Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

Looking forward to the day that an actual, genuine discussion can be had about "minimizing dependencies" and what that entails, instead of the horde of "just make number low, problem solved" arguments that always happen in practice and completely ignore important things like internal complexity and peer review

Grmbl. Since this apparently needs clarifying.

I will not boost pictures without *useful* alt text. Technically having alt text that's completely useless to the reader ("an image", "a tweet", etc.) is not enough. Yes, I check.

https://oliphant.social/@paprikapink/112904521290357349

I think I've finally worked out what annoys me so much about these 'intellectual podcasts'. Like, sure, they're almost always laundering right-wing politics, but I find them grating in a much more visceral sense than that, and this includes the ones that *aren't* right-wing.

I think it's because of how those shows are almost entirely centered on a few people sitting in a room enthusiastically agreeing with each other. There's a pretense of intellectual debate, but no actual depth of any sort.

There's no room for learning of novel perspectives, of different experiences. It's just two dudes - it's almost always dudes - talking over each other about how right they both are. No genuine reflection or inquiry.

Hypothesis: the fact that tech workers have little genuine agency over the work they do and how they do it (the boss decides in the end, not them) leads to bad technical choices sticking around institutionally because the inertia is hard to overcome if you don't have power over the direction, and those bad technical choices are introduced in the first place through hype cycles because "banding together around an exciting new tool" is the closest thing that anyone has to community organizing.

(This is an unrefined thought)

Pondering about the relation between worker agency/ownership and the susceptibility of the tech industry to hype cycles

To make this absolutely clear: this is in no way a *justification* for people getting involved in right-wing movements. That remains the responsibility of those people themselves.

The point I am trying to make here (and asking a question about) is that sure, we know what is *morally* the correct answer, but how does this translate into concrete actions to stop the issue from happening?

I quite often have warned someone about a platform that's clearly targeting white supremacists, nazis, and other kinds of fascists as their userbase, but that superficially claims they're just "neutral".

These warnings rarely lead anyone to leave those platforms behind. And it usually takes a few years before it becomes publicly documented and accepted that yes, it really is a fascist platform.

On the one hand, the conclusion you could draw from this is that they should have listened to the warning, they should have taken it seriously. "I told you so" and all that.

You might argue that they probably understood perfectly well what it was, but they were actually okay with it as long as it wasn't too obvious, because a little bit of white supremacy helps them feel better as a white guy, and really the problem isn't that they ignored the warning, but that they are racist. And you'd probably be right.

But then the question becomes: how can we prevent this dynamic? Because however wrong and racist someone may be, that conclusion does not change the outcome of them likely having become radicalized further right in this process. How can we avoid that happening?

How do we stop "people who have internalized racist views and never introspected on them" from walking into the just-about-tolerable bar and falling into a fascist pit? Because yes, it's their own responsibility if they do so, but the consequences are borne by everyone else and that's still a problem.