: How does Richard Stallman buy airplane tickets, anyway?
I just read “Giving Up on Element & Matrix.org” by, uh … how do you even get a non-ASCII domain name, anyway? That’s pretty cool. Point is, this opening sentence completely blew my mind:
For the past few years, I’ve been trying to make Matrix.org, and with it the Element client applications, my primary platform for communication.
This guy is clearly living in a very, very different world for me. I don’t have many friends who even know what Matrix is, let alone would tolerate me annoying them into installing and setting it up. I tried trying it out once and gave up, not for lack of skill exactly, but because there were so many choices to make (which server, which client etc.) that I had ample time during the process to realize that even if I got this shit working I would have nobody to talk to.
Don’t worry, though, I’m not going to give the familiar spiel about network effects. Privacy nihilism is bad mmkay and I think using tools like Matrix and trying to bring your friends on board is cool!! It’s just, today wasn’t the first time I’ve heard a take from a privacy enthusiast that seemed vastly out of touch with the landscape of real life. A buddy of mine—actually, the only person I know who manually set up PGP encryption for his email (he uses Arch btw)—was telling me about a friend of his who refuses to use Signal because it requires an iPhone or Android. That’s noble and all, but like, who the fuck does that guy talk to? How does he access the many services that require, yes, require, an app to interact with them?
Or consider Richard Stallman (also Margaret Atwood I think?) who refuses to pay for anything using anything other than cash (maybe checks too?). How does that man ever get on a plane?!
I was contemplating such questions, along with my own experience with trying to have a semblance of digital privacy—I use a smartphone but I don’t install just any app, try my darndest to avoid services that require them, and occasionally am a pain in the ass to friends who want me to give personal information to third parties like Partiful (another web app that could have been an email)—when it hit me: These so-called privacy absolutists are probably just making somebody else (probably a wife or girlfriend, let’s be honest) shoulder the burden for them.
Although I can’t prove it, I’m willing to bet that Donald Knuth has someone in his life with a Gmail account who does all the basic internet transactions for him so he can continue to brag about having given up email in 1991 or whatever. Ditto RMS, ditto my friend’s friend who’s too cool for Signal. A privacy-conscious lifestyle is great and all, but we need to account honestly for the associated costs.