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In the downhill battle era, I used to think there was no way FOSS could be exploited. I saw the sharing-is-caring mentality as our new mindmelting way out of the quid-pro-quo market’s artificial scarcity shackles.
Three seconds later the triple whammy of smartphones (as we had hit hit feature parity on desktop, boom here’s a new goalpost of ever-obsolete pocket porcelain) and silo sites (can’t easily fork
Facebook or YouTube) and DRM’d streaming sites.
All three fueled by the dev practice of appropriating FOSS for non-free projects; Apple was leading that charge with their mix of proprietary and oh-so-exploitable FOSS.
Just now, I was thinking that one issue the wedge fascists never go to is climate and environment. They go for queer, gay, foreigners, other religions etc all in the name of “vote for our rich-gets-richer program and we’ll bind the outgroup to protect you”. The ones who chant “people against people, not class against class” all the way to the bank.
This is the only right wing remaining. They’ve abandoned all pretense of liberty or efficiency or fiscal responsibility. Liberalism is pretty much dead, it’s all jackboot all the time from the capitalists now.
And I was thinking that climate would be “safe” from them, that since fixing climate requires unbreaking or removing market capitalism radically, since industrialist means-of-production ownership concentration is entwined with the fossil fuel economy—exploitation is the surest route to profits—they just inherently can’t go green.
That’s the thought I had for a few seconds until I painfully remembered how FOSS got commodified and we all became free workers in the tech giants’ code mines. The same thing could happen to the climate issue.
Yeah, yeah, they can’t go green for real, but they can start greenwashing like there’s literally no tomorrow. Wedge issues never were about real solutions. The persecution of queer people isn’t really about “womens’ sex-based rights”. Never was. (Which is why the GC cult immediately sold out Roe's bodily autonomy, lesbian rights, and domestic abuse victims.) It was always about putting the exploiters in power.
Same goes if they grab ahold of the climate agenda. Musk and Thiel have already started trying the greenwashed Gyro Gearloose approach. People hate climate stuff and it’s constantly low tier among “most inportant issues” in polls. They don’t understand the urgency, they don’t have hope, they feel it’s lecture-coded, goody-two-shoes–coded, femininely coded.
So that’s, uh, a silver lining I guess? They wrested the reigns of the downhill battle generation precisely because it was the zeitgeist and everyone was sharing. Whereas climate awareness is loser-coded and uncool, so why would they even wanna make it a wedge? They wanna be the ingroup on the cinder.
Now, I wanna clarify something here. This process is not teleological. (Teleologival is a fancy word for something someone is doing on purpose.) There’s no “them” that gathered in a smoky room and drew up these plans for the future of the right wing. I know we on the left can be fascinated by the rare times something really does appear that way, be it strategists like Lee Atwater and William F. Buckley, or media houses like Fox News. Yeah, but for the most part, it’s more something that’s an emergent result of the way the market system’s media and policy landscape and its reward structures inherently work.
Exploitation, and using wedge issues to gather support for exploitation, thrives because it’s effective. People on both right and left are flailing around trying all sorts of dumb things and it’s just survival of the stickiest spaghetti.
As a macro example of this: everyone knows who Ron DeSantis is but he’s just one of twenty-six republican governors. They were all trying all kinds of wack ideas. DeSantis’ crazy anti-science, anti-mask, anti-vaxx, anti–black-lives antics happened to resonate with the poor fools at the polls. Same goes for Trump.
On a micro level this process is not just politician by politican, but essay by essay, clip by clip, tweet by tweet. We’re always at the crumbling edge of memetic evolution.
Conclusion: dismantle fossil capitalism.