Discussion
With respect to GNU developers openly and publicly endorsing slavery (phew, that's a hell of a statement), I think white folks like me who are not under direct threat of that brutal institution and who do not bear the generational results of that violence to pause for just a moment and sit with that.
In particular, I think we need to sit with how that interacts with eugenics-fueled AI boosterism more broadly.
It is difficult to capture the nuance of comparing their goals to slavery but never their actions, but I think it's an important nuance to arrive at. If AI is actually, well, intelligent (it's not), then what boosters describe wanting to do is enslavement.
It is in that context, aspiring to recreate one of the most violent institutions the world has ever seen, that I read that GNU developer's endorsement.
I don't think his goals are necessarily to be a modern-day slaveowner, but I do think developers like him are in the position of deciding how to interact with people whose ambition is to become modern-day slaveowners, and in that context his endorsement is a severe practical failing of morals as well as an academic one.
@xgranade I used to have respect for him, even though I thought his opinions on technical topics was often not in line with mine. I was, however, under the (clearly mistaken) assumption that he had high moral standards.
Now, I wonder if he went into a shop to buy a pair of jeans, and he had to choose between one very nice pair which were also cheap, and another pair which have perhaps not the right colour and was also more expensive. If the only issue with the former had a label that said "proudly made by authentic slave labour", would he think twice?
If yes, then I wonder why he'd reconsider when it comes to manual labour but not code contributions? If no, then no further questions are needed.
So, yeah, fellow racially privileged folks, we need to sit with that, I think. That there are people who share our skin color and that attendant privilege that confers and who, when faced with people who aspire to recreate violence so complete and brutal that its harms are felt *centuries* later, choose to offer apologia for that violence instead of opposing it.
Some things to reflect on: What is it about the culture of white privilege that allows such abhorrent moral stances, and how do we dismantle that culture so completely that endorsing slavery results in permanent ostracization? How do we challenge the biases and privileges that obscure the harms of slavery enough for a statement like that to be possible? How do we build communities that are resistant to that kind of virulent racism?
@xgranade I want to say something about how this is based on abstraction and distance and only considering things as thought experiments. Except, that doesn't really work as an explanation. Software freedom rests upon … freedom. You cannot have "free software" unless you have bodily autonomy. Like this is an utterly incoherent arrangement of ideas. Obviously white supremacy contributes but also just being an absolute incurious dolt must be an enormous proportion
@glyph @xgranade > Software freedom rests upon … freedom. You cannot have "free software" unless you have bodily autonomy. Like this is an utterly incoherent arrangement of ideas.
I had thoughts swirling in my head about this earlier; about how you literally cannot have "free software" without bodily autonomy.
I don't know how good this explanation is, but I do notice that if you take into account the fact that white supremacists literally do not consider Black, Brown, LGBTQ, women, etc, to be people, there is no internal inconsistency in their logic. "Freedom For All", where "All" has a lot of asterisks and only referring to those whom they think of as people.
It's not like they hide this belief when talking amongst themselves; there's a reason white supremacists invented the idea of race and it was explicitly to enforce and create hierarchies of which people deserved freedom and which deserved labor.
I have a personal policy of not comparing things to slavery, because nothing we have seen in modern-day American culture can compare to the sheer scope of the violence that was slavery. Nothing. Full stop. The violence of slavery simply cannot be overstated, it's not possible.
I think it is also true that regardless of what harm boosters actually perpetuate in the world, their stated *goals* are to replicate that violence.