2020-12-05, False Profits

This post has to do with computer technology, and the intersection of that technology with other contemporary technologies, like mechanisms of settler-colonialism.

In this post, I’m going to name names. These problems are social and cultural, but both of those things are made by people. Despite all the things I’m about to say about the people I’m about to talk about, I want to make it clear, I have a lot of respect for them. They are, all of them, willing to do hard and often thankless work, based on nothing more than a promise they made to themselves about their role in life. Brought up with a different set of knowledge and experience, these people might have grown up to become an inspiration for me. And as people, their knowledge and experience isn’t set in stone: any of these people might go on to become inspirational.

Also in this post, I’m going to say a slur that is used against people with disabilities. It was used against me, and it is simply awkward to try and explain that part of things without mentioning it. There is also mention of genocide and state-conducted massacres.

Also in this post, I’m going to make a lot of claims which will likely contradict what a lot of you believe, and I’m going to do it without citation. A lot of these claims are based in philosophy, and trying to cite philosophical ideas can get really complicated, really quickly. (Deleuze? Foucault? Hegel? All, and none.) I believe a round-about way to acquire the relevant knowledge would be to read the various texts on decolonization I have linked throughout my posts. (I have a long list in one post, but it’s not comprehensive.)

But first, allow me to share a poem by Joy Harjo. It’s been floating around the various Native American forums I’m in these past few months, mostly to relate it to COVID-19.

In a world long before this one, there was enough for everyone, Until somebody got out of line. We heard it was Rabbit, fooling around with clay and the wind. Everybody was tired of his tricks and no one would play with him; He was lonely in this world. So Rabbit thought to make a person. And when he blew into the mouth of that crude figure to see What would happen, The clay man stood up. Rabbit showed the clay man how to steal a chicken. The clay man obeyed. Then Rabbit showed him how to steal corn. The clay man obeyed. Then he showed him how to steal someone else’s wife. The clay man obeyed. Rabbit felt important and powerful. The clay man felt important and powerful. And once that clay man started he could not stop. Once he took that chicken he wanted all the chickens. And once he took that corn he wanted all the corn. And once he took that wife, he wanted all the wives. He was insatiable. Then he had a taste of gold and he wanted all the gold. Then it was land and anything else he saw. His wanting only made him want more. Soon it was countries, and then it was trade. The wanting infected the earth. We lost track of the purpose and reason for life. We began to forget our songs. We forgot our stories. We could no longer see or hear our ancestors, Or talk with each other across the kitchen table. Forests were being mowed down all over the world. And Rabbit had no place to play. Rabbit’s trick had backfired. Rabbit tried to call the clay man back, But when the clay man wouldn’t listen Rabbit realized he’d made a clay man with no ears.

On this Earth, there are many worlds, living alongside and mixed-with each other. There is the Lakota world, the Ojibwe world, the Maori world, and a thousand thousand more. Among all these many worlds, there is one particular one. Within this one world, just one of many, there are a number of people who recognize something about the world they live in is failing, and a fair number of those want to fix it. Some of those people are taking actions to fix it, and a few of those people are taking action by working with their world’s computer technologies, especially those related to their world’s remote communications.

It’s those people I’m talking about now, and it’s the people who care about those efforts that I’m talking to.

If you only live in one world, and if your role in that world specializes you within that world’s remote communications infrastructure and ancillary industries, it can be easy to mistake it for “the world.”

I think that is what has happened, and rather than working to correct their over-precision, those who have made the mistake are insisting that reality bend to their world – or else they will damage reality.

Let me provide some backstory here. A couple years ago, there was a discussion being had on the Fediverse about the GNU Image Manipulation Program, whose abbreviation forms a slur used against people with disabilities. People suggested changing the name, and later forking the source code and re-naming it. The admin and one of the main moderators of the FOSStodon Mastodon instance, Kev Quirk, took a stance in favor of the slur-name, calling anyone who objected a “snowflake” and demanding to know if there was actually anyone with a disability who was offended.

I have a disability, and have been called a gimp, unkindly, a few times. I nominated myself as the token disabled person that was offended by the name – and critical of people’s choice to defend the status quo, for the sake of it, rather than alleviate an potential inaccessibility caused by that status quo. Put another way: Kev was insistent that his world was the only valid one, and anyone who wasn’t willing to bend themselves to that, was a “snowflake.”

As the token for the issue, my domain was quickly swamped by a distributed denial-of-service attack, and my communications systems filled up with messages using just about every slur people thought might apply to me.

Eventually, Kev issued a general apology which I felt failed to apologise for the right things, so I made it public that I was declining it.

The general effect of the events was that I gained a small reputation for being critical of FOSS, which was enough to get me followed by advocates of FOSS.

I forget the specifics, but this led to Drew DeVault, some time later, commenting on a post of mine, or responding to a reply I send to someone else’s post. My commentary had, and I forget the context that caused me to say this, been about the massacre at Wounded Knee. Drew’s response was to say that anyone who died at Wounded Knee deserved it for not listening to the military. I asked Drew to clarify – was he saying that the unarmed women and children deserved to be shot? He confirmed, yes, if others weren’t listening to the military. (I apologise for the imprecision and forgetfulness here; Drew’s comments were emotionally disturbing and I did not think that he would go on to be a favored voiced by so many of my acquaintances, so I didn’t take better notes at the time.)

This was a rough thing to be told. Here was someone who had engaged me in previous conversations about using tech for emancipation, saying that my relatives deserved to be murdered for not handing over guns they didn’t have. The conversation continued until Drew said that anyone disobeying any cop has forfeited their right to life. Weirdly reminiscent of the image-editor name problem: “The rules of my little colonial world matter more than reality, and if reality doesn’t change itself, I will shoot it.”

(I’m not sure I’m conveying how silly it is to support shooting people for not handing over guns they didn’t have, but it’d be like me shooting you for not handling me your childhood innocence, wrapped in wax paper, and the judge coming to your hospital bed and saying “what did you expect, should’ve given em what they wanted!”)

I let the people close to me know. At this point, very few of them used Sourcehut, Drew’s software, so it was a relatively simple matter: they blocked him.

Now it’s been a couple years since then, and Sourcehut is very popular and increasingly popular. And I have continued to inform people I know who affiliate with Drew about his comments. Except for one person, everyone responded to say that the technical merits of the software were more valuable to them.

Read that again. I went around telling people “Hey this burger shop said my relatives deserved to be massacred,” and they went “yea, but they’re the only shop with crinkle-cut fries.” This isn’t even really hyperbolic: I had “it has a lexer for my favorite programming language!” said to me with a straight-face by Phil Hagelberg, a person who I think makes some of the best choices a colonizer can for actually enabling people outside colonialism. (Lexer, if you don’t know, is the thing that adds colorful highlighting to source code when it’s render, say as HTML.)

And I had to accept that answer, because otherwise, I would lose access to people who were helping me to try and use computers for emancipation. There are so many people who prioritize the convenience of their computer use over not supporting genocide-supporters, that I cannot distance myself from them without leaving the Internet entirely.

I want folk who are reading about this for the first time to really thing about this. I’m talking about the folk who are building out tools for ActivityPub, building things like Gemini servers, posting “ACAB” shitposts for months… all these people who happily ran “Black Lives Matter banners” on their sites, use the software of someone who says “Cops Orders Matter More.”

A lot of folk said that they were using Sourcehut because they moved there from Github, which they left because Microsoft collaborates with ICE. But… Drew says folk need to collaborate or they’re liable for their own death. That doesn’t really seem better to me. In fact, it seems a lot worse: every person at Github might hate their association with ICE, but cannot choose otherwise because of the rules of the organization, what with shareholders and all. But Drew expressed an explicit fondness for that sort of boot-licking.

I honestly shouldn’t have to take the time to spell it out like this for folk. Cut out racists and bootlickers from your tech stack, and if you can’t replace them without using other racists and bootlickers, then guess what: you just don’t get to use a computer that way for now. Go support non-Collaborators attempting to enable that use and wait. Do some gardening, knit some hats, do data entry or community relations for a mutualist group while you wait, if you want.

Nothing you’re gonna share on this colonial-ass construction called the Web is so important as all that, as to warrant conceding things like “shooting unarmed children is good sometimes,” just to share your source code through a specific user interface.

I’m going to keep going, but as I do I want y’all to think ahead: what effect does it have on things for things to be this way, and for it to be an open secret the way it is?

In a weird Groundhog Day, this summer saw another contention between open-source developers. Instead of over the name of an image-editing software, this time it was about the naming conventions of Git, a version control software. Way back when, Git had one “branch” of code that was the primary branch, and then every other branch was seen as subordinate to that branch. This was reflected in the documentation as the “master” branch and “slave” branches.

There’s been a push for a couple years to switch from “master” to “main,” and it gained steam this summer when Github started using “main” as their default branch name. Just like before, this caused a lot of pushback. Just like before, with the image-editor and Drew’s support for Wounded Knee, people prioritized their world over even considering that other worlds might exist. This one is interesting, too, because there has now been an effort to purge mailing list archives, to remove evidence that “slave” was ever used as a term, and many people will say that it never was. It is open gaslighting.

Drew DeVault, when this conversation was at its most prevalent in the Fediverse, objected to folk distancing their language from slavery, saying, “I have still never seen even one first-hand take from a PoC.”

…Gee, I wonder why someone who says people of color deserve to be killed by cops for failing to comply with impossible instructions doesn’t see many first-hand accounts from people of color. What’s absolutely wild is that Drew refers to himself as a part of “the left” in a preceding post, which should give everyone who is white and identifies as a leftist some serious pause. His presence in a community, even through having his writing discussed within that community, makes it feel unsafe for me: here is someone who thinks it is okay to kill people like me if we don’t listen to people like him. I doubt he’s going to have the cavalry come kill my family for using a different Git naming convention than him, but I also doubt he’ll do anything but some appropriately scaled-down version of that violence. Once again, it is the establishment of “assimilate or be exterminated” as the acceptable standard of cultural exchange between whites and others, and it is only y’all white folk who can stop it.

I said something to the above effect in the Fediverse at the time, which led to another white colonizer coming to talk to me, this time to say that Sourcehut is bad not because its creator supports military violence against unarmed civilians, but because it has opinions about email formatting. Even in attempt to support, colonizers still cannot help but center their own colonialism, and prioritize adhering to its rules above all else. If that happens to accomplish some good, all the better. This colonizer even went so far as to say I was lying about how ActivityPub worked, because I was asking him to incorporate common sociocultural mechanisms into his use of the Fediverse, alongside technical ones. (If folk say “don’t reply to my posts if you meet these criteria,” it isn’t their fault if you ignore that.)

Is the trend clear now? Colonizers will defend colonialism above all else, even as they engage in actions they say are intended to liberate people from colonialism!

Five days ago, it came to my attention that a bunch of people who are making technology to improve the Web apparently just found out that Google services don’t allow many browsers, except Firefox/Chrome, among them Chris Webber.

That’s been policy for months. I have been complaining loudly for three months now about how that fucked me over. I even have a post explaining the vast social harms of it, that was shared and talked about by some of the folk expressing surprise at the Google change this past week!

Y’all, please recognize that the ignorance to these events is demonstrative of the focus of these people building a better Web – they’re able to go three months without realizing that the Web’s largest service provider has cut off all but the largest browsers. Who are they talking to, or not talking to, that lets them maintain that sort of ignorance for so long? (I can tell you they aren’t talking to me – Chris distanced eirself from me nearly a year ago, when I was critical of their pursuit and use of land ownership privilege.)

In my circles the move to exclude everyone but Chrome and Firefox users was devastating overnight, as we all suddenly found ourselves needing to install Firefox on very old/weak computers, to check out texts and voicemails!

“The web as an open standards platform is rapidly falling apart. :\”

It fell apart years ago, literally more than a decade, as service providers acquiesced to state communication monitoring services.

Once again. Once again, the problem is the same: people mistake the part of their one world for the entirety of reality. How do you expect to build a better Web if you are so ignorant as to the broad strokes of its history, outside the bubble of commercialized English Web use, and its little subculture of “commercialized FOSS English Web use”?

Who are you building a Web for? What will be done on it?

I have been shouting as loud as I know that y’all are gravely underestimating the scope of the problem you are looking at. I’ve been shouting it in poetic language, and in pseudocode.

What is it going to take for folk to realize that in order to build a better Web, they’re going to have to learn what the Web is, and in order to do that, they’re going to have to learn what the culture of the Web is, and to do that, they’re going to have to learn a lot more about cultural identity, at all.

And I hope it’s clear, the problem is not a simple ignorance, but an active decision to maintain ignorance. All the people I’m talking about actively declined invitations to consider that there might be opinions formed by a worldview different than theirs. And that decision to decline is often defended by people around them. They argue these developers who protect their ignorance need to do so, to be able to focus on the problems they’re dealing with.

Imagine being a deer trying to live in the woods, trying to avoid being tracked by hunters. And… actively ignoring the hunters. Imagine being a Kurdish insurgent and ignoring what Daesh newsletters are saying. Absolutely wild. These “harmful effects” are not passive natural laws but intentional human action and they have more labour-hours; choosing to ignore them is a risk you can’t take. I can be as concerned about climate change as I want, if my definition of climate change ignores anthropogenic origins, all my concern is predicated on bullshit.

And in a very concrete way, the domain of things they choose to ignore makes it impossible for them to ever identify, let alone solve, any of the problems they want to grapple with. They say they’re interested in enabling communication between human people, but choose to live only interacting with one of the many many human worlds. So they say the problem is capitalist corporations and focus all their energy on that, because they can’t see that capitalist corporations is just how their world looks to them from the inside. They condemn reliance on one kind of monopoly, corporate monopoly, while violently defending a cultural monopoly.

They’ll be against the abuse of a monopoly when it infringes on their ability to act freely (within their world,) but use another abusive monopoly to fulfill the needs that give them the quality-of-life to pursue such freedoms. It is only because of their compliance with one monopolistic agency that they have the security in life to worry about the influence of some tiny-ass monopoly!

I just can’t imagine anyone would say “It’s okay emsenn gave a bunch of people COVID, e was so focused on mutual aid work that e didn’t know about the pandemic!” But that’s what people say about open-source developers. “It’s okay they’re not up-to-date on relevant tech issues, they’re so focused on solving those issues!” I can only hope it’s because folk are uncertain what these people are a vector for.

Let me make it clear: by advocating folk distance their dependency on one colonial mechanism, while being aggressively defensive of their collaboration with other mechanisms and colonialism at-large, many colonizers are either convergently inventing or appropriating indigenous ways of living and incorporating them into the colonial system, strengthening its ability to assimilate.

If you wanna tell me to stop using Google or Facebook services, you damn well better be willing to answer why you’re still using colonial services. “I have to so I can have enough privilege to fuck about inside colonialism” is not good enough; it’s ignorantly evil at best.

And to bring back earlier threads, they often don’t even see that they are complying with a monopoly. They mistake individual cultural expression for “human nature” and emergent mass cultural expression as “social science.” So it’s understandable they don’t view it as a threat; they don’t see it. But… again, it’s not like the means of learning to see it aren’t there. They’re able to be provided through intuition through just, not being an asshole that distances yourself from anyone whose culture isn’t identical to yours, and through reason by reading any number of philosophers.

So, folk justify the harm of the monopolies they live within, to secure the privilege, to… ignore smaller monopolies that do directly harm them… while trying to replace them? Meanwhile I’m here excluded from land ownership AND Google use, neither by choice, and I’m supposed to trust that this person with one toe kinda dipped into the water is going to build something useful to me?

People fighting for independence in India didn’t sit around buying clothes and food from the British while condemning the East India Tea Company as the worst thing ever. They condemned it all, and the EITC was simply a symbol. I do not have the privilege to be concerned about Google’s monopoly of the Web as a monopoly, I’m forced to care about it because it is a threat, but if I weren’t forced into caring about it? It wouldn’t even be on my radar.

There have been some horrible test-cases used in the development of open-source communication software recently. There was a “joke” service that was themed as an e-dictatorship oriented around doxxing and harassing transgender people, to stress-test its moderation capabilities, and ability to circumvent others’ moderation capabilities.

Which sounds awful, right? But we can say something worse about almost every colonial software developer:

They run their entire life themed around a real kyriarchy that doxxes and kills literally everyone except the most privileged of Collaborators, as the test environment for their software capabilities.

Does that environment benefit the creation of software which is not a part of the kyriarchy? I don’t think so: by analogy look at the feeble attempts by California to mimic Indigenous land management. Whole state went up in flames and they’re no closer to a solution. These solutions are built as solutions within a very narrow cultural perspective, and that isn’t much use in helping actual humans live life.

Beyond the incongruence between the lives of these developers and the lives of the people they think they’re helping, are we saying that the things open-source developers are doing are so important as to excuse continued Collaboration? Is there something special about these people that means they are entitled to lives of comfort to work on computer technogies, while I face a risk of displacement for feeding people? There’s an implication that these developers need to be Collaborators, they need the privilege to do the work… but that’s largely just because we don’t support non-Collaborators, as my current life is demonstrating. I bet if I had the past two years to not worry about money or food, for myself or anyone else, I’d probably be a lot further along with a lot of my software projects, and I’m coming at this from a background of homelessness, not college and white-collar roles.

Frankly, it is… annoyingly narrow-minded and superior for all these colonizers to come along and say “I’m going to create X that’ll enable Y” without considering if Y is already happening, and if anyone doing Y has anything to say about it. I mean, come on. If a white land-owner is on the vanguard of your approach to decolonization… that should be a bit of a red flag that something isn’t reasonable, somewhere in your thinking.

First, again, colonialism is currently relying on mutualists to get by, see United Healthcare shunting COVID patients to me for resources. To say developers need to rely on colonialism to survive is to spit in the face of every labor I’ve performed to keep this colonial settlement safe, because I care more about keeping humans alive than sticking it to colonialism.

Second, ignoring the faulty logic of Collaboration given the evidence available, it’s just a callous thing to do, justify the oppression and genocide of others so you can eat well enough to worry about the big problems, like whether to call a datatype “petnames” or “nicknames.” Are you fucking kidding me? Folk can ask that question when they aren’t feeding themselves with grant money from the an organization’s funded by one that just that launched an airstrike against my friends in Pakistan, yesterday.

I really don’t know why “don’t trust the opinions of people who would kill you to have the time to form those opinions” is a point I have to argue but here we are. Don’t trust their opinions; even if they seem really good, they were developed in this incredibly convoluted space, that can only exist through perpetuating great harms. Don’t trust their opinions; even if they seem really good, they were developed by people who care more about the rules than keeping people alive. Don’t trust their opinions; even if they seem really good, they were developed by people who care more about meeting standards than creating them.

(I bet that last one will anger a few readers who are the sort of Collaborator I am criticizing here. They do define standards, right? Well… standards that help automate the ceremony of colonial communication mechanisms, themselves a “standard.” But again, they live so tightly in their world that they don’t see these things as decided standards, they’re just the way things are, “human nature.”)

It’d be nice to have a day where I can read about the future of the Internet and not have to hear it from people that cheer on my extermination. One day? Can you folk who I follow and who follow me try that, can we go one day without elevating the voices of people who have pledged allegiance to a genocidal world-killing institution?

(I bet we can’t, because there’s not even an active consideration for folks’ allegiance in that way, because it raises uncomfortable questions about your own allegiance.)

It just sucks to see, “Headline That I Agree With,” by Some fuckwit that actively argues email formatting is more important than addressing contemporary genocides. …Every. Single. Day.

It’s like how I see “Headline about Indigenous Rights,” by: Some fuckwit that can only argue for Indigenous existence because it is a material resource to the colonial system, by serving as a cultural and literal seedbank for diversity.

All day and just have to… deal with it. All day, people violently defend the borders of colonialism, the borders of their thinking, their personal culture, and have the audacity to proclaim themselves actors of multiculturalism, open-mindedness, and change.

I’ve focused on technology as my example for discussing these issues, but as I hint at above, it’s prevalent through-out colonial society: reality is as big as their world, and no bigger. Anything that contradicts is fair game for violence, either active or a passive “we’ll just ignore you until you starve because we made food apartheid a reality so we could solve hunger in our world.”

I also want to explicitly relate that I think this infatuation that open-source has with self-proclaimed kings who fundrais to build their own fiefdoms is reflective of a reliance across colonial society on Great Leaders for innovation. This is prevalent in colonial society, from environmentalism to technical innovation. It’s often perceived by colonials who can see other people believing in the notion, in another part of colonial life. Everyone I’ve mentioned by name here is publicly critical of people like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. And they’re critical of those who expect people like Bezos and Musk to save us.

But… insist that the only way to perform actual good is by selecting other privileged people and elevating them. Just like Musk, there’s something about these people that makes them worth supporting, even if it means forsaking investment in actual assets. They see among themselves prophets, who express the promise of something better, so that is who they choose to support.

Each of these prophets promises liberation through the development of institutions of subjugation, and achieve the illusion of liberation by increasing the capabilities of individuals anointed by the institutions of subjugation. They promise that through the development of themselves, as assets, and the maintenance of the society which they depend on, they will provide develop tools of liberation.

A wonderful asset to be developed, tools of liberation. But you cannot develop something by investing more heavily in that which diminishes it. The only profit in this means of investment is the growth of the anointed individuals. False profits, for false prophets.

No matter how hard they work to make computers a tool of emancipation, if they depend on subjugation for food, water, shelter, medicine, transportation, communication, art, and family, they will never provide a tool of liberation to anyone that does enough good to outweigh the harm that just living life as they do, depending on the oppression of others, does.

There is no ethical consumption within the kyriarchy, but there is also no ethical production.

The resolution for both is simple: leave the kyriarchy.

Ironically, this is what so many of these people think they’re offering, when they offer “freedom” from corporate Web services, but they’re simply building a new frontier, propagandizing a new generation of pioneers, and resettling… all within the scope of the kyriarchy. There is a rigid belief that their cultural way of being is the only one possible, a rigid belief that expresses itself as intimidation, harassment, and outright violence. It is, without being metaphorical, just another form of white supremacy. And if people want non-colonials to trust them to help us, then they need to stop predicating that help upon a reliance on white supremacy.