• 24 Posts
  • 22 Comments
Joined 6 years ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2019

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  • I live in Germany and I’m not from the USA. It has nothing to do with the USA. Many Germans do want this genocide to happen and they still defend it. It’s a daily lived experience, it has nothing to do with online discussions, let alone with Americans. Germany doesn’t have the same concept of military-industrial complex like the USA (even though they might have started rebuilding it recently), but universities do research to enable genocide, like many universities around the world.

    I’m Italian, and Leonardo does the same with universities in Italy, using young naive researchers to build weapons used in Palestine or by other undemocratic governments throughout the world.

    I don’t get what’s so weird to you: universities have alwasy been complicit of horrible stuff.



  • Many of my direct friends lost their job for doing it. Look up “exposing Zalando”.

    Here in Berlin it’s a regular occurrence that any exhibition, cultural or political event criticizing Israel receives at the very list a threatening call and a visit from the police. Sometimes it escalates into vandalism or violence, sometimes with getting raided by the police, sometimes with defunding if it’s a public thing.

    If they silenced Albanese and banned Varoufakis, they can silence anybody.





  • the logic that sending messages alters political reality is part of the overall problem. Politics is a conflict of forces, not a conflict of ideas or opinions. A license is as powerful as the will of the state power behind it to enforce it. Otherwise, it is powerless.

    If you want to make sense of the political world, I invite to move beyond the idea of “taking stances” or expressing positions as a political act, and reason instead of what incentives and powers you’re altering with your political actions.

    What you describe just does not play out in real life: neither on a micro scale nor on a macro scale.










  • Licenses don’t stop bombs. In general, informational freedoms always benefits the stronger actor, because they already have the means to exploit the information better than other actors. Legal restrictions are just a bump in the road if what you produced is really really valuable for a corporation or a state entity: they can reimplement it, exploiting the design and “trial-and-error” work embedded in whatever you produced, or they can simply ignore licenses because nobody is going to ask the Israeli’s military to respect a license when they are slaughtering civilians.

    Social problems never have technical solutions.

    If you want to make software that is not captured by state or corporate power, you must create software that is incompatible with whatever they need to do. Embed a social logic that is worthless to their system but useful to our system. Anything else is eventually going to be captured. There’s a lot of literature on anti-capture design, and some of it manages to rise above the purely techno-optimist logic and provide something useful.