Yeah, I don't know if I'd lean into it (I'm lying, I would). But if we're trying to avoid that sort of framing, I would leave it at the fact that we were a high profile target and needed to batten down the hatches.
unless we’re wanting to open that as an avenue of questioning and explain how the chapo label/brand differentiates itself, both from historic leftist movements/ideologies and from radical right-wing groups.
I think this is pretty important, and the more of this we can slip in, the better. We're modestly infamous for pissing off liberals and right wingers, but I think we genuinely piss off some genuine bona-fide Marxists as well. To be clear, I'm not proud about the latter. But IMO, we're really just a bunch of lost souls trying to make sense of the world we live in as it deteriorates around us. An anti-capitalist paradigm explains it better than any of the alternatives we've been introduced to, but many of us are still learning, and still have a lot more to learn. This shared experience is what brought us together in the first place
At the end of the day, we are trying to cultivate a counterculture. Something which can stand up as an alternative to free-market driven climate calamity, or the eco-fascist movements which inevitably spawn out of the failure of that process.
On one hand, we are privileged babies living in the imperial core. On the other hand, we are disadvantaged by having principled leftism stripped entirely out of our political culture, forcing us to figure things out from scratch. Few people here claim to have the answers, but we know which paths will certainly not lead us to the promised land. Namely, fascism and neoliberalism. Or more broadly, any form of capitalist apologia offered to us by our political class.
Going back to the earlier question:
What’s your stance on open source?
Free Software has always been a political movement. Free Software has always been defined by the power struggle between individuals seeking self-determination and self-actualization in their digital lives, versus the corporations which wish to centralize and commodify our digital landscape and turn the appliances we rely on into black boxes.
It has been a shame to see the direction of so many free software projects fall into the hands of silicon valley libertarians and venture capitalists. We're here to take it back. We're here to put the liberation back into libre software.
Free Software is the communist mode of production in practice, and witnessing the success of this mode of production was one of the first things that clued me in to the potential for an alternative to capitalism nearly two decades ago - before I even learned the vocabulary to describe what I was witnessing.
Yeah, I don't know if I'd lean into it (I'm lying, I would). But if we're trying to avoid that sort of framing, I would leave it at the fact that we were a high profile target and needed to batten down the hatches.
I think this is pretty important, and the more of this we can slip in, the better. We're modestly infamous for pissing off liberals and right wingers, but I think we genuinely piss off some genuine bona-fide Marxists as well. To be clear, I'm not proud about the latter. But IMO, we're really just a bunch of lost souls trying to make sense of the world we live in as it deteriorates around us. An anti-capitalist paradigm explains it better than any of the alternatives we've been introduced to, but many of us are still learning, and still have a lot more to learn. This shared experience is what brought us together in the first place
At the end of the day, we are trying to cultivate a counterculture. Something which can stand up as an alternative to free-market driven climate calamity, or the eco-fascist movements which inevitably spawn out of the failure of that process.
On one hand, we are privileged babies living in the imperial core. On the other hand, we are disadvantaged by having principled leftism stripped entirely out of our political culture, forcing us to figure things out from scratch. Few people here claim to have the answers, but we know which paths will certainly not lead us to the promised land. Namely, fascism and neoliberalism. Or more broadly, any form of capitalist apologia offered to us by our political class.
Going back to the earlier question:
Free Software has always been a political movement. Free Software has always been defined by the power struggle between individuals seeking self-determination and self-actualization in their digital lives, versus the corporations which wish to centralize and commodify our digital landscape and turn the appliances we rely on into black boxes.
It has been a shame to see the direction of so many free software projects fall into the hands of silicon valley libertarians and venture capitalists. We're here to take it back. We're here to put the liberation back into libre software.
Free Software is the communist mode of production in practice, and witnessing the success of this mode of production was one of the first things that clued me in to the potential for an alternative to capitalism nearly two decades ago - before I even learned the vocabulary to describe what I was witnessing.