Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

To make it more explicit; that individualist understanding of 'collaboration' is the belief that people will contribute to scratch their own itch and that this will somehow magically convert into a public good at scale, and you will find this assumption embedded *everywhere* in the design decisions of popular FOSS project management software

Of course in practice this isn't how anything works, and it just means that lots of people submit often low-effort "patches" and then a few people burn out having to review tons of patches from people they have never talked to, whose motivations they do not understand, with zero guarantee of a response to a review, and with little chance of them sticking around in the long term, meaning that core maintainers have to repeat the onboarding process over and over again with every new patch

The "hit-and-run PR" model is a completely unsustainable model for FOSS development, because it shifts the majority of the labour to a handful of core maintainers, and is the outcome of a hopelessly individualist and capitalist understanding of what "collaboration" means

Project management systems should instead be primarily focused on building trust and retaining contributors at varying levels of commitment, and giving them room to breathe without becoming detached from the project

Imagine believing that "they are just not capable of starting tech companies" is the reason that folks in the global South are getting exploited, jesus christ

Like, if your first response to being told about the exploitative nature of it is to make colonialist jokes, then uhhh I don't know what to tell you, but you might be part of the problem here

Discussions about ChatGPT sure are very educational in learning how people think about colonialism and labour exploitation, huh

If you run across claims about Claudine Gay, be very wary; by all appearances this seems to be another wave of racist harassment disguised as criticism, from all of the usual right-wing pundits who Suddenly(tm) care about academic integrity now that it's a Black woman they can point their anger towards

(Like how nobody except said right-wing pundits seem to believe that any plagiarism actually happened, not even the authors in question whose work was supposedly 'plagiarized')

WaPo has an article, I wouldn't exactly call it excellent, but it does at least provide a lot of context for what's going on: https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/12/15/harvard-president-claudine-gay-race-criticism/

I wonder if the "you can't say anything anymore" crowd would like to hear some of the things that I can't say to privileged tech dudes without them exploding in a ball of anger

Such controversial statements as, for example, "you are violating a boundary", "you hold racist beliefs even if you don't realize it", or "building tech does actually come with an ethical responsibility"

Something tells me that that's not what this crowd is talking about, though, when they complain that "you can't say anything anymore"

@helle From what I've heard about the way that COVID safety measures were approached internally by some orga, the reason seems likely to be "having air quality graphs would mean acknowledging that this is our responsibility"

There's apparently been resistance to even the most basic safety measures to a degree that I find it difficult to believe it was just overlooked or 'too much work'