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Cancel Culture

~stargazer

I do not want to drag politics into our fine pub, but GitHub changing their branch from Master to Main and screwing up all of my scripts just because they think "Master" is a racist term is a bunch of bullshit. In this context the meaning of the word has nothing to do with racism or slavery. I am not racist, nor do I care what gender you are, hell you could be three genders and purple with green spots for all I care and I would treat you with respect. Sometimes I think we should wake up and cancel the "cancel culture".

That is all.

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~tlf wrote:

I don't care what colour other people are either. As a white male though, it's important to recognise that I alone can't be the judge of which steps are helpful to purge the toxicity of our society that they have to suffer.

I'm happy to change a line in a script and be grateful that I'll never fully understand what it's like to be in their shoes.

~emptything wrote:

Expurgating phrases like "master" or "slave" from technical jargon does not in any substantive way meaningfully improve the lives of people descended from slaves. Some people forego the use of these phrases from a genuine desire to be welcoming, omitting language that could potentially offend or upset: so be it, they're permitted to do that.

GitHub's house, GitHub's rules. This might impact a few projects which reference "Master" instead of "Principle", "Primary", etc, but it's a small change. Generally speaking I can't see how it significantly impedes anyone's use of their platform, aside from irritating them with faux wokery.

~maya wrote:

Well, I disagree, but there you are. 🤷

~mellita wrote:

I agree insofar as I think the problem can be most directly attributed to companies desperate to appear as "woke" as possible while avoiding making any substantive changes to how they impact the world politically. Starbreaker's got a point, too—this isn't the primary reason to avoid a service like GitHub, anyway.

I don't disagree with what you say, but I hope people here don't make the error of pinning this on people with grievances in the domain of race or gender or anything else. Just use Occam's Razor. What's more likely? That this many people are actually so petulant, shallow, irrational, and overwhelmingly enraged at the slightest transgression? Or that their concerns are being taken advantage of for a marketing ploy, by a select few internet users who want attention?

It really seems to me as though this "cancel culture" stuff is more or less just corporations desperately attempting to appeal to mostly apolitical liberals who want a pat on the back for being "good people". Think of Twitter, for example. Their whole service functions on the basis of trends and engagement, so when as few as, say, 20 people get a bee in their bonnet and decide to fuck somebody up, Twitter supports this. A hashtag goes viral; people use it either because it makes them feel like a better person, or they're following the trend, or both; news outlets pick up the story; and the people to whom this news is broadcasted become confused or frustrated. But none of this means it's actually news-worthy, right? And there's no guarantee whatsoever that it reflects a significant number of people's political beliefs. It's preferable for media (whether social or mainstream) to deal with the frivolous over the serious. The latter would require them to make nuanced and disinterested inquiry and commentary, which hasn't been their modus operandi for as long as I can remember!

People on the ground just don't care about Master and Main on GitHub. They really don't. I move in some very political circles and I've never heard anyone express a concern even remotely like it. There's a lot of things these companies do that no one asked for, they just want to look progressive. It's a social currency largely of their own creation, after all. But those working to build a more just world almost always want impactful material changes, not this gutless shifting and shuffling of window-dressing on corporate products.

~edisondotme wrote (thread):

I think it's especially silly in cases like this where this is no corresponding "slave" term. There is no such thing as a "slave" in git. In common parlance, "master" more often means things like primary, principle, expert, etc. Not "a person who owns slaves" as is in the context of slavery of people.

~sojourner wrote (thread):

The cancel mob is already infighting, so there's some hope that this farce will just eat itself due to internal divisions and uncontained aggression. When a wild hearsay and reckless over/misinterpretation can make words taboo, people social lepers, or even kill businesses, literally no one and nothing is safe. Most folks are getting fed up with all this hostility. The moment people with social media pitchforks collectively realize that they aren't unpunishable and can get framed themselves, fear kicks in and this whole mass hysteria either spectacularly implodes or fizzes over in shame.

~tskaalgard wrote (thread):

It's kind of going away, thankfully. It's going out of vogue. At least it seems so.

~starbreaker wrote (thread):

1. I thought this was only for new repositories.

2. Is it that hard to update your scripts to point to "main" rather than "master" (which I agree probably involves master recordings rather than master of other people)? Or is it the inconvenience you resent?

3. There are plenty of reasons to not use GitHub that have nothing to do with terminology or "cancel culture". That Microsoft now owns it should be reason enough to migrate away to SourceHut, GitLab, Gitea, or a self-hosted solution.