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There's this undercurrent in the FOSS community of people deriving a sense of superiority from using such software. This article is an excellent example with it
by Bakary 6y ago
There's this undercurrent in the FOSS community of people deriving a sense of superiority from using such software. This article is an excellent example with its use of the idea of domestication and other such terms meant to distance the author from the hapless masses.
For most people, the calculus is simple: they want to live their lives and have little interest in the tools themselves. The author mentioned the emotional drain they felt each time they had to reiterate their stance on privacy to people, but failed to consider the validity of the mirror image sentiment there, that is to say the frustrated puzzlement of friends and acquaintances just wanting to interact without jumping through hoops and bothering with things that they do not intrinsically care about. This is the same theory of mind issue that causes many open source programs to be plagued with poor UIs. The enjoyment of feelings of superiority prevents the very empathy and understanding that would not only diminish it but could also ironically probably lead to better privacy-focused services that more people would adopt.
That's not to say that I don't think online privacy is tremendously important, just that there are multiple dimensions to it. It collectively matters, but for any random individual to be concerned is often the result of vanity. In reality, there are too many people jostling for attention for any one person to have a statistically likely chance of being scrutinized, even if it does happen regularly given the size of the world. Even social norms themselves are changing to make a wider range of lifestyles acceptable, further shrinking the problem from the individual's perspective. Prominent individuals are now doing things that would be frowned upon a decade ago, and doing well. In the end, perhaps the prospect of being revealed as unimportant after all can be much more terrifying than the familiar and more manageable fear of tech surveillance.
Note that I am not making the tired "but I have nothing to hide!" argument but simply stating that attitudes to privacy can't simply be divided between "intelligent and perceptive software persons" and "silly, animal-like masses". Ressentiment and casting the rest of society as inferior is a classic trap that only leaves misery in its wake.
- Seirdy 6y ago[Am author] I took care not to ever describe the characteristics of users when describing domestication; "user domestication" refers to treatment of users, not characteristics of users themselves. Domestication is an act or process before it is a characteristic. Part of the point of the article was to argue that users shouldn't be treated as livestock by companies; they should be served by vendors rather than be in service of vendors. I wanted people to think it's bad to treat normal users as lesser beings to be exploited. In other words: you're right. My article agrees with you. If you think the message wasn't communicated clearly enough, I'm open to suggestions on how I could clarify this.