: Right to repair is right-wing coded now?
Articles you can read instead of my lame post:
- Framework flame war erupts over support of politically polarizing Linux projects (The Register)
- The Omarchy/Framework Thing (Gardiner Bryant)
You know about the right-to-repair movement, yeah? It’s a response to how personal electronics (cell phones, laptops) have become more and more difficult to repair over time, and the expectation that consumers will just buy a new iPhone instead of fixing a broken USB port. To some extent, modern electronics have gotten harder to repair because they are compact, waterproof, and tightly integrated—i.e. there is a tradeoff between repairability and certain features that people like. But there are other instances where it sure looks like the manufacturer is intentionally making things hard to repair, just to be a pain in the ass and squeeze out some extra profit.
I learned about right to repair from Louis Rossman, a YouTuber who used to run an Apple repair shop and made videos about all the crazy shit he had to do to repair laptops with a single bad part. Rossman has a fairly abrasive personality, his videos are full of non-sequitiurs about politics, and he is an outspoken libertarian. I always thought that was kind of weird, because repairability is actually a pretty good example a problem that the free market has failed to fix, but whatever. The information on the channel is good, and Rossman is not an actual Nazi (as far as I know), so it never bugged me too much.
The other big name in right to repair is Framework laptops. They make these frankly COOL laptops that are super modular, support Linux out of the box, and that you can build, repair, and upgrade yourself. They make a big deal about being an ethical company and sell all the parts themselves. I have been one impulse away from buying a Framework for like, the past 2 years straight.
Anyway, the current drama is that Framework are Nazis now? Specifically: The Framework CEO made an approving tweet about a Linux distro called Omarchy, which was created by DHH, the disgraced creator of Ruby on Rails, who has a generally combative personality and also wrote a racist blog post a few months ago because he felt like sharing that with the world. Also, Framework sponsored the Hyprland project, which is a Linux tiling window manager (desktop environment for sadists) that is notorious for having a fairly juvenile community, which makes sense when you consider that the developer is like, only 17 or 21 or something.
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I think Drew Devault’s original post on the Hyprland community is underrated. It is often cited as proof that Hyprland is toxic and shouldn’t be touched with a 10-foot pole, but Devault actually takes a somewhat more compassionate approach, allowing for the possibility that the community could reform. He makes a risky, and I think brave, admission: “I empathise with Vaxry. I remember being young, smart, productive… and mean.”
Need more of this energy: Understanding that the evil in others exists within all of us. But back to complaining.
Idk guys, all of this is super exhausting. There is this weird thing that happens when you look at people who are extremely into tech principles that I happen to care about, like privacy, free software, and right to repair: A bunch of them are on the alt-right spectrum, ranging from fairly harmless libertarians like Louis Rossman and the NearlyFreeSpeech.net crew to like, yeah, actual racists.
I’ve said this before, but the most frustrating thing the situation (besides the basic existence of racists) is how politically marked so many basic preferences re: media, tech, and consumptions have become. Now I can’t just go shopping for a laptop that has the features I care about; I also have to “vet” the company and make sure the CEO isn’t, like, a sex criminal or something, or else I might become guilty by association.
Some people find it easy to turn away from companies like Framework with platitudes like “I don’t support fascists, period.” But I don’t find it that simple. There is a spectrum of “how fascist is this company” that ranges from “no fascists to be seen” to “CEO is DHH.” Somewhere along this spectrum you find cases in the middle, such as “CEO provides free laptops to twerp developer, and also tweeted in endorsement of Linux distro that was created by a racist and, when confronted about it, said he has a ‘big tent’ approach and tries to stay out of politics.” I think that for me that’s over the line. There’s just a little too much there for me to conclude that the Framework CEO is a nonracist guy who made an honest mistake.
But I can’t guarantee that I will agree with the hive mind in the next instance of this—if the connection between the product I’m being asked to boycott and the racism is a more tenuous. I still reserve the right to read the articles and draw my own conclusions.
: Lesser-known ways to be fake on the internet, and why it doesn't matter
So, the reason we do all this indie blogging shit is because we are fed up with algorithmic feeds and megaplatforms, right? With the attention economy, the spam economy, the hustlers and influencers, the idea that you need to be doing everything in your power to marshall clicks and views in your direction in order to have a job or future? Yeah, I’m fed up with all that stuff too.
But I think it’s possible to overcorrect, to lean too far into a sort of internet asceticism that discounts any attempt to cultivate or engage an audience as a betrayal of core internet values or a sign of inauthenticity. I don’t want to pick on netigen in particular, but the post linked there exemplifies the idea: that only by sharing your posts exactly nowhere can you reach the nirvana of being your True Self on the internet and having an audience that accepts you for it.
I’m happy to forgive the logical impossibility of finding any audience without sharing your blog somewhere—I understand that netigen and their ilk are not absolutists and will share their posts slowly, in curated forums. But I take issue with the underlying assumption that it’s impossible to be your authentic self when performing before an audience, or (the reverse) that somehow removing the audience from the equation unlocks an authentic self that isn’t there when nobody’s looking.
Folks, I have read Judith Butler. This “true self” shit is bull. Every single word we speak or action we take involves interaction with another, even if the other is not in the room. When you sing along with a song on the radio, you borrow the identity of the speaker, inhabit their experience for a moment, perhaps learn something in the process. I journal (pen and paper) most days, and do so because it helps me step outside of myself: I write with a bit more perspective and distance, with an imagined audience that varies between “me in fifty years” and “jury if I am arrested on false charges and need an alibi” (OCD lol); my mood affects which audience I imagine, and the audience I imagine affects the tone I take. It’s a house of mirrors, yeah?
Even self-directed actions, such as masturbation, invoke the fundamental dynamics of self and other. This is how we arrive at concepts such as “self care”: Sometimes we need to “fake it” by roleplaying a caretaker and patient, because there is no room in the concept of an “authentic self” for this bifurcation.
Let me circle back to the point: I do not want to be TikTok famous, or even Neocities famous. But I am here because I want to talk about the things that matter to me to people who might share my views. I want people to come to this blog slash space in good faith, because they are genuinely interested in reading/thinking about the ideas I present here. And I am overjoyed when people reach out and say they like something I wrote, or even present a contrasting view. The desire to be heard, understood, and recognized is a human desire; it is not the mark of insincerity.
So, how do I “promote” my posts, given that I am trying to find such an audience? Mostly, I try to just lurk a lot, mostly on the 32-bit Cafe Discourse forum, especially their big blog thread where people share all kinds of interesting posts. I don’t post every single one of my posts, nor do I read everything, but so far I have been able to at least skim the title of every blog post in the megathread when I check in every few days. I try my best to leave a few comments, even if it’s dumb shit like “Hey that’s cool.” If I’m perfectly honest, I do so with the hope that the positive energy I try to put out will one day be reflected at me.
Does that make me a fake bitch? Maybe? But like, so what. I’m just here for a good time, and arguments.
: Open borders
Republicans like to fearmonger about Democrats by saying that liberals want “open borders.” This take is laughable because Democratic lawmakers have virtually never called for open borders, or even pressed very hard on immigration reform. The last episode I can remember was the DACA debate way back in the Obama era, and that was really more about an edge case than fundamentals.
I am probably not as progressive^TM as most liberals, but the exception I have is that I think I pretty much do believe in open borders? I don’t know if I would throw them open all at once, but I think it’s the ideal we should be striving towards.
Someone once said that all men are endowed with certain inalienable rights, to include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Those words are not written into the law—that’s the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution. But if we believe in the underlying principle, then we must admit that those rights belong to everyone, not just Americans. (America was not even a country when the Declaration was issued!) Moving to a different country where you may have a better chance at life, liberty, or happiness seems, to me, like a basic exercise of those rights.
Quite simply, I do not have any prejudice against people on the basis of what country they came from. Republicans fret about “Mexicans taking our jobs” but to me, even if we accept the premise that it’s a zero-sum exchange (it isn’t), it does not make me more or less happy if a given job is held by some random American vs. some random Mexican. They are just … two people I don’t know.
I am reluctant to share this opinion because I worry it plays into a Republican narrative about liberals who won’t compromise extreme positions, but like, this is one issue where I feel like my beliefs aren’t even that provocative? I’m just starting from a different set of assumptions than most Republicans, who believe (I guess) that to be American is to be Special and deserving of special protection. But protection from what, exactly? From the creation of new Americans through immigration? It just doesn’t make sense.
: Weekend in the South
Girlfriend and I went to a wedding in a pretty town in the US South this weekend. I’d never been to a southern wedding. It was a little different than I’m used to: They still do the “speak now or forever hold your peace” part, which is pretty fun, but they didn’t play a single Michael Jackson song, which I thought was obligatory. Instead, they did “Sweet Caroline,” and everyone sang along to that one part. Overall, a gorgeous and an amazing time. I know both the bride and groom pretty well, but had never met either family and it was a trip to suddenly be surrounded by zillions of cousins who looked just like the main characters.
We explored the main street area and the kitschy shops, including one that had signs everywhere that said “Absolutely no photos!! We support Real Artists and don’t want copies of our shit to show up on Temu!!” which I found a bit ironic, because most of the stuff on sale was pretty standard souvenir fare (coffee mugs with grumpy slogans, etc.). We encountered only one (1) racist episode and two (2) sexist episodes, which was not great, but better than par, I suppose.
I met a guy at the wedding who is an aspiring writer and gave me the link to his Substack. I asked him about how he chose Substack of all the platforms and he said he likes it because it has a relatively even distribution of subscription counts. That is, some Substacks are more popular than others, but the difference isn’t as stark as other places, which makes it easy to discover writers with super niche interests. I told him a bit about the indie web and the idea of decentralizing the internet and making it a platform for creative expression instead of consumption. He seemed into the idea in principle but intimidated by the tech aspects, which, fair.
I know that indie web people like to hate on Substack, I think mainly because it’s just another proprietary platform, and something something about not banning racist blogs? I subscribed to this guy’s Substack, and it is many things, but definitely not racist; the vibe is more woo-woo and live, laugh, love.
I have to be honest: A few years ago I made a conscious decision to “opt out” of the idea that using a platform, service, or product makes you responsible for all the decisions made by the parent company. Of course, you may choose to buy products that you believe in, but (in my view) that is extra credit, more than what’s morally required. If you look far enough up and down the supply chain of any business you will find bad people. The point of living in a society to work together to set and enforce rules against bad behavior, rather than put the onus for solving racism on every individual in the society.
: Cute
My girlfriend and I are catsitting for some friends. In practice, this means going to their house, setting out new food and water, changing the litterbox, and leaving—the cat is insanely shy and hides in his cat bed under the human bed the whole time.
But GF was determined to make the cat warm up to her, so every day, after we visited, she would go lay next to the bed and just stare at the cat for 10 or 15 minutes. “I want to show him that I am not going to hurt him,” she explained, which was quite adorable, but from a cat’s perspective, I thought it looked more like she was trying to ambush him 😅
But get this? That shit worked. Today, she walked over to the bed and extended her hand and the cat popped right out and let her pet his scruff. So, persistence pays off.
As the world goes crazy, I am trying to focus my attention on my very small corner of the universe and find things to celebrate. I’ve also been working a lot on personal projects, perhaps to an unhealthy/obsessive degree. One of them is my AI bullshit podcast ad remover that I posted about last time.
I also have some real-name projects that I am excited about, although the motivation there is partly fulfillment and partly the dim hope that if I do Good Public Code then maybe someone will offer me a kickass job. I’ve been wondering if it’s time for a change—the team dynamic on my current job is starting to suck and I don’t see any good way to turn it around, plus I sort of have my thing figured out and worry I am stagnating in my skills.