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Technology and Conscience

Replying to a couple of posts about IPFS:

On knives and their uses

Anyone here against knives because they are/can be used to harm other beings raise your hands!

A similar point could be made about other tools -- screwdrivers, hammers, crowbars, rope, syringes, ... I'm not of a very creative mind but I could probably go on.

That's an excellent point. I suppose the counterpoint would be made with nuclear weapons, which as of now have no use other than causing massive loss of life. Nuclear power is a different story, and it may be what helps mitigate climate change and eliminate fossil fuels. I don't believe that technology and tools are always value-neutral, though this is frequently the case. Mustard gas and atomic bombs are my counter-propositions.

I flirted with IPFS off and on since about 2015, and as of this summer, I've been using it heavily[1]. When I got back into IPFS this year, one of the first things that jumped out at me was just how much cryptogrift was associated with it. I don't want to be involved with that. I've ranted against cryptocurrency multiple times in several public fora such as HN. So it was a real struggle for me. Do I stop using this really promising tool just because a bunch of people are doing things with it that I find harmful or threatening?

For me, the answer was no. It is still a useful and promising tool, even though people are doing wrong things with it. I'm not aiding or abetting them, because I'm not distributing NFTs or whatever the latest cryptohype is. My conscience remains clear.

I've been here before. About 15 years ago, I dabbled with Freenet. I stopped pretty quickly, because with the way that Freenet works, you have no control over what is hosted or exchanged using your resources. The hard drive space and network connectivity dedicated to Freenet may well be used for storing or transmission of kiddy porn without one's knowledge. That was too much for my conscience to bear, so I noped right out of Freenet. That said, I do not condemn the good people using Freenet for good purposes.

My point is that everyone pretty much has to decide for themselves what is conscionable to them, and it will vary from person to person.

[1] For instance, I'm running an IPFS mirror of the Void Linux package repository at /ipns/void-mirror.the-brannons.com.