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I have a very smart friend who is also a talented decoupler, who could easily be a very quality contributer here if dealing with Culture War issues didn't make him bleed from the eyes. He is literally the only person I know whose Facebook posts about politics did not make me lose respect for him. Over the years, we have had a number of conversations about contentious CW topics that flirted with the border of Adversarial Collaboration, long detailed discussions handled with fairness, civility, and mutual respect.
Until the topic of student loan forgiveness came up. That discussion was unusually heated. He seemed almost frantic, heated about PPP loan forgiveness hypocrites and just not giving the expected degree of decoupled consideration for arguments about how the loan forgiveness was an overall terrible policy. He seemed personally invested, felt personally attacked, in a way he hadn't in conversations about abortion or gun control.
The thing is, my friend is a teacher. Education is a big factor in his identity. He has taught maybe a thousand students who might benefit from the forgiveness plan. Attacks on that plan are an attack on his class identity. Politics is the mind-killer, and it is a sad fact that a rationalist's Art is most likely to abandon him when he needs it most (or, rather, he will fail the Art). And so my arguments sparked an uncontrolled emotional response that was missing from other, less identity-laden topics.
The second thing is, I've been on the other side of that coin, back when we had our multi-day deep dive into the gun control literature. Gun control hits me emotionally as an attack on my class identity. When I hear a gun control proposal, before I hear a single specific detail or spend a second considering merits, some lizard part of my brain interprets it as "Fuck you, your father, your father's father, and your father's father's father". (Does the word "father" still mean anything to you?) I've begged off having spontaneous discussions about it in person, even with close family, because I don't want to spike myself into rage and other unpleasant feelings. During that deep dive, my excellent friend was so calm, fair and rational that he overrode that concern, and I ended up learning a lot and having a great time.
And I'm thinking about this now, because I notice a similar reaction to the trans discussion downthread. The idea that my children might be brainwashed into taking evolutionarily self-destructive choices, and I can't even attempt to oppose it without facing the full wrath of the modern State, kindles a pre-rational, animal panic/fury response. I find myself getting heated to an unusual degree just thinking about it. I don't think I'm particularly "anti-trans". I was willing to be accepting two decades ago, when I first learned it was even a thing. But something about the thought that the phenomenon might hit my kids triggers an atavistic survival instinct. That reaction doesn't trigger when I consider my son dressing like David Bowie, or my daughter playing sports. It doesn't happen when a peer goes trans. It triggers at the thought of one of the two corporeal incarnations of my DNA and memes getting sucked into a fraught psychological memeplex, and particularly at the thought of them being medically sterilized.
Imagine an alternate world where any time a kid expressed suicidal ideation, government employees would firmly nudge them towards euthanasia, and would jail you as a parent for protesting. That's roughly the level of emotional hit - some part of me considers this an existential threat.
But what are the odds? 0.3%? That's not that much worse than the odds of childhood cancer, or other kind of unexpected death that a healthy mind doesn't overmuch worry about, and deals with gracefully if it comes. But now it's apparently something more like nearly 2%? That hits me in the Papa-Bear-Who-Wants-Grandkids-In-Space-Forever. And it seems very likely that a lot of that is social contagion or could otherwise be wildly reduced with a minimal degree of skepticism towards youth fads.
So, two points. One, I think it might behoove activist types (assuming we're not in pure conflict theory) to try to notice when one of their pushes is hitting this sort of reaction and figure out a path to undermine or alleviate it.
Secondly, a question for the community: What gets you fiercely activated, beyond what you can rationally justify? What CW issues feels like molten hot war to the hilt, where your instincts fight to throw aside all reason and charity? Any thoughts about why?
Unusually, for not being CW at all: Proprietary software, especially the type that takes control away from the user and keeps getting more bloated and awful with every version. And in particular, being forced to use it.
Probably because it's, at least in part, an attack on my core identity - a hacker, computer programmer and free software advocate. But also, because it's one of the most blatant forms of authoritarian oppression: Not being able to do something with my hardware that I know it's capable of drives me furious, because there's no technical reason for it. It's 100% due to a quasi-psychopathic desire by big tech companies to maintain an iron stranglehold on their users' rights.
Same. Especially firmware.
There's also the thing where, if you root an Android phone, suddenly random bank apps and such try to fight back against it. This Reddit thread is very triggering.
Or this Asus forum thread. Specifically, this response from someone actually working there:
This makes me wish for terrorism. Sadly no one is going to bomb a mobo manufacturer for these reasons. I just don't understand why it's not all leaked...
"stamp their uniqueness", lol. Maybe that would be convincing if this wasn't utter garbage. Eh
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Is it hypocritical to hold this view while also making a comfortable living writing proprietary software :)
I wish there was a way to thread the needle and have decent open source software in more domains. Like you say there's no technical reason why proprietary software couldn't be made more open but I think realistically the users like yourself who could actually do something productive with it are a tiny minority, and most people will just try to get the software to do what they want, give up if it's not important or fork over cash if they absolutely need to. Presenting them with an SDK or source tree will yield anything useful. So there's probably no economic advantage to be found in opening up, and keeping all possible control over software is probably the safest position to be in. The ethical get outcompeted by the cutthroat.
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One thing that really gets me in this vein is when hardware I already own gets worse due to forced updates. For example, I own a PS4 (bought it when they came out). And at the beginning, the "video" section of the UI was great. Just a simple list of all video streaming apps you had installed, pick one and go.
At some point, they overhauled the UI to make it advertising-centric. Now, when you go to the video section of the UI, most of the screen is dedicated to ads "helpfully" telling you about some new show you can go watch. You have to go past those to get to a little strip of icons for "featured" apps, so you can just go into whatever app and watch your content. This strip is also a form of advertising, in that it forces the big name apps (whether you even have them installed or not) to be in the list, prioritized over any apps that haven't gotten Sony's favor (probably haven't paid them enough money). It doesn't matter if you don't have Apple TV installed and never used it, it will always be towards the beginning of that list. And because the screen has space permanently taken up by the "featured" apps, it means that some smaller apps you use simply may not have the space to appear. The old style "just show me all the apps I have" listing is still there, but you have to dig through one or two screens of UI to get to it.
To me, it is completely outrageous that Sony would do this. It should arguably be illegal. As a consumer, I try to make informed decisions and only buy products that have a good experience for me, the user. But what am I supposed to do when corporations can ruin a product I bought after the fact? I don't have a way to determine if some mega corp will decide to screw over its users for profits years down the line. This sort of thing robs me of the one power I had in the marketplace, and it really upsets me.
I have a lot of disagreements with Richard Stallman. I think he's an ideological zealot who is too insistent on purity to an ideal that doesn't actually benefit 99% of users, and I think he has an overinflated sense of the importance of his contributions to open source. Nevertheless, when some shit goes down like what Sony pulled with my PS4, I can't help but sigh and go "fuck... Stallman was right."
+1 to this. I had a similar experience with the PS3 when an "update" added anti-piracy software that made my perfectly-working cloud library impossible to use. It didn't disable playback, it just muted the sound and put up a banner every few minutes if it did not detect the CD in the drive. Absolutely enraging.
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I remember having a similar reaction when microsoft started slathering ads all over the xbox home screen.
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I can't believe my education on this issue started with John Deere.
I think John Deere was the point at which things had gotten so bad that right-to-repair started to gain real mindshare, so don't feel too bad.
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