Very discouraging. People who’ve lived long to have experienced several cultural/generational cycles will have been expecting a backlash against « wokism ». At first I was optimistic when the pendulum began to swing back towards equilibrium but history has shown that backlashes can swing to far the other way. Christopher Rufo seems like a hyper-focused madman to me. And much, much worse is how russia and china have skilfully woven their own propaganda to fit the narrative of their choosing to further destabilize us.
I do think some younger people approach our current moment without totally appreciating how much this is history repeating itself. Reactionary backlash sure ain't nothing new, as you note!
But, yeah. Some things are definitely new about the scale/scope/intensity of all this. Maybe that's just the mirror image of how fast all these progress has been — like, I've been gobsmacked at just how quickly trans rights went from marginal to mainstream to normalized. (Which is, obviously, great!) We were always going to have the pendulum swing back. But, again, it's galling at just how intense, immediately, well-organized, and insidious it's become. Depressing, for sure.
But I try not to be fatalist about this stuff. We *can* push back against the grievance merchants and win — and, hopefully, wind up with a more positive and productive discourse as a result. We just have to be smart about it.
Strange to think that all the passion we spent on the "Clipper Chip" about 1994 was soon to be pointless because encrypting voice calls would be unimportant compared to text. When Phil won his day, the battle was over, because anybody technically teachable could ensure safe whistleblowing, and the big Assange/Snowden reveals were possible.
Losing one convenient app is not that big a deal as long as PGP and email still exist. But how are you going to lose the app? Rufo's smears depend on a stupid audience, and amoral platforms (like the NYT) that prize audience-size over content quality. The audience for Signal is just journalists and the whistleblowers they tell to get it (never occurred to me to get it - my web page confirms how I overshare everything).
If journalists are fooled by Rufo, I hope they do lose access to tools; their journalism is probably awful.
I was originally going to get far more into this, so glad you brought it up.
So at the top level, I think there has always been this tension between what the state hopes to do — have immediate access to communications they're keen to read/listen to — and what technologists and civil libertarians want to preserve, which is a free and open internet. Technologically, the latter group won. The NSA might've tapped the backbone of the internet and Russia might've taken over its ISPs, but Tor, PGP, Signal, etc have still proliferated above/beyond all that. But you can't deny that it's a pretty tenuous victory. A bunch of EU nations are trying to mandate backdoors into all kinds of consumer-grade services, and are pushing data localization as a way to keep the data close at hand. Russia, India, Brazil, etc: There are countries were even having Signal installed on your phone puts you in danger.
Ok, that's all pretty obvious. But we're currently on the right side of this delicate balance specifically because groups like the EFF, Access Now, and Signal. These groups have never really been part of the culture wars, and they've not been institutions that ought to be torn down. But here's Rufo, convincing the richest guy in the world and a bunch of brainiacs that The Enemy is hiding amongst us techies. The Fifth Column is everywhere.
I'm not worried about this one blog or news cycle. I think it just bodes ill for the months and years to come. It's like hunting a Snark: If you go looking for it, you're sure to find it. How many others in the open tech space wind up being targets for the Rufo types? What about scientists? Birdwatchers? etc. If you've created a perpetual grievance machine, it needs new fuel every day.
(Also, I can't recommend Signal enough. It's such a pleasant app to use. It has proliferated far, far beyond just journalists and whistleblowers. It's more user-friendly than Whatsapp.)
Sympathies also, but agonizing over this issue must be strictly disciplined or you'll wind up a permanent crankiness (like me). Lawyers had to suck it up when Microsoft Word won, though WordPerfect was about 3X as good a word processor for legal documents. After MS won the office suite about the turn of the century, they had to use what everybody else was using.
We learned over and over again with computers, that the one time you can make a crappy product a standard is when the whole product-category is new. As long as everybody is getting something better, it can be a much-lower good, and the benefits from having a *common good* are high.
Microsoft leveraged their monopoly on the OS to extend monopoly to office software, and now communications solutions, with Messenger and Teams - still at it after 30 years!
Not off-topic, because if you can compromise a deeply-entrenched standard because it depends on one company, you can really infiltrate anybody and everybody.
Very discouraging. People who’ve lived long to have experienced several cultural/generational cycles will have been expecting a backlash against « wokism ». At first I was optimistic when the pendulum began to swing back towards equilibrium but history has shown that backlashes can swing to far the other way. Christopher Rufo seems like a hyper-focused madman to me. And much, much worse is how russia and china have skilfully woven their own propaganda to fit the narrative of their choosing to further destabilize us.
I do think some younger people approach our current moment without totally appreciating how much this is history repeating itself. Reactionary backlash sure ain't nothing new, as you note!
But, yeah. Some things are definitely new about the scale/scope/intensity of all this. Maybe that's just the mirror image of how fast all these progress has been — like, I've been gobsmacked at just how quickly trans rights went from marginal to mainstream to normalized. (Which is, obviously, great!) We were always going to have the pendulum swing back. But, again, it's galling at just how intense, immediately, well-organized, and insidious it's become. Depressing, for sure.
But I try not to be fatalist about this stuff. We *can* push back against the grievance merchants and win — and, hopefully, wind up with a more positive and productive discourse as a result. We just have to be smart about it.
Strange to think that all the passion we spent on the "Clipper Chip" about 1994 was soon to be pointless because encrypting voice calls would be unimportant compared to text. When Phil won his day, the battle was over, because anybody technically teachable could ensure safe whistleblowing, and the big Assange/Snowden reveals were possible.
Losing one convenient app is not that big a deal as long as PGP and email still exist. But how are you going to lose the app? Rufo's smears depend on a stupid audience, and amoral platforms (like the NYT) that prize audience-size over content quality. The audience for Signal is just journalists and the whistleblowers they tell to get it (never occurred to me to get it - my web page confirms how I overshare everything).
If journalists are fooled by Rufo, I hope they do lose access to tools; their journalism is probably awful.
I was originally going to get far more into this, so glad you brought it up.
So at the top level, I think there has always been this tension between what the state hopes to do — have immediate access to communications they're keen to read/listen to — and what technologists and civil libertarians want to preserve, which is a free and open internet. Technologically, the latter group won. The NSA might've tapped the backbone of the internet and Russia might've taken over its ISPs, but Tor, PGP, Signal, etc have still proliferated above/beyond all that. But you can't deny that it's a pretty tenuous victory. A bunch of EU nations are trying to mandate backdoors into all kinds of consumer-grade services, and are pushing data localization as a way to keep the data close at hand. Russia, India, Brazil, etc: There are countries were even having Signal installed on your phone puts you in danger.
Ok, that's all pretty obvious. But we're currently on the right side of this delicate balance specifically because groups like the EFF, Access Now, and Signal. These groups have never really been part of the culture wars, and they've not been institutions that ought to be torn down. But here's Rufo, convincing the richest guy in the world and a bunch of brainiacs that The Enemy is hiding amongst us techies. The Fifth Column is everywhere.
I'm not worried about this one blog or news cycle. I think it just bodes ill for the months and years to come. It's like hunting a Snark: If you go looking for it, you're sure to find it. How many others in the open tech space wind up being targets for the Rufo types? What about scientists? Birdwatchers? etc. If you've created a perpetual grievance machine, it needs new fuel every day.
(Also, I can't recommend Signal enough. It's such a pleasant app to use. It has proliferated far, far beyond just journalists and whistleblowers. It's more user-friendly than Whatsapp.)
I do prefer signal, but only my techie friends use it, so I’m stuck on WhatsApp, and even worse…messenger.
Oh, god, you have my sympathy
Sympathies also, but agonizing over this issue must be strictly disciplined or you'll wind up a permanent crankiness (like me). Lawyers had to suck it up when Microsoft Word won, though WordPerfect was about 3X as good a word processor for legal documents. After MS won the office suite about the turn of the century, they had to use what everybody else was using.
We learned over and over again with computers, that the one time you can make a crappy product a standard is when the whole product-category is new. As long as everybody is getting something better, it can be a much-lower good, and the benefits from having a *common good* are high.
Microsoft leveraged their monopoly on the OS to extend monopoly to office software, and now communications solutions, with Messenger and Teams - still at it after 30 years!
Not off-topic, because if you can compromise a deeply-entrenched standard because it depends on one company, you can really infiltrate anybody and everybody.