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@dredmorbius Of course, let’s quietly let the same fucking VCs and tech bros that fucked things up suck up all the air and funding to fuck things up again and then they can say they’re sorry again. These people are not fighting my fight. They’re doing PR.

Sometimes you're wrong, @aral

Get out of your own way.

@dredmorbius Of course I am. This isn’t one of those times.

@aral Punching a cloud is tedious, but since your original link features a photo of Tristan Harris, I'll list him as among the good guys.

Along with, off the top of my head, RMS whose warned of this for literally decades, Alex Stamos, Tim Wu, Kara Swisher, Renee Derista, Cory Doctorow, yourself, and maybe even me on a good day.

Some have been inside the belly of the beast. Some argued from outside. Some saw the risks early, many were convinced recently.

Fighting amongst ourselves for credit or purity points accomplishes nothing but division. That serves the opposition.

You can do better.

Please do.

@dredmorbius This is not about credit. This is about separating those who are trying to change the system from those who are perpetuating it with superficial PR. You lump a lot of very different folks together there. It’s the same as saying AOC and Bernie Sanders are the same as Kamala and Biden and should just shush and toe the party line. Conflating neoliberals with progressives only benefits neoliberals.

@aral Who specefically should be exluded?

Your painting, or smearing, with a very broad brush.

I've been following these trends for .... it's hard to say, really. Online rights in the classic EFF / free software sense since the late 1990s. Surveillance since at least the early aughts. Social media a la Facebook seemed a poor choice from the start, though I'd participated in earlier platforms --- say, Slashdot, pre-dating registered usernames, Usenet.

Spam and online ad-blocking. DNS hijacking. PGP.

The really dark side though wasn't clearly apparent to me until the 2016 election cycle, thpugh I was starting to talk of "truth systems for the Internet" by 2015 (on Google+, now dead, though those posts are somewhere on the Internet Archive).

A lot of us are playing catch-up. The true visionaries who saw this all along are few. RMS likely comes closest and my read is that even he was surprised.

A lot of people, possibly you among them, were coming of age as this was breaking, mostly 2000--2015. I'm a bit older, but putting together the political and technological wasn't something I'd learned or realised fully until the past decade.

Othering seems too easy, cheap, and petty. Especially the vague sort.

Politics makes for strange bedfellows. Not all who are useful are friends. That doesn't make them less useful, at least for now.

@dredmorbius https://collect.readwriterespond.com/the-social-dilemma-fails-to-tackle-the-real-issues-in-tech/

@aral Thanks, exploring and considering.

Two meta comments:

• Link / canned response is appropriate and appreciated. It's efficient and less wearying for you, and I employ similar tactics.
• I'm well aware how simply annoying discussion can be, especially narrow shades of disagreement within a faction or "violent disagreement".. Distinctions and tactics matter, and I suspect that these are largely what we're headbutting over, though as always I could be wrong.

I can think of several hot-take responses.

For both our sakes, to better understand your views and the sources you cite, and out of respect (I genuinely admire your work, differences entirely notwithstanding), I'm going to shut the fuck up and will probably address comments generally rather than to you, though I'll likely point you to them later. That seems to usually help reduce the role of personality, almost always the least interesting aspects of such exchanges.

Thanks for your time and thoughts, again, sincerely.

@dredmorbius Thanks for taking the time to write that, appreciate it. Looking forward to reading your thoughts.