When I hated Mondays

The right wing usually has the attitude that “Yeah, yeah, it sucks that the world is so awful, but there’s not a lot we can do about that, I’m sorry to say, because we don’t want gun control and feminism and communism and that kinda stuff that threatens to change anything that I consider unchangeable. Everything needs to remain as it is, we can only send thoughts and prayers.”

The Alt-Right Playbook: I Hate Mondays

However, when questions pop up that tread on our own FOSS/​EFF/​Cypherpunk ideology, we’re kind of the same way. “Oh, what a shame that there are so many abusers out there, but there’s not a lot of things we can do about that, we need to have good crypto, I can only send thoughts and prayers.”

That, hmm, that doesn’t feel like a great position to take. Not super into it. Not sure where I wanna be.

Update, a few days later

What I meant with this post is just to vent, lament, and bemoan how frustrating it is to argue for the rights of school shooters and bullies. They breathe air but regulating air-breathing isn’t a good solution. They use gravity to walk the Earth without flying away but regulating physics isn’t a good solution.

I just, I don’t have to be happy about how things are, OK? I’m allowed to grieve over how messed up this world is and how we treat each other.

Update

The above post was from August 2021. Today, May 2022, one of my rants ended up more clearly explaining how I felt back then:

I remember that [the cypher community’s reaction to Apple’s scanning proposal] because that was a big reason why I distanced myself from the EFF and the FOSS community. I was creeped out by them running up that particular hill.

I understood the arguments and how they followed naturally from our FOSS values and priorities.

To me, it said a lot about how wack our values and priorities had become.

Apple can’t call iMessage and iCloud e2ee after this, but Apple isn’t morally mandated to provide e2ee in those particular apps either.

Additionally, because of the layered nature of all software stacks since von Neumann, it’s still possible to use e2ee on top of those apps (for a trivial and dumb example, I can paste one-time-pad XOR text into an iMessage).

So it’s a pretty inconsequential and toothless decision and it becomes a question of optics of anti-scan vs optics of anti-CSAM.

Our overreaching entitlement is not more important than protecting kids.

We want proprietary software to die anyway so what does it matter what they do in their li’l walled garden? Our own goal is to have our own gardens, our own apps, our own servers and our own root accounts. Not to be beholden to Apple.

Apple preventing sideloading on apps is, for example, a much bigger problem (since it establishes them as bosses & roots on the devices they “sell”) than how their own dumb messaging and file storage apps work. Who cares!

Like, they have the power to select what font they use or what colors bubbles are (stuff that I love being able to change in FOSS apps) and if I’m not gonna fight them on those design issues that I do care about, I’m sure as heckfire not gonna fight when they try to stem something I hate (CSAM).

Since the apps aren’t even free in the first place!

It’s like being in a prison being forced to eat prison food and watch prison TV and do prison labor and sleep in prison bed and it’s all gross and bad and I’m in hell and then someone comes and says “Hey, they’re checking our pockets for CSAM so let’s start a riot against that” and I’m like “This?! This creepy shit is what you’re dying on a hill for!!?! Count me out!” I was with them when we were fighting nor having our own food, our own TV, our own labor, our own beds—the prison itself is the problem. If the issue they’re gonna riot over is the lack of CSAM in there, that’s creepy and fucked up and I’m gonna wonder what messed up side I’ve even been on all these FOSS years.

This new EU proposal is very different, because of the far reaching consequences and ripple effects of actually trying to implement something like this, and it’s important to be crystal clear about that. It’s making a prison out of our own homes as opposed to regulating the prisons people already rushed to lock themselves up in.

When the EU wanted to own all computers

Update 2

The EU proposal was successfully stopped. Doomsday averted.