trump administration it needed to change. The implication being that bigcorps were no longer the enemy, even though a hallmark of fascism is a corrupt collusion between the state and industry. "We have always been at war with Eastasia" tier cognitive dissonance. Anyway, open source was intended to protect users' freedom, not to fight a particular enemy. There was another one, I forgot who, who said something like in order to be "real open source" in $CURRENT_YEAR you can't just put the code out there, You need to have a code of conduct, and a code of conduct enforcement board. He lamented the fact that open source projects did not implement the standard practices used by corporate HR departments. Which, if you need to have an HR department to be legitimate open source then that limits legitimate open source participants to corporations only. I'm counting nonprofits like the Linux Foundation as "corporations" because they require (large amounts of) money, infrastructure, a legal team, and yes, an HR department in order to function. No Linus Torvalds could come along and start a project used by billions in the environment they want to create. It would have to go through the Proper Channels and be certified as anti-racist and free of toxic masculinity by the Proper Authorities. Like many forms of regulatory compliance, it's a filter to ensure only the big players can play, but unlike regulation there isn't even a nominal accountability to the public. Scientology style "dead agenting" tactics will suffice when governments are too slow to act. I want to believe that SJ in open source is for the greater good, but it looks far too much like a weapon to be wielded by the powerful against the users and developers open source was supposed to protect. |
There is an overwhelming number of them due to the profitability of the surveillance industry. They're focused on source availability rather than software freedom, because that matches the business model of their employers. And their coup is couched in the language of progress, so it's easier to just go along with at first.
I don't know how to push back, except for publishing your own projects such that you can't get doxxed, avoiding middlemen like Github, developing technology that isn't interesting to authoritarians, etc. For the greater landscape, Corporate HR seems here to stay.
Personally, RMS bugs me because he seems to miss the forest for the trees on some things. But this doesn't mean I think the organization RMS founded needs a new leader, rather it means I need to do the work of convincing others where he is wrong. And I'd be lucky if I accomplish one tenth of what RMS has.