*amorphous
it's challenging to put forth a vision of how we'd like the social side of all this to work, which is why we've thus-far resisted doing so. if we ever write something like that it'll only be after we've worked through all the hard questions.
the biggest challenge we see is avoiding us/them framing, which is one of those things that it's easy to accidentally uphold while trying to oppose it.
"us" can be as bad as "them"; if we're drawing an impermeable line around ourselves and saying "not you" to people outside it, we should expect that we're not actually grappling with the existing fracture lines in society. we should expect that anyone trying to raise concerns about racism or classism or ableism will find themselves on the outside of that line, and the oppression will continue without proper discussion.
that's bad. that's not the goal.
so we think the hope should be to define ourselves by ideals that we try to live up to, and not by other characteristics. anyone who's doing that is inside, anyone who isn't is outside. acknowledging injustice and seeking to right it should be one of those ideals.
will that work? we don't claim to know. it seems like a start, though.
for those who haven't seen our previous thoughts on this topic, we do still stand by our old pieces at
https://irenes.space/leaves/2024-09-29-technology-community-idealism
and
https://irenes.space/leaves/2024-09-29-xz-and-community
we'd like to think that in this thread we're going slightly beyond those pieces, but if there's anything we didn't go into enough depth in here, we probably did over there