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This is a question that has been bothering me for a week or so and now the time is ripe for blogging, even if I have no answers.
I am typing and backspacing this line, I don’t know how to properly begin and format my message, or if my message can be understood. I think I will begin by listing what events have lead me to think of the question, who is “we”.
Case redacted
I feel anxious returning to thinking about this case which I have removed from my blog even if git remembers, I appreciate if you don’t start digging for more of that story. I don’t even remember how it went.
There was a project and there was drama. I was “given permission” (how exactly?) to talk as “we”, I think it’s simple to say it went to my head and bad things happened.
Case matrix-appservice-irc
I am not affiliated with New Vector or Matrix.org and neither are the people I am going to describe, it’s just easy to pick the name of the project based on where this happened. I guess the people may not even remember this incident, unless they are harbouring similar thoughts and going to write their versions of this post.
I am not sure how to talk about this either, but after having told about redacted I feel less anxious as this happened after my worst mental health problems.
There is a group of people. There is someone others don’t get along with well and another one whom people get along with a bit better.
The first person asks whether “we” should do something (funnily I have no memory of what, but it’s irrelevant to this post as this could have happened anywhere) and I think what happened was the second person starting to challenge the first one asking who are they to talk about “we”. Can you guess what happens next?
I still don’t remember what exactly happened, but within the same discussion the second person starts talking similar things as “we”. I think this time I am the one challenging them, asking how does their “we” differ from the “we” of the first person or why are they allowed to say “we” while the first one cannot.
I think there were hurt feelings and I faintly remember talking about it with a third person, who I think agreed that there wasn’t difference between those “we”s and maybe even said that it was good that I pointed it out? I don’t remember, but I might regardless be typing this post and I have at least two more cases.
Cases PrivacyTools.IO
This is an interesting case, because I guess I am supposedly part of the “we” or at least a team member (unless I have gotten “fired” during the time I am typing this) and I have criticized PTIO before finding myself in the team. I am not sure or the case being interesting is why I again have difficulties finding words while the previous case felt easy to get out. Or maybe the problem is that this is actually cases in plural.
PTIO attempts to list tools that preferably anyone can use to protect their privacy. There are GitHub issues (where I am active), Discourse Forum (which I read thanks to mailing list mode) and a subReddit which I see at times when Reddit decides to give me a web push notification. PTIO is also hosting some services.
Now I look at the previous paragraph and wonder… What I am asking is “who is we”, but I could similarly ask who is PTIO, are they also a person who happens to be hosting many services and list tools for privacy? Or is it a inanimate website which just happens to have a founder and contributions by many people on GitHub? And are the websites hosted by PTIO or Barung and Jonah who are the service department?
At this point on line 87 this question starts seeming silly, but I am not finished yet. Maybe “we” deserves the defence on whether it makes more sense to ask whether “we should list X” or whether “X should be listed on PTIO”, I think I prefer the later form as it doesn’t refer to the “we” and thus it doesn’t bring to existence the others.
I have been reading books by Jaron Lanier recently, beginning from Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, Who Owns The Future and currently I am reading You Are Not a Gadget. I may be using weird books as I read the first and the last in Finnish while I am typing in English so I know the English to Finnish translation of Kirsimarja Tielinen and am translating it back to English and it wouldn’t be very surprising if I ended up to a different translation than the original word.
Anyway especially in the first book he mentions a “pack switch” in peoples heads and how social media (I wish I knew what was the original name of “SUMUTIN”) attempts to turn it into the pack position instead of the individual postition. I think this and references to it in the other books are inspiration for me to be typing this (on line 106 in Neovim) as I have been seeing examples of this.
- A Finnish article on how a YLE
reporter met a man who wished for death of his family.
- The reporter had written request From reporter: don’t do a favour to terrorists - don’t distribute hate on social media which apparently wasn’t very liked on a certain imageboard where horrible things were said and this person was sued and met in arbitration and I see this as a case of us-vs-them.
- Another recent case happened after I had already left Facebook*, it goes too close to people I know and associations I have responsibility in so I am afraid of bringing the subject up again, so I will just say that there was kind of a manhunt on Facebook and I was afraid that the next day I would be hearing about how the situation escalated into a manhunt and a murder. Luckily that didn’t happen and the last I heard was that the police got involved and the situation ended well.
Within this text editor I have gotten sidetracked for one screenful of text, I have said that being “we” went badly for me in the past and that there is ambiguosity between “PTIO”/“we”, referred to books and Finnish events, so I should be getting back to the subject.
While PTIO is not a imageboard, I still wonder who is that “we”, because if there is a “we”, there must be those “others” and if there are “others”, doesn’t pack mentality require “them” to be hated and maybe also feared? Who are those others? Is it perhaps another privacy site like PRISM BREAK or people who aren’t as privacy concious? Who are privacy concious if I use GMail and have Google Play Services on my phone, am I not part of us then? I keep removing this sentence as the obvious continuation would be stereotypes making me the target.
Recently there was another specific case on PTIO Reddit, someone asked about DNS over HTTPS which is one of the issues I have thought the most about:
Should we add these settings as recommended hardening on the firefox about:config hardening page?
There we (haha) have the “we” again, I felt a bit annoyed when Reddit web push notification sent me to that page as I was hungry and tired and the discussion was had in Reddit instead of at GitHub in 💬 Discussion | Firefox eSNI / DoH/TRR #785 where I and four other people had discussed it previously. There was one nice question on why everyone just doesn’t run their own DNS server which indeed would resolve at least my concerns, but… OK, now I am actually getting beside the point.
I think the point is that I wish to provoke you, whoever is reading this, into thinking who is that “we” in these scenarios that could happen anywhere.
If I finish up talking about PTIO, I don’t know how many people there are commenting at GitHub, Discourse, Reddit, Matrix, and whether they are the same people everywhere or different and at the risk of sounding stupid or elitist, I will say that I have no idea who the person opening the Reddit thread is, they are not a member of the GitHub organization nor a moderator at Reddit. As I have said previously, I am not active at Reddit, so I don’t know if they were e.g. the most active poster/commenter there. Who is we? Maybe it was the PTIO Reddit users?
I don’t like how the previous paragraph turned out, I am bad with words. I do hope everyone keeps doing what they like and is welcoming to everyone, I hope I made it clear earlier that my argument (if you can get it) undermines itself while I said that there probably isn’t that much difference in “should we do X” or “should PTIO do X”. PTIO can only be a sum of everyone who contributes into it and if no one contributes, there can be no PTIO.
I still have two cases I intent to touch.
Case Notes on privacy and data collection of Matrix.org
If you ask Maxidorius or other The Grid protocol community members about this, they likely have no idea what I talk about as as with case matrix-appservice-irc it’s easier to take the name of where or what caused the discussion, especially in this case as I don’t want to promote the quiet channel where this happened.
The setting is a bit quiet IRC channel where many users happen to be from Matrix. Due to the Notes on privacy and data collection of Matrix.org and me being a founder, I was asked if “we should ban Matrix so the users will be more safe”.
I haven’t yet addressed the question who is “I”, which my original question “who is we” begs, I originally planned to not involve it, but it seems like I have to at least in a few words. I think it should be enough to say that I am not perfect or handle everything well (I have decided to throw this post into the drafts directory after I reach the end so I can ask at least some PTIO people to comment and why not people from this case too)…
I wasn’t my best self at that time either and as this post had been demanding to be written for days I started asking who that “we” is. And whether everyone who cannot prove running a IRC client at home should be banned as while I agree that Matrix is bad in this regard, I at least have some sort of idea what it is doing, while I cannot know what are IRCCloud and big shells doing (legally secrecy of correspondence would at least prevent them from reading what happens in the channel and same applies to Matrix, but I cannot know how long anything else is storing data).
Skipping several lines I asked the most active Matrix users (and everyone else) what would they do if “the mysterious ‘we’ decided to ban Matrix users” and one response was that they wouldn’t bother just for one channel. I also said that I wouldn’t want to lose anyone.
No one told me who is the “we”. I guess having undermined my argument that the “we” is people on the channel or at least the most active chatters and the not-operator asking the question wishes that the op/user distinction to not be that big and the users may also take part on running the channel, which I do think is a good idea, but as I said before, the “we” brings the idea that there are also the “others” and I don’t know who are the others either. Are they the Matrix users other than the most active ones? Are they those who don’t say anything often? Are they those who chat when I am sleeping and whom I never chat with directly for that reason?
Case I
LGBT* circles have the right of self-definition and the right to not define self. I wonder if I should take the later right to get out of that difficult question, but it doesn’t feel right to me, even if I originally didn’t plan to type this.
I am myself and many things, I may seem to be a different person in a group where I feel safe or in a large group of people where I don’t know the people around. My communication can be very different when I am happy or hungry. I am getting sidetracked, am I not?
For the purpose of this post, I am someone who has recovered from mental health problems and started attempting to communicate nonviolently. I try to be myself, “I”, instead of “we” (whoever that was again). I try to make clear what are my thoughts and feelings instead of communicating them as thoughts/feelings of someone else, be that the mysterious “we” or a project that has no life in itself.
I admit that I fail often, I guess that is to be a human, and if you and me meet somewhere either in the internet or offline, I am going to fail regardless of the language. I wonder if trying can also be thought as the learning progress which is part of the journey and the journey is as important as the destination.
With these words it’s good time to end typing this post and commit this in the drafts directory for spamming around for feedback on whether this is ready for release in the blog or if there are suggestions how I should change specific paragraphs or anything.