4 ms·

It's not a boast. I have found out pretty much every person whose words inspired me is a huge shitbag. Assange and Appelbaum are terribe... ESR I never met and

It's not a boast. I have found out pretty much every person whose words inspired me is a huge shitbag. Assange and Appelbaum are terribe... ESR I never met and got a lot out of "how to be a hacker" etc, but he too offset that work by being terrible. Imagine spending ten or more years of your life, jumping from precarious position to precarious position, as folks exhaust you, then jump to something better, then if you ever ask them just to... fairly interview you for something on a different team than theirs, they don't. Ever since I left "civil" society all people do is make a show of doing courtesy interviews they could treat as free consulting sessions (paired with acting like victims if I then get annoyed they didn't do as I suggested and their bank fails or their agency gets their computers blasted full of Russian malware). These posts come from a place of caring, and hurt. I seriously considered leaving the country when Trump was elected, I had felt trapped behind enemy lines since 9/11, and it was a mistake that I did not. All that happened is my emergency fund was drained as folks used me like a prop as they have since childhood. Have you ever had to do a remote interview at gunpoint, because a company that claims to care about diversity refused to even do a flyout, since one of your coworkers was the daughter of a senator? Have you ever had someone stalk you for over a year, then had a local business with "no hate" and pride signs says "Oh, well he's not bothing me". I got into all this... stuff... because allegedly people were less homophobic or whatever, but all I've seen in the "hacker" community is folks who got in back when it was harder to get caught, amassed wealth, then kicked the ladder out. I'm not boasting, I'm depressed as hell because everything I used to take joy in just makes me sad. I'm "creepy" because I lurk a lot, but OTOH I left 4chan around then... in fact I've left a lot of things looking for less radicalized people, and it's been a consistent problem that folks murmur false concern like "get therapy", when every therapist I've seen agrees the core issue is instability -- if you don't have consistent income, and you don't have consistent income because people make emotional, irrational hiring decisions, then well... if I stay silent, my situation won't improve. At least when I write, I get feedback and can learn, and possibly attract the attention of some less angry gatekeeper. It's not at all a boast, it's a very bitter anger that being present and not participating and eventually maturing is a more dangerous path than... whatever the opposite was.

cmurf 4y ago
I think it is a deep disappointment in a rotten culture that really is way off track. I think Pinkerton is right on paper, that humans are less shitty than they used to be. But we don't all live in an aggregated universe, we live in microverses we're born into and if we're lucky have some limited ability to moderate or even create, and some of those are just inevitably shitty. Some of that is because of other people's greed, most of it is just willful prideful ignorance. And a lot of economic survival in this culture depends on putting up with shitty people, shitty culture. And it worth it because that's part of the programming of the culture, and the alternative seems scary mainly because it's unfamiliar to most people but also scary for the culture if enough people were to "lose the faith" and find their own path. If everyone were economically independent, by just some magic wand (as in the mechanism isn't explained and therefore doesn't matter) what choices to humans start making differently? Economic coercion is really powerful and frequently acts very much contrary to our interests.

cmurf 4y ago

I think it is a deep disappointment in a rotten culture that really is way off track. I think Pinkerton is right on paper, that humans are less shitty than they used to be. But we don't all live in an aggregated universe, we live in microverses we're born into and if we're lucky have some limited ability to moderate or even create, and some of those are just inevitably shitty. Some of that is because of other people's greed, most of it is just willful prideful ignorance. And a lot of economic survival in this culture depends on putting up with shitty people, shitty culture. And it worth it because that's part of the programming of the culture, and the alternative seems scary mainly because it's unfamiliar to most people but also scary for the culture if enough people were to "lose the faith" and find their own path. If everyone were economically independent, by just some magic wand (as in the mechanism isn't explained and therefore doesn't matter) what choices to humans start making differently? Economic coercion is really powerful and frequently acts very much contrary to our interests.