Comment by jochem9
7 hours ago
One does not rule out the other. In the end it's nerds messing with hardware.
Lots of computer culture is rooted in anarchism, anti-capitalism and a fight for fairness. E.g. early internet culture, the open source community.
Imo it's very nice to see explicit anti-capitalist movements within tech, because the other side of tech is so completely over the top capitalist.
anti-capitalism, while a bit strange a lable, is something I can sympathize with. But once we are talking anarchism and (intersectional) feminism in a computing context, I am definitely out. I miss the time when computing was a lot less political. It was nice hacking on projects without having to identify with something totally unrelated, or being forced to support idiologies just to be a part of it.
> 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.
Most "conservative" opinions are basically "I miss when I was young and wasn't aware of all of the stuff happening around me and want modern reality to be like my incorrect perception of how things were in my youth"
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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.
The web was invented at CERN and spread through universities and got taken up by nerds. It could not possibly have been more state sponsored.
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clearly not a reader of Mondo 2000 back in the day. i do miss real hacker culture.
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.
> 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 [...] and who is welcome [...]
This is where I think the problem is.
Once you start appending political identifiers then the purpose of an organization becomes more than just about X, but X according to certain values to the exclusion of others. There's nothing wrong with that but I could see how it can be viewed as disingenuous when it's insinuated that the organization is more open/general than it is apparent.
> In the end it's nerds messing with hardware.
Am I being lazy or does this imply that all (or true) nerds are anarchist anti-capitalist feminists.
No. Some $x do $y does not imply that all/most/many/true $x do $y. It implies that some $x do $y.
Right. But "in the end" people who participate in "permacomputing" per the websites stated values represent a subset of nerds. I think the rebuttal we're commenting on oversimplifies this.
Well, yes, but no. Hacker Community projects increasingly force political agendas on participants. It gets harder and harder to just do tech stuff without having to align with some cabal.
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Yes, you're being lazy