4 ms·

It's just a power grab and has gone on forever in many forms. Redefine language and classify certain language as non-compliant under the guise of whatever it is

It's just a power grab and has gone on forever in many forms. Redefine language and classify certain language as non-compliant under the guise of whatever it is that works to your advantage. Then use this to create systemic policy to dictate towards your goals and ultimately control whatever resource it is you were trying to colonize or acquire. Language is power and can greatly influence and define what masses of people think about their world view and their experience. Those who get to define which language is "appropriate" and which is not have a certain power to take as they please. "Tone-policing", "cancel culture", and "identity politics" aren't unique in the sense that they are designed to seize power, as this is a tale as old as time. It's a strategy that proponents believe will help their in-group and followers acquire and maintain power over cultural resources. I'm not saying this example is good, bad, or neutral - just what it is: Using language to project influence and power and take the cultural resources you want.

Qwertious 7y ago
AIUI, the point of codes of conduct (when used in good faith) are basically like FAQs or What Wikipedia Is Not[1] in that they're social bludgeons to avoid having the same fucking discussion with stubborn idiots, where they do this[2] to cause tedious repetitive arguments of how the project should be run. A code of conduct, AIUI, has two main effects: 1. You have written, formalised proof you can link to that e.g. you're expected to use XYZ pronouns - no tedious offtopic argument that drives people away. 2. If there is a dispute then there's a formal method of bringing up the argument - a feature request or BG report on the CoC. Or more practically, when writing the thing in the first place. And on the subject of whether it's warranted, this article[3]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_... [2] https://xkcd.com/1277/ https://xkcd.com/1277/ [3]https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tscc3e5eujrsEeFN4/well-kept-gardens-die-by-pacifism https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tscc3e5eujrsEeFN4/well-kept-...
- luckylion 7y ago
  when used in good faith is the key part there, though. If everything everybody ever proposed was only used in good faith, we'd be living in Utopia. > You have written, formalised proof you can link to that e.g. you're expected to use XYZ pronouns - no tedious offtopic argument that drives people away. They are usually way too vague to do that. "Be kind" hangs on who decides what is and isn't kind. It's my impression that that is generally by design, because they are supposed to enable selective enforcement.
  - xyzzyz 7y ago
    It's my impression that that is generally by design, because they are supposed to enable selective enforcement. Indeed. I'm quite certain, for example, that if someone called ESR a toxic lunatic, no code of conduct violation would be found.
- rstuart4133 7y ago
  > codes of conduct (when used in good faith) All true. In other news guns don't kill people, people kill people. The gun can be used in either way. CoC's are like guns in that they can be lethal when deployed. That sounds great to many people: we final have a sure fire way of expelling arsehole's from our group. Unfortunately the CoC's come with an inbuilt defect: they all boil down to "be intolerant of intolerance". That creates wonderful opportunity for attackers, because if they can goad someone in the project to being intolerant towards them they can get the project to shoot itself with it's on weapon. The amazing thing I've never seen a instance where a CoC has been used in anger by a project where hasn't also been used in this way against long standing members of the project. Even worse, the long standing members use it against each other! Introducing a CoC seems to have the same destabilising effect as introducing a new weapon: people rush to use it in what looks to be a pre-emptive strike as soon as some dispute comes around. Maybe that's in an attempt to take out others before they use it against them. It's so predicable it's extraordinary. There must be something deep within the human psyche priming us to seek out weaknesses like this in "enemy groups", along with the inbuilt knowledge of how to it.
asveikau 7y ago
Why do you consider it a power grab sooner than, say, people acting in good faith who really believe in their stated values?
- meowface 7y ago
  It can be both. Many power grabs and coups are performed by people with a good faith belief that they're right and the current administration is wrong or dangerous.
  - asveikau 7y ago
    Yet I feel like "power grab" is a loaded description that implies such a "grab" is unjustified and that the grabber is primarily interested in power for power's sake, not for otherwise justifiable, altruistic, or benevolent reasons.
    - Brian_K_White 7y ago
      Because it is a bad thing regardless who does it. If the supposed good guys were actually as good as they thought they were, they would simply aim to do whatever jobs need doing with as much integrity as they posess. They wouldn't be grabbing power, for any reason. There is no "enlightened" reason to grab power. If you don't like how someone else runs something, it's not your only option to try to take it over from them. You can also simply not join that club and not care what it does or how it does it. An organization like OSI isn't like a geographical country where you are forced to be in it, and so there is some legitimate excuse for actively vying for control over it and it's policies.
      - zozbot234 7y ago
        The whole idea of merit and meritocracy is that power and influence (and perhaps control, if applicable) should be allocated fairly and transparently, via processes that reliably correlate with good decision-making. Notably, a stridently authoritarian leadership style calling for bans on "evil" and "unethical" software use (as featured in the so-called "Ethical Software Definition") does not correlate with such; but to be fair, neither does the use of obnoxious name-calling like "toxic loony". To me, the latter just feels sad! So, I'd say I can see "both sides" in this, so to speak.
usrusr 7y ago
You make it sound like a deliberate strategy. But even if it was playing out that way (I refuse to be the judge about that, fortunately I'd never be). I'd take it as a given that this "takeover" is a pure chance outcome, even if repeated, kind of like how Columbus never intended to discover America. Organizations like the FSF or any open source project are just not plausible targets for an elaborate takeover scheme, people with that kind of ambnition would surely look elsewhere.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  The Cultural Revolution in Maoist China was a deliberate strategy. The whole Gramscian idea of attaining "hegemony" in a "long march through the institutions" is just as goal-oriented, though success of the core idea is far more mixed than is generally acknowledged.
cookiecaper 7y ago
More than that, once some entity is in power, language policing and other types of arbitrary rulemaking are widely-deployed to allow the power broker to quickly expose troublemakers and wrongthinkers. Failure to adhere to arbitrary vocabulary blacklists shows at least that you aren't just totally mindlessly executing directives, which is a bad thing to show powerful people, and in many cases, it betrays your true loyalties to "not-them", because if you really believed the "them" were noble and great, well, you'd be happy to learn that WordX is naughty and WordY is approved. Look for this in a company near you. It's used frequently. Is it any surprise that the hackers who built the open-source movement fail tests explicitly designed to fail anyone whose default mode is not just mindless complicity? These guys spent most of their lives slinging rocks at the multi-billion-dollar proprietary OS juggernauts and generally completely obliterated them. I think it's safe to expect that "complicity" isn't very high in their value system.

Qwertious 7y ago

AIUI, the point of codes of conduct (when used in good faith) are basically like FAQs or What Wikipedia Is Not[1] in that they're social bludgeons to avoid having the same fucking discussion with stubborn idiots, where they do this[2] to cause tedious repetitive arguments of how the project should be run. A code of conduct, AIUI, has two main effects: 1. You have written, formalised proof you can link to that e.g. you're expected to use XYZ pronouns - no tedious offtopic argument that drives people away. 2. If there is a dispute then there's a formal method of bringing up the argument - a feature request or BG report on the CoC. Or more practically, when writing the thing in the first place. And on the subject of whether it's warranted, this article[3]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_... [2] https://xkcd.com/1277/ https://xkcd.com/1277/ [3]https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tscc3e5eujrsEeFN4/well-kept-gardens-die-by-pacifism https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tscc3e5eujrsEeFN4/well-kept-...

luckylion 7y ago
when used in good faith is the key part there, though. If everything everybody ever proposed was only used in good faith, we'd be living in Utopia. > You have written, formalised proof you can link to that e.g. you're expected to use XYZ pronouns - no tedious offtopic argument that drives people away. They are usually way too vague to do that. "Be kind" hangs on who decides what is and isn't kind. It's my impression that that is generally by design, because they are supposed to enable selective enforcement.
- xyzzyz 7y ago
  It's my impression that that is generally by design, because they are supposed to enable selective enforcement. Indeed. I'm quite certain, for example, that if someone called ESR a toxic lunatic, no code of conduct violation would be found.
rstuart4133 7y ago
> codes of conduct (when used in good faith) All true. In other news guns don't kill people, people kill people. The gun can be used in either way. CoC's are like guns in that they can be lethal when deployed. That sounds great to many people: we final have a sure fire way of expelling arsehole's from our group. Unfortunately the CoC's come with an inbuilt defect: they all boil down to "be intolerant of intolerance". That creates wonderful opportunity for attackers, because if they can goad someone in the project to being intolerant towards them they can get the project to shoot itself with it's on weapon. The amazing thing I've never seen a instance where a CoC has been used in anger by a project where hasn't also been used in this way against long standing members of the project. Even worse, the long standing members use it against each other! Introducing a CoC seems to have the same destabilising effect as introducing a new weapon: people rush to use it in what looks to be a pre-emptive strike as soon as some dispute comes around. Maybe that's in an attempt to take out others before they use it against them. It's so predicable it's extraordinary. There must be something deep within the human psyche priming us to seek out weaknesses like this in "enemy groups", along with the inbuilt knowledge of how to it.

asveikau 7y ago

Why do you consider it a power grab sooner than, say, people acting in good faith who really believe in their stated values?

meowface 7y ago
It can be both. Many power grabs and coups are performed by people with a good faith belief that they're right and the current administration is wrong or dangerous.
- asveikau 7y ago
  Yet I feel like "power grab" is a loaded description that implies such a "grab" is unjustified and that the grabber is primarily interested in power for power's sake, not for otherwise justifiable, altruistic, or benevolent reasons.
  - Brian_K_White 7y ago
    Because it is a bad thing regardless who does it. If the supposed good guys were actually as good as they thought they were, they would simply aim to do whatever jobs need doing with as much integrity as they posess. They wouldn't be grabbing power, for any reason. There is no "enlightened" reason to grab power. If you don't like how someone else runs something, it's not your only option to try to take it over from them. You can also simply not join that club and not care what it does or how it does it. An organization like OSI isn't like a geographical country where you are forced to be in it, and so there is some legitimate excuse for actively vying for control over it and it's policies.
    - zozbot234 7y ago
      The whole idea of merit and meritocracy is that power and influence (and perhaps control, if applicable) should be allocated fairly and transparently, via processes that reliably correlate with good decision-making. Notably, a stridently authoritarian leadership style calling for bans on "evil" and "unethical" software use (as featured in the so-called "Ethical Software Definition") does not correlate with such; but to be fair, neither does the use of obnoxious name-calling like "toxic loony". To me, the latter just feels sad! So, I'd say I can see "both sides" in this, so to speak.

usrusr 7y ago

You make it sound like a deliberate strategy. But even if it was playing out that way (I refuse to be the judge about that, fortunately I'd never be). I'd take it as a given that this "takeover" is a pure chance outcome, even if repeated, kind of like how Columbus never intended to discover America. Organizations like the FSF or any open source project are just not plausible targets for an elaborate takeover scheme, people with that kind of ambnition would surely look elsewhere.

zozbot234 7y ago
The Cultural Revolution in Maoist China was a deliberate strategy. The whole Gramscian idea of attaining "hegemony" in a "long march through the institutions" is just as goal-oriented, though success of the core idea is far more mixed than is generally acknowledged.

cookiecaper 7y ago

More than that, once some entity is in power, language policing and other types of arbitrary rulemaking are widely-deployed to allow the power broker to quickly expose troublemakers and wrongthinkers. Failure to adhere to arbitrary vocabulary blacklists shows at least that you aren't just totally mindlessly executing directives, which is a bad thing to show powerful people, and in many cases, it betrays your true loyalties to "not-them", because if you really believed the "them" were noble and great, well, you'd be happy to learn that WordX is naughty and WordY is approved. Look for this in a company near you. It's used frequently. Is it any surprise that the hackers who built the open-source movement fail tests explicitly designed to fail anyone whose default mode is not just mindless complicity? These guys spent most of their lives slinging rocks at the multi-billion-dollar proprietary OS juggernauts and generally completely obliterated them. I think it's safe to expect that "complicity" isn't very high in their value system.