EXCLUSIVE: Katherine Maher says that she abandoned a "free and open" internet as the mission of Wikipedia, because those principles recapitulated a "white male Westernized construct" and "did not end up living into the intentionality of what openness can be."
There is a video of her speaking, which I find hard to translate.
Totally. She seems really thoughtful and aware of how absolute freedom (anarchy) just leads to a situation where implicit power structures are created by those who get there first. Hope she and others keep doing good work to ensure that the site lives up to its goal, to catalog all knowledge, not just the knowledge that's easy to catalog.
Most recent are a reasonably mundane culture wars stuff but (more interesting to HN) it seems earlier Signal related ones appear to suggesting a degree of alignment with the USA government. The words "spook" and "compromised" are used in different comments.
Edits. From the Signal page:
"She is an appointed member of the U.S. Department of State's Foreign Affairs Policy Board, where she advises the Secretary of State on technology policy"
which may explain some of it. It reminds me of an odd experience I had with Wikipedia around covid time - I edit a bit and thought you could say covid may have arisen zoonotically like all previous such pandemics or may have come from the nearby lab which was running job ads for bat coronavirus researchers at the time of the outbreak and as an open wiki you could consider both but no - the lab stuff was largely verboten and unmentionable. I guess the above article explains a bit how that happened maybe?
DHH only has strong feelings. Katherine Maher is a great CEO and leader and has been taken out of context in order to isolate her and make her unsupportable by people who claim to not like cancel culture. The whole thing is ridiculous.
You're the second person in this small thread to make a quip about "people claiming to not like cancel culture". Smells pretty fishy to me. Also the whole "she's a great CEO and leader" bit, what are the odds that you have personal experience to where you can make this claim? Even if you did, you could at least provide reasoning for why you think that. Anyways, all put together, I suspect a non-genuine person (or bot/LLM) posted this.
From the tweet:
EXCLUSIVE: Katherine Maher says that she abandoned a "free and open" internet as the mission of Wikipedia, because those principles recapitulated a "white male Westernized construct" and "did not end up living into the intentionality of what openness can be."
There is a video of her speaking, which I find hard to translate.