I grew up poor enough that my classmates called me "Tramp". Hand-me-downs so threadbare they could pass for actual rubbish, couldn't afford deodorant or adequate dental hygiene; the works. The 10-year-old £5 computer that barely wheezed into life was my escape into a world that genuinely didn't care about any of that.

On the internet (1hr per day, courtesy of the local library), I was just the words on the screen. Nobody knew I was poor. Nobody knew I was weird-looking. Nobody knew anything except whether my code worked and whether my arguments made sense. That pseudonymity wasn't a limitation of the technology... it was the most liberating feature I'd ever experienced.

When people say "everything is political" and "detaching is privilege", I feel like they're describing a completely different internet to the one that saved me. The privilege wasn't being able to ignore politics- the privilege was finally finding a space where the hierarchies that had crushed me in the physical world simply didn't exist.

Bringing identity and real-world political causes into these spaces doesn't make them more inclusive- it recreates the very social hierarchies we'd escaped. When you insist I must care about your cause, acknowledge your identity, or pledge allegiance to your political framework just to contribute code or discuss technology, you're making the space less meritocratic, not more.

The early internet let us be judged solely on the merit of our ideas. That was radical. That was revolutionary. For some of us, that was the only place we'd ever experienced actual equality of opportunity.

When you demand these spaces become "politically aware", what I hear is: "your refuge wasn't good enough, and now you need to care about my problems too." But this was the one place where I didn't have to perform social status, where I didn't have to prove I belonged based on anything other than what I knew and what I could build.

I'm not saying the world's problems don't matter. I'm saying there used to be spaces where we could focus on intellectual puzzles and technical problems without importing every societal conflict. And frankly, for those of us who were outcasts in the physical world, losing that feels like losing the only place we ever truly belonged.

I would go further and claim that anyone who sees themselves as "apolitical" just basically thinks their own opinion is the only true way to see things "rationally" (and as such "fact" and not an opinion; nothing to be "political" about), and everyone else is just plain wrong/mistaken. Since they're not ready to admit this to themselves and others, they hide behind the "apolitical" label. Otherwise they would see that their own opinion is a "political statement" on equal basis as others. It doesn't even make a difference if you voice it or not.

This strategy works poorly to avoid conflict and friction (life), since one just shifts conflict to reappear elsewhere. Hence the often claimed need to self-isolate "for mental health" to avoid getting in contact with... positions such as one's own, and half-suppressed anger at all those that just don't see what is RIGHT.

Hint: It doesn't work.

[dead]

This comment has so many statements framed by a lot of specific political premises that not everyone agrees on. It's hard to talk about political neutrality without going to the next higher meta language where we view our own interests alongside others' independent interests more abstractly.

A lot of the problems people see with OSS are a result of "free/libre" having been successful at training OSS enthusiasts to embrace commensalist thinking, bomb-shelter monasticism, and to reject the consumer but then complain when the consumer has to turn to the network-effect entrenched platforms while other businesses lack the tools to compete in open networks that were never built.

Anyway, check out https://prizeforge.com

The trend is global and inherent to online psychological coupling and self-selection bias. The longer we go without healthy information spaces, the more the population will regress.

There does however seem to be a "free/libre" vs open source rift along the Atlantic ridge, and it is being wedged apart by the US government flirting with a return to isolationism mixed with bullying and self-enforced credible threat geopolitics.

It is really counter-productive for Europeans to think American OSS people are monolithic with US tech giants and the US federal government. Nonetheless, pluralism is good, and innovation will win, so I suppose it's just another hairpin in the game.

> When CEOs and founders and project leads leverage their audience for politics, then their tools are absolutely a political choice. Be it DHH’s latest fasho ramblings or every time you do ‘swift build’ - Tim Cook takes a selfie with a sex offender.

I don't follow. Are you implying that by using Ruby on Rails or Omarchy one is fasho aligned ? Or that people that use Swift somehow support sex offenders ?

I don't think your examples are comparable. DHH is (/was?) the face of ruby on rails and basecamp, whereas Cook is just the latest person at the helm of a tremendously large (personnel-wise) company someone else built. There are only 2 relevant phone types to consider, and please don't tell me Google/Samsung are morally superior to Apple. Even for ruby on rails, hundreds (thousands ?) of people have been contributing to it. It's not really "owned" by DHH anymore, and it's 21 years old, well before these rants.

And not to compare badness, but DHH is ranting publicly on his blog about the projected % of white people in Norway in 2096 and quoting white supremacists in his lamentation about the UK not being more white. Blaming the increasingly totalitarian actions the UK has been taking on immigrants and not the literal lawmakers setting those policies is certainly an opinion to hold. It's a whole lot more in your face.

I do agree about Omarchy linux though- that's still very closely associated with DHH and I'm not touching that with a 39.5ft pole, let alone before getting into technical issues. I was honestly pretty disappointed to see the typical dev personalities online cover Omarchy linux despite the crap DHH has been spewing on his blog.