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The motivations behind the project are quite interesting and well argued: "Developing Open Source is a Political Act" https://www.zettlr.com/post/release-devel

• poszlem 2y ago
  Not that interesting of a take, especially coming for a political scientist (which the author is). "When all you've got is a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail." Feels like it's straight out of that "everything is political" phase we are hopefully leaving behind, usually meaning - "I will try to problematise it to make it political".
  • refset 2y ago
    I actually don't think the headline captures the point succinctly, because the definition of 'political' being used is obscure and quite specific: > "Political activity is whatever shifts a body from the place assigned to it or changes a place's destination." (Rancière 1999, S. 30) > What Rancière means by that is that politics occurs whenever a thing is not in its assigned place. This is perfectly valid for software: As soon as a person diverts from what is expected from them, software aborts with an error or "corrects" the "wrong" statement automatically. So at least from the view of Jacques Rancière, software is utterly political. It has a significant impact on our daily lives and we cannot do anything against this. And this is a problem that especially corporate software shows.
    • samatman 2y ago
      That isn't what 'political', or 'political activity', means, though. Publishing a paper, or citing it, doesn't confer the status to change the definition of words.
      • refset 2y ago
        I agree, fwiw. It is better to introduce new words than to risk being so provocative. Still though I think Zettlr is founded on sensible ideals.