Cleo Menezes Jr. 🌵Hot take: #opensource projects MUST stop being hosted in USA.
Orion Ussner kidder@CleoMenezesJr This is looking less like a good idea and more like a necessity.
@OrionKidder yeah. A terrorist, imperialist country shouldn’t be the hub for anything, especially not #opensource, where ethics and freedom are the foundation.
Glyph@CleoMenezesJr @OrionKidder as a US-based open source contributor and leader, it’s hard to know what to do with this. what does it mean to not “host” a project here? which of you can give me, and a million others, a job and a citizenship in a morally pure country? it’s not that I disagree with you, it’s that I don’t even really know what you might be suggesting.
@glyph @CleoMenezesJr I have nothing but sympathy for the massive majority of Americans who are on many different front receiving the bulk of the Trump regime's violence and oppression. I think what you can do from inside is different from what the rest of have to do from the outside.
For example, I'm Canadian, so I'm going out of my way to not buy American goods. Obviously, that's not an option if you're American. The circumstances are different, so the moral imperative is different.
@glyph @CleoMenezesJr The issue with technology is that it's increasingly difficult for anything made in your country to not flow through us "big tech," and big tech is 100% on board with fascism.
(I know you know this. I'm just going through all the facts in the hopes that I'm not misunderstood.)
@glyph @CleoMenezesJr So, if you have the option to move your #OpenSource project outside of the US government's reach, I think there's a moral and practical necessity to do so. Obviously, many people don't have that option, so you'll have to do the best you can from within the US.
I will also say, I know there are open source applications on the computer that I'm typing on right now, and I keep using them because they appear to be thus far untainted, but I'm keeping my eyes open.
@glyph @CleoMenezesJr Is that a little more coherent? I am genuinely interested in this conversation. It's important that we don't leave Americans behind while we protect ourselves.
@OrionKidder @CleoMenezesJr if the ask is that more people around the world get involved and devolve the power in open source to a distributed global community, I am absolutely all for it. I am just pointing out that the reasons things are “hosted” here is an emergent phenomenon with extremely diverse causes and not because we all got together in 2017 and said “yeah it’s no big deal that the US is sliding into fascism, we should keep it all here”
@glyph @CleoMenezesJr Yeah, agreed. 100%. In a more nuanced conversation, we'd put all those facts on the table.
Part of the problem is that when we say "America," we don't mean all the Americans who are being oppressed by the Trump regime. We mean the hegemonic entity that is the United States.
But again, for us this is practical: we *cannot* keep hosting 90% our infrastructure on American tech. It's dangerous. Trump has made it quite clear that we are not allies any more.
@glyph @OrionKidder I’d also add that U.S. centrism is so deeply ingrained that many ppl don’t even realize there are other ways to see the world. Countless projects, both private and open-source, relocate from their home countries to the U.S. simply to align with market logic, often without questioning the ethical or political cost.
@glyph While @OrionKidder pointed to the Trump administration, my critique extends to the entire U.S. state apparatus, whether under Republicans or Democratics, they’ve all engaged in terrorism and unethical actions. This isn’t about individuals like you, a Usian maintaining your project in the U.S.; it’s about the systemic hypocrisy of a country that demands global compliance while ignoring its own abuses.
@CleoMenezesJr @glyph This is the narrative, yes. Carney (a neoliberal monster, to be clear) was right when he said the global order was always unjust, but we played along anyway, and Trump has blown up even that system. Cory Doctorow (local celebrity) argues this moment of rupture, as violent and horrific as it is, is finally prompting the world to recreate the global tech/data structure so that America isn't the inevitable hub. Something good *can* come from all this horror, if we're careful.
@CleoMenezesJr @glyph To this point, which I agree with broadly, I'd add that even those who did see the problem and would like to have located their projects outside the US, it's not just market logic but also market *forces* that are very strong. So it's not that they "can't" located outside the US; it's that most forces push them *into* the US, and that's a structural problem rather than an issue of individual virtue.