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Boosted by dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase"):
elilla@transmom.love ("elilla&, bara no duelista") wrote:
people were talking about the sense of optimism of tech in the 90s and 00s and when that disappeared. I said for me any positive feelings about tech were gone by 2014, with LessWrong and Y Combinator followed by GamerGate, which made it clear that the geeks and hackers I thought of as "the good side" in the fight against corporate tech would pick fascism rather than risk their privileges. each year since has panned that out harder and harder, and proved me correct about this inference I wish I was wrong about.
but in retrospect, I believe tech as a subculture or hobby (open source, hacking etc.) never really addressed what I came to think of as the Original Sin of tech:
→ All electronics and computing equipment is produced through tremendously damaging, exploitative systems. ←
These include, but are not limited to:
- Mines in Africa where the world tacitly tolerate grotesque warlords enslaving and brutalising the population to mine coltan and other tech minerals, including children miners, and appropriating all profit, just to make a quick buck out of cheap materials;
- Precarious and slave labour in East Asia to produce all the necessary parts, again with profits empowering the worst governments and capital owners;
- Pervasive use of fossil fuels to produce, transport, and power all these devices, in the face of a global ecological polycrisis that hurts poor countries first—including the ones exploited to produce all that in the first place;
- Pervasive use of plastics and other toxic, environmentally damaging materials, with much more money and interest invested in producing a 20% faster phone than a phone that leaks 20% less permanent pollution into the soil;
- Culture of consumerism, neophilia, planned obsolescence and wastefulness (software growing to need more and more RAM to do the same tasks etc.) accelerating every issue pointed above;
- Culture of tech elitism where programmers see themselves as superior to other types of workers, preventing any sense of solidarity with social struggles and justifying the points above.
until these issues are addressed, every cool new micro-PC running Open Source Software, every indie videogame handheld, every HAM radio gear, every activist GrapheneOS phone is soaking their hands in the blood of the exploited.
"other industries are also exploitative, no ethical consumption under capitalism yadda yadda" yes, but not usually this badly. except if we are talking about like, the meat industry, or the arms industry, and people boycott those for a reason. with tech, it seems to not even hit the radar of most discussions; with the benefit of hindsight, the fact that "FOSS" appeared so early and attracted so much attention while "permacomputing" appeared so late and remained so small was a sign of misplace ethical priorities.