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.
Fwiw, I 100% agree with this. All of a sudden the constant judging is there, it's seeping into the once clean, apolitical world-of-mind. It started on the big tech platforms, the new weary giants of flesh and steel, but it's overflowing into our hacker-minded spaces as well now.
Like US families torn between 2 sides of their politics, they can't even have normal dinners together anymore. They can't communicate without judging, it's an illness, they've been weaponized against each other.
Well, it's hard to break bread with someone who you fundamentally disagree about things like humans rights issues with. Family or not. You don't just skip over that, and in fact why should you? Having blood relations means you have to sit and eat with someone who thinks you or people you know shouldn't exist or shouldn't be allowed to have the same rights as other people? I'm very glad that we've normalized not glossing over this kind of stuff anymore, because of "family".
"our hacker-minded spaces"
Spaces full of people.
"once clean, apolitical world-of-mind"
This only ever existed for select few people.
> Well, it's hard to break bread with someone who you fundamentally disagree about things like humans rights issues with.
It's actually not. It's very easy to get along with people, even those from whom we have vastly differing moral axioms, if we only try. Sadly these days many people are disinterested in trying, believing (wrongly) that they will make the world a better place if they sow more division.
Why try to get along with someone you have vastly different moral axioms to?
It used to work quite well. Perhaps together you can think of a cause to the rift, and try to actively fight it instead of each other. Start with commonalities, not differences. I think it’s important to, at the very least, never stop trying.
How extreme of moral axiom differences should we tolerate?
I don't know if you notice what you're doing, but you're turning a low stakes / no confrontation situation into a high stakes / confrontational situation for no discernible benefit.
This type of self destructive behavior may seem worthwhile in the moment, but in the long run it doesn't bring any benefits, because you have to fight the people you're declaring war against and if the list of enemies is long enough, you're almost certainly guaranteed to lose against one of them.
The question assumes we know what someone believes before we've spoken to them. That's the actual problem here, people are being excluded based on assumed beliefs rather than demonstrated behaviour.
Opinions evolve through exposure to different viewpoints, not through isolation from them. The homophobes and racists of the 80s who changed their minds didn't do so because they were shut out of communities - they changed because they were forced to actually interact with the people they'd made assumptions about. That contact broke down the assumptions.
When you exclude someone pre-emptively because you've decided what they must believe, you've eliminated the possibility of that evolution happening. You've also replicated the exact mechanism that made 80s bigotry so pernicious: denying participation based on identity or assumed characteristics rather than actual conduct.
Everyone thinks they're right. The racists thought they were right. The homophobes thought they were right. You think you're right. I think I'm right. That's why behaviour-based boundaries matter more than belief-based ones. Judge people on what they actually do in the space, not what you assume they think.
If your moral framework requires everyone to already agree with you before they're allowed to participate, you're not building a community - you're enforcing an orthodoxy. And orthodoxies don't evolve, they just calcify.
Let me answer you with 2 other questions:
Is this line of thinking going to make things better for future generations or is it not?
How important is it to work on defining this boundary, compared to working towards a less polarized society?
How can society become less polarised if we normalise an extremely wide spectrum of different moral axioms? To reduce polarisation, people with extremist moral axioms must stop having them, which can't happen if extremist moral axioms are accepted.
For one, I think that the people you have put the "extreme" label on, are not as extreme as you think they are, and indeed could be quite agreeable when you'd seek them out and sit down with them over tea and try to communicate with them with more nuance than a 160 char message can deliver.
Yes, you will be able to find examples that confirm your statement, but they are an exceedingly small minority, probably despised (almost) as much by their "own group" (as far as people actually feel part of a group) as they are by you.
I believe it is the (incentives of) the (social)media and the bots that have made you believe otherwise, over time and in small steps.
The people I put the "extreme" label on believe that it's okay to kill millions of people in order to increase your own strength.
I'd love to have a beer with you, we could be at this all night haha.
.. And we know MS is used as a political tool (ie see their past with the NSA, and the whole business with the International Criminal Court), ie Linux is not, at least not "willingly".
Because they may be your neighbors, your colleagues? Because they're going to the same third place as you, whatever that might be?
I don't show it but honestly I also find it hard not to attribute the negative consequences (partially in Brussels funnily enough) of your preferred policies to people like you. Sometimes it gets hard to hide that.
Anonymity was a given in the beginnings of the internet, and we now need to fight hard for any remaining form of it. Your post makes me longing for my past, whereas GPs post makes me longing for our future.
The virtual world(s) felt like equality of opportunity because everything was a blank canvas, or some canvas that barely had any fingerprints on it. For a lot of people the internet currently consists out of WhatsApp, Facebook, and Google News. So tell me, what is truly radical, what is revolutionary anymore?
Your reading of "politics" seems quite narrow. Creating a place free of social status, hierarchies and with equal opportunity? That's 100% politics.
If that were the goal it might be politics. If its a side effect then its not.
If it's just a side effect then you don't mind if we get rid of it, right?
I'm not describing just the internet. I'm describing the nature of the world around us, both in meatspace and on in the internet in the context of this discussion. As regrettable as it is (I mean, who doesn't hate politicians?), it's just all politics, regardless if one chooses to detach or not.
That pseudonymity you're describing still exists in many spaces to this day. I have no idea what many (most?) of the contributors on F/OSS projects look like, or anything about them unless they voluntarily divulged it. You don't have to "pledge allegiance to political frameworks", not for any F/OSS project that I'm aware of.
What people do have to do more now is treat other people with respect, which the old internet very much did not do well. There are many people who can code, so projects actually don't have to keep around people who can't conduct themselves nicely.
"When you demand these spaces become ..."
"Demand" is a strawman argument. What changed overall is that people bring themselves into these spaces, not just a pseudonymous username. That comes with different expectations for conduct. Do you miss the flamewars of the past?
"where I didn't have to prove I belonged"
What F/OSS projects do you have to do this for? Basically every project I've contributed to had nothing like that.
"... there used to be spaces where we could focus on intellectual puzzles and technical problems without importing every societal conflict"
While I can empathize with this, I'm not sure if I entirely agree with this recollection of the internet. People could still be cruel to anyone who happened to reveal anything about themselves, as humans tend to do, that was "atypical", shall we say. I don't see why you still can't focus on technical problems, because unless you're a moderator, nobody is forcing you to comment on anything except technical discussions.
So if someone wants to close your local library you wouldn't have a problem? If someone decides that you can't have a £5 computer, you have to subscribe to a computer service?
Read this and tell me free software is not politics
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html
You're right that free software philosophy is political, and I benefited enormously from that. But there's a crucial difference between "this tool has political implications" and "you must actively engage with every political cause to participate." I could contribute to GNU projects without Stallman asking about my views beyond software freedom, the code compiled or it didn't, the patch worked or it didn't. The philosophy was clear, but participation didn't require political conformity beyond that shared goal. What I'm pushing back against is the insistence that every space must become a venue for every political discussion, where "everything is political" becomes "you must actively care about my specific causes in the way I care about them, right now, in this space."
The beauty of libraries and cheap computers wasn't just that they existed through political decisions, it's that I could use them without performing any particular political identity beyond their core function. If libraries close or computing becomes subscription-only, I'll fight that because access matters. But I can defend access whilst wanting spaces where the primary focus remains the technical work. The right to read is worth defending. So is the right to just read, without every reading group becoming a political caucus.