Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Ok, maybe someone can help me here figure something out.
Iāve wondered for a long time about a strange adjacency which I sometimes observe between what I call (due to lack of a better term) āunix conservativismā and fascism. Itās the strange phenomenon where ideas about āclassicā and āpureā unix systems coincide with the worst politics. For example the āsucklessā stuff. Or the ramblings of people like ESR. Criticism of systemd is sometimes infused with it (yes, there is plenty of valid criticism as well. But thereās this other kind of criticism Iāve often seen, which is icky and weirdly personal). And Iāve also seen traces of this in discussions of programming languages newer than C, especially when topics like memory safety come up.
This is distinguished from retro computing and nostalgia and such, those are unrelated. If someone e.g. just likes old unix stuff, thatās not what I mean.
You may already notice, I struggle a bit to come up with a clear definition and whether there really is a connection or just a loose set of examples that are not part of a definable set. So, is there really something there or am I seeing a connection that doesnāt exist?
Iāve also so far not figured out what might create the connection. Ideas I have come up with are: appeal to times that are gone (going back to an idealized computing past that never existed), elitism (computers must not become user friendly), ideas of purity (an imaginary pure āunix philosophyā).
Anyway, now with this new xlibre project, thereās another one that fits into itā¦
Nostalgia has a lowkey reactionary impulse part(see also why those right wing reactionary gamer streamers who do ten hour reactive criticize a movie streams have their backgrounds filled with consumer nerd media toys (and almost never books)) and fear of change is also a part of conservatism. āEngineering mindsā who think they can solve things, and have a bit more rigid thinking also tend to be attracted to more extremist ideologies (which usually seems to have more rigid rules and lesser exceptions), which also leads back to the problem where people like this are bad at not realizing their minds are not typical (I can easily use a console so everyone else can and should). So it makes sense to me. Not sure if the ui thing is elitism or just a strong desire to create and patrol the borders of an ingroup. (But isnt that just what elitism is?)
I think the common ground is a fear of loss of authority to which they feel entitled. They learned the āoldā ways of SysV RC, X11, etc. etc. and that is their domain of expertise, in which they fear being surpassed or obsoleted. From there, itās easy to combine that fear with the fears stoked by adjacent white/male supremacist identity politics and queerphobia, plus the resentment already present from stupid baby slapfights like vi vs emacs or systemd vs everything else, and generate a new asshole identity in which they feel temporarily secure. Fear of loss of status drives all of this.
Except my feeling is itās mostly people who have grown up with Linux as a settled fact of computing life, not Unix greybeards.
Absolutely. Take the reverence for āSysVā init* to the point where the init system has all but eclipsed the AT&T Unix release as the primary meaning of āSystem Vā. The BSDs (at least the Net/Open branch, not sure about FreeBSD) adopted a simplified BSD init/rc model ages ago and Solaris switched to systemd-esque SMF with little uproar. Personally I even prefer SMF over its Linux equivalents, despite the cumbersome XML configuration.
I somewhat understand the terminalchud mindset, a longing for a supposed simpler time where a nerd could keep a holistic grasp of oneās computing system in their head. Combine that with the tech industryās pervasive male chauvinism and dogmatic adherence to a law of āsimplify and reduce weightā (usually a useful rule of thumb) and you end up with terrible social circles making bad software believing theyāre great on both fronts.
* Rather, the Linux implementation of the concept
I sometimes feel that I, as someone who also likes retro computing and even deliberately uses old software because it feels familiar and cozy to me, and because itās often easier to hack and tweak (in the same way that someone would prefer a vintage car they can maintenance themselves, I guess), I get thrown in with these people ā and yes, I also find it super hard to put a finger on it.
I also feel theyāre very prominent in the Vim community for the exact same reasons you mentioned. I like Vim, I use it daily and itās my favorite editor because itās what I am used to and I know how to tweak it, and I canāt be bothered to use anything else (except Emacs, but only with evil-mode), but fuck me if Vim evangelists arenāt some of the most obnoxious people online.
Donāt have much to add, other than I first became aware of this connection when Freenode imploded. I wrote in a short essay that
(src)
Maybe itās connected to the phenomenon of old counter-cultural activist become massive racists.