I think there are successful orgs that do both. The pro-life movement in the US was laser focused on that issue, but it was a manufactured campaign by the Republican party to capture evangelicals. You can't say the Republican party is laser focused, but they're also pretty successful.

I guess I would say, I'm not sure what the basis of your critique is. I guess if you want to sit back and watch a more centrist permacomputing organization push those values without you doing anything, that doesn't seem like a fair ask. If you do want to do something, you could probably make your own website/etc. "Please tailor your activism to my aesthetics/politics" is kinda self-centered.

People are generally not "post-Marxist" or "decolonial," concepts/frameworks are. These are just theoretical markers, not something necessarily one identifies with in the way you suggest. And I would be curious to know why you are so certain that none of the "core ideas" of permacomputing have bearing to either of these things, if you believe they are so underdefined. Little bit of kettle logic there, no?

This is such a genre of comment on here when you can Ctrl-F 'Marx' on the content, and it just really comes off uncurious and reflexive every time. Like, why is the burden on the authors and not you to sort through the things you care about and don't? Why is it not an opportunity to learn? Do you even care to know where they could possibly be coming from? If there is ever some kind of overlap between something you can get behind and something for whatever reason you feel is bad or "underdefined," doesn't that stir even a bit of curiosity, a chance to learn? Even if it's just sharpening what you already know?

You don't have to end up agreeing with it, but to frame all this as advice on how to "be a successful org" is just not great here imo.

It is? The left-wing radicals I'm aware of are all very big on community. My understanding of the corresponding "right-wing" value is that community should be a certain way (with the radical right-wing value being that it must be a certain way, for various incompatible versions of "right way"). The radical left-wing response would be an insistence on the validity of other forms of community (notably including relationship anarchy: polycules, queer-platonic relationships, etc), the promotion of community organising (such as unions, food distribution networks, mutual aid networks, communes), and so on – which I can understand might appear to be an opposition to "community", if your understanding of "community" is narrowly-defined (e.g. as referring to the traditional practices of your cultural group), but the radical left-wingers certainly don't think they're opposing community.

If you're thinking of corporate activisty types, the sort of people who promote hamfisted "everyone with light skin has internalised racism" mandatory training, then I'd wager the "corporate" part has something to do with what you've observed. I would certainly call such people "aspiring-radical", and I might even call them tepidly left-wing (especially with respect to the US's Overton window), but I think "left-wing radical" might be a misnomer, since the radicality is unrelated to the left-wing nature. There are strong first-principles reasons to expect that this politics does a significant disservice to members of the groups it's nominally attempting to help (and that's before you factor in the backlash we're currently seeing).

But I've never found the "left-wing" / "right-wing" dichotomy to be helpful for anything other than identifying The Enemy™ (which I consider a generally counterproductive activity), so take what I say here with a pinch of salt.

> I miss the time when computing was a lot less political.

Whether such a time ever existed is debatable.

Here's a test. Define the period that you're imagining. Then investigate this period as a point in the history of computing with its broader sociopolitical contexts.

Somewhere in the midst of that milieu I reckon or the politics you're likely to be fond to mix with your tech projects.

The web originally was way closer to anarchism and I really miss that. It was a cluster of self-organising communities, little to no intervention from the state, a lot was not profit driven. Same with IRC.

If you at all understood any of those three things you would know that they are all closely related.

IMO it depends very much on how those positions are being forced on those attending. Since this is about permacomputing I suspect not all that much.

In my experience these self-given-labels just express the views of some founding members and are often used to clarify who they do not want (capitalist, misogynist authoritarians) and who is welcome (left leaning people, women, people who know how to treat women, people who can respect flat hierarchies).

I find it a bit edgy to self label an encouraging like that, instead of explaining the meat of it (we are anticapitalist, because..., we are feminist, so women are welcome, we are anarchist, so our organization is structured with a flat hierarchy). Since it is an anarchist space, that is anti-authoritarian you probably won't find much indoctrination.

No. Some $x do $y does not imply that all/most/many/true $x do $y. It implies that some $x do $y.

Yes, you're being lazy