chobeat
There’s no major force pushing users to adopt federated software beyond privacy concerns and distrust for big tech. This means mass adoption won’t happen unless big tech collapses or gets regulated to death by forces external to the fediverse.
The only strategy I’ve seen articulated so far for federated social media is “be ready for when scraps will fall from the table of Big Tech”.
While I’m not part of XR myself and I’m not a super fan, I still invite you to stay in the group, especially if you lack alternatives. You have a lot to learn, especially because you disagree with what you perceive is the general strategy.
XR is a movement that locally employs a diversity of tactics and it’s not a homogeneous, centrally-directed organization. So when you say that “XR is demonstration oriented”, you should understand it as an emergent property of the current situation in which XR is in, or at least your local chapter. It’s not like that everywhere, but especially it doesn’t have to be. While movements have their own DNA that is hard to alter, XR is relatively open to a diversity of tactics. Being part of a movement means also to have the ability to shape and direct its actions.
Let’s be more concrete: once you forge relationships in your local chapter and you gain trust, you can start proposing different kinds of actions and bring change in the org. Learning to do that is a lot of work and it’s far from trivial, but better doing it in XR than in a stale ML org full of old tankies. If XR identity is too far away from your proposals, you can gather interest for a side-project done with a different public identity: just because you meet people in XR and do stuff with them doesn’t mean you have to go public as XR. You can for example create a lobbying group on your local politicians that is easier to talk to than XR, and then bring XR positions into a city council, for example.
If you feel your local chapter has become a machine to pump out demos without a broader strategy, point that out. Ask what’s the long-term strategy, what’s the theory of change, how do they expect to make things happen. Ask them to point you to document in which they analyze that: if they have them, your questions will remind them that they should stick to the strategy, if they don’t have them push the chapter to set up sessions in which they develop their local strategy.
Since here the answers are split between edgy kids and people repeating a bland, stale narrative about comfort and fear of death, I will try to bring a different perspective.
For context: I grew up in a Catholic country but in a very secular family and in a very secular region. I’ve had an edgy atheist phase that lasted between 8yo and probably around 30yo.
I studied a STEM discipline and have always been surrounded by mostly atheist or agnostic people.
I was afraid of death up until I was 27/28yo, but the cope was gnostic transhumanism, not Abrahamitic religions. At some point I took acid, my gf at the time told me I was going to die, I cried my eyes out for a few minutes and then I was fine and I’m still fine. I had a near-death experience in the hospital that further consolidated the idea that I’m going to die, and it’s chill: if you’re sick, you have a bunch of people looking after you, everybody gives you attention, you spend all your day chilling in bed on drugs. Dream life death.
I was still agnostic at that point. I started approaching spirituality later on, not much because of an emotional need, but because further studies both in STEM disciplines and Philosophy highlighted the limit of reason to explain and understand the world. Reason is a tool among others, with its limits. Limits that can be reasoned about using reason itself. You cannot investigate or explain what lies outside though, let alone change it, something for which you need different tools: faith, spirituality, trust. I got closer to what Erik Davis calls “Cyborg Spiritualism”, but it doesn’t mean much since it’s not an organized movement, but more of a shared intuition and meaning-making process to which, in the last 60 years, more and more people arrived. Especially people dealing with disciplines like system theory, cybernetics, system design, and information theory, but also people disillusioned with the New Age movement or other Western Gnostic practices. Mixed in it there’s plenty of animism.
Atheists believe that all religions are about speaking to God, and hoping for an answer, while many religions are about listening to God because they are already talking to us all the time.
A lot of coopyleft or p2pp projects adopt the license and it’s not discussed that much in the identity of the project.
I personally believe that software freedom shouldn’t come at the expense of people’s freedom, and I consider the FOSS movement a political failure because it’s completely incapable of mediating between the two things. New generations are growing more and more alienated from a movement they consider a relic of the past.
For my projects, I avoid FOSS licenses, but they are also not relevant enough to get insights from them.
Most people in the field don’t even ask themselves this question. They all have an incentive in believing it works.
There’s a book about it though: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374538651/subprimeattentioncrisis
Larping as a tankie is definitely a thing of immature, terminally online kids, but I wouldn’t throw Lenin in the bunch. While Stalin is mostly condemned as a reactionary psychopath by pretty much everybody except a few leftist basement-dwellers, Lenin is still read and taught throughout the world. Nothing edgy in reading Lenin.
Edgy kids on the internet worship other psychopaths like Pol Pot or Hoxha.
“debate me” kids are another stereotype on the internet though. The idea that ideas should be entertained and discussed for the sake of it and come without implications attached is just another form of edgyness. It’s another thing that often goes away with age or with touching grass. I know because I was one of them. Now I understand that the fact itself of discussing something publicly has moral implications.
