• 12 Posts
  • 23 Comments
Joined 5 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 8th, 2019

help-circle














  • nah, you will attract only those that already kinda agree. All the others will see weirdos with weird ideas, weird clothing and weird vocabulary, approaching them in the street or promoting events that they don’t care about.

    “talking to people” is something I do since I’m in union organizing and the way people react to the same arguments varies wildly over time. After the waves of layoffs in the tech sector, non-politicized tech workers are incredibly more receptive to pro-union rhetoric, in a way that would have been impossible before.

    About accelerationism: I’m not saying failing an election is a necessary step in a teleological sense. You should enter elections to win them, if you do it. Nonetheless it is useful to radicalize people. It is a recuperation of what is perceived as a defeat in a system in order to feed a different system. Electoral betrayal is useful, but not necessarily something you should strive for, as an armchair accelerationist would claim. There are better ways to spend your time and energy imho, but if it happens, it is still good manure for growing the seeds of something new.



  • The mistake of this logic is to believe that this betrayal of electoral logic won’t radicalize people. It is a necessary step. There are now 11 Million French people, many of which probably don’t believe much in electoralism but vote anyway, who are furious at what’s happening.

    People don’t change their mind listening to arguments, they change their mind living experiences. The experience of joy after winning, followed by the disregard of democratic logic by Macron, will mobilize an insane amount of popular energy, contrary to snarky “electoralism doesn’t work” comments that are relatable only to a microscopic niche of edgy, maximalist leftists.





  • They just allocate according to different logic than the mainstream american FOSS ideology. For instance, hackerbros, and you seem to say the same, will tell you that resources should be centralized into the biggest project in its own category to add more and more features to it. Regardless of cooptation from the private sector, this is generally a bad idea. It leads to a monoculture and monoculture leads to critical bugs impacting enormous amount of users. Also it’s predicated on the idea that there should be only a single way to fullfill a specific use-case, and that it’s the same throughout the world, erasing cultural, economic, social, biological and political differences. Optimization requires standardization, standardization requires erasure and suppression of minoritarian voices and it’s therefore oppressive. Maximizing it is not a good idea, both for technical, political and ethical reasons.

    Seeding new projects that better fit local contexts, or simply produce diverse alternatives raises diversity and in turns raises resilience of the software ecosystem as a whole.