3 ms·

You don't need to get people en masse to care, you need to get a niche. This niche needs to be strict about upholding its values ("avoid unnecessary burning of

You don't need to get people en masse to care, you need to get a niche. This niche needs to be strict about upholding its values ("avoid unnecessary burning of fossil fuels!", "GMOs reduce biodiversity and introduce systemic risks in our food production chain!", "non-FOSS and the ad-subsidized Internet is destroying the civil discourse and leading to immense concentration of wealth") and it needs to foment the creation of alternatives. Even if the masses don't fully adopt the "better" alternative, the competition should be enough to force a change in behavior of the status quo. Take IE6 and Firefox (pre-Chrome): the majority of people didn't care about the browser they were using, as long as they could go to the websites they wanted. At first, they'd use IE because that's what was there and the majority of sites worked with it. But when we got an intolerant minority [0] that upheld the idea that the web should be open and started adopting Firefox, it was enough to get a virtuous cycle of having less IE-only sites, more features on Firefox and more people simply following the recommendations of their tech-savvy friends to use Firefox. Even if Firefox never got to be the dominant browser, its mere existence and support was enough to put the incumbent in check. [0]: https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15 https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...

teddyh 4y ago
Maybe. You’d have to give it a name, though, to give regular people something to pin as the “reason” in their mind. I.e. if you have strange dietary preferences (not requirements, merely preferences), some people might try to accomodate, but most will think you’re weird and either ignore you or be annoyed and actively suppress you. Call it “vegan”, “halal”, or “kosher”, though, and suddenly it’s a thing which people might grumble about, but many people will at least grudgingly respect. We’d need something like that for this. But I’ve never even seen it named, except when RMS jokingly called it being a “Saint in the Church of Emacs”, but that’s obviously a terrible name, and also just a joke.
- rglullis 4y ago
  I agree. The hard thing is that anything that involves "Freedom" gets mistaken as some crazy-libertarian ideology. OR worse, it gets derided as something from "freeze peach" incels.

teddyh 4y ago

Maybe. You’d have to give it a name, though, to give regular people something to pin as the “reason” in their mind. I.e. if you have strange dietary preferences (not requirements, merely preferences), some people might try to accomodate, but most will think you’re weird and either ignore you or be annoyed and actively suppress you. Call it “vegan”, “halal”, or “kosher”, though, and suddenly it’s a thing which people might grumble about, but many people will at least grudgingly respect. We’d need something like that for this. But I’ve never even seen it named, except when RMS jokingly called it being a “Saint in the Church of Emacs”, but that’s obviously a terrible name, and also just a joke.

rglullis 4y ago
I agree. The hard thing is that anything that involves "Freedom" gets mistaken as some crazy-libertarian ideology. OR worse, it gets derided as something from "freeze peach" incels.