💾 Archived View for zaibatsu.circumlunar.space › ~visiblink › phlog › 20181112 captured on 2022-01-08 at 13:47:15.
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I've been reading several very thoughtful phlogs (Jandal's,
Solderpunk's, and FAX SEX among them) and I'm intrigued by
the political nature of what's going on here. Let me be
clear that I don't mean political in the sense of
nation-state politics, with their mindless cliquey
tribalism, superficiality, personality cults, and power
grabbing. I mean political in the sense of thoughtfully
and ethically determining how we organize ourselves and
distribute power and control.
I don't know what happened at SDF beyond the fact that at
least one member was banned, for reasons that did not seem
sufficient to some in the community. I have also read that
the SDF sometimes acts arbitrarily with respect to changes
in service provision[1].
Those comments parallel my experiences with a forum
(crackberry.com) where I was a contributing member for
years. I eventually moved my content elsewhere for a few
reasons: I could no longer update the initial posts in two
informational threads that I maintained; the site moderators
arbitrarily moved the major thread that most users visited
on a regular basis (with thousands of posts) to an
"Off-Topic" forum, because we sometimes strayed off topic,
though the majority of the commentary was definitely
on-topic; and the terms of service changed, explicitly
requiring users to accept liability rather than simply
disclaiming the site's liability. In each case, I (and
sometimes others) discussed the issues with moderators, but
without a satisfactory resolution. I felt that my only
option was to walk away, because the site is proprietary,
its purpose is obviously commercial (there's a community,
but its needs are clearly secondary to those of the
enterprise), and the general response to critical scrutiny
was unsatisfactory. Looking back, I had little reason to
be upset about the experience. I should not have had high
expectations with respect to what my membership in that
community meant.
In the case of SDF, I think users have the right to feel
differently, because of the SDF's status as a non-profit
and the language it uses with respect to free software and
community in its mission statement[2]. Hierarchy and the
assertion of control seem incongruous with the stated
purposes of the SDF.
In any case, it's not my purpose here to be critical of
other organizations. My interest is in the response.
Some of you have responded to the situation by setting up
your own servers and creating your own sites. It's a logical
response with a long history. People in hunting and
gathering societies in northern Canada used to engage in
group fissioning like this all the time, and for much the
same reasons. When the group became dysfunctional, the
factions would separate and reform into new groups with new
leadership. Group re-fusion would also take place, with
various fragments of previous groups forming new
combinations.
What's happening within this UNIX-verse (can I call it
that?) seems explicitly political in nature. Solderpunk has
given this server a political identity (Mare Tranquillitatis
People's Circumlunar Zaibatsu), complete with a mission
statement[3], a constitution[4], and even a refugee
policy[5]!
One of the questions that occurs to me (because I'm in the
process of setting up a server of my own) involves property
rights, sovereignty, and power. If I set up a server and
invite people to join it, yet refuse them any sovereign
power because I am the property owner, am I not simply
replicating the behaviour I've seen elsewhere? I think the
answer to that question is yes.
Another challenge created by group fissioning is to maintain
connection despite the separation. Federation (a very
political term!) might play a key role in maintaining those
connections. Which brings up an interesting question. Do the
services that federate have constitutions? How would they
deal with a single problematic federated server (i.e., one
that was involved in some form of illegal activity)? I'm
curious and will have to look into it.
I don't really have a solution to these problems of
sovereignty and federation at this point, in part because I
don't know what is technologically possible. Solderpunk's
idea of "outposts" could serve a purpose, but as he has
mentioned, he retains a level of control over the creation
of those spaces, because he controls the distribution of
host names within the domain[6]. Perhaps, as he's wondered
elsewhere in his blog, the use of a brand name like "tilde"
would permit some level of decentralization of power to
occur[7]. I guess the most anarchic solution (in the proper,
positive sense of the term) would be if everyone had their
own server and federated? Again, I'm not sure and I don't
know what that would do to the sense of community.
Rather than re-inventing the wheel on these issues, I think
I'll look into the different approaches to Linux development
governance, given that they've faced (or not faced) these
issues before. There are benevolent (maybe that's too kind)
dictators like Linus Torvalds and Patrick Volkerding, and
there are community-governed projects, complete with a
regularly-elected leadership, like the Debian project.
Maybe I'll report back. Maybe I won't. There's freedom in
this Zaibatsu! Until there isn't lol ;)
[1] gopher://baud.baby/0/phlog/fs20181106.txt
gopher://circumlunar.space/0/%7esolderpunk/phlog/circumlunar-space.txt
gopher://circumlunar.space/0/%7esolderpunk/phlog/on-sdf-and-the-future-of-public-access-unix.txt
[2] https://sdf.org/?welcome
[3] gopher://circumlunar.space
[4] gopher://circumlunar.space/0/about
[5] gopher://circumlunar.space/0/asylum
[6] gopher://circumlunar.space/0/%7esolderpunk/phlog/circumlunar-updates.txt
[7] gopher://circumlunar.space/0/%7esolderpunk/phlog/on-sdf-and-the-future-of-public-access-unix.txt