TaggartAs a research project, I built a needed tool with Claude Code. I thought it would be a disaster, but it wasn't. I have some complicated feelings about it.
Glyph@mttaggart I have read only the self-flagellation so far and can I just say: oof.
my own co-skeptic feeling here is that I am deeply sympathetic to what you’re trying to do here and also I am furious with your employer (or maybe just the ecosystem more generally) effectively forcing you to take a bunch of risks with this
@mttaggart okay, read the whole thing now. I wouldn't have phrased the "purity" section at the end in quite the same way you did, but it didn't raise my hackles in quite the same way Doctorow did with the same point. "I am tired of running from one corner of technology to the next" resonated hard enough to rattle my teeth
Matt Campbell@glyph I'm curious about why you have reservations about the purity section, or, to put it another way, why it apparently did raise your hackles to some extent. @mttaggart
@matt @mttaggart "ideological purity" is a bit of a loaded phrase. While I'm sympathetic to the *sentiment*, I don't think it's true that "purity is a weapon used to divide labor against each other"; the thing that was used to divide labor against each other was racism. Now… purity does come into that, because once a bunch of racists are wandering around your movement, you've got difficult choices to make about how you maintain your coalition.
@matt @mttaggart so, like, you could argue that it's "purity testing" to say that racists are unwelcome in your movement, and that we can't fight amongst "ourselves", except that the opposite of that is to welcome racists into the coalition and now it's just a coalition of racists because the racists are going to chase all the minorities out
@matt @mttaggart there's a very delicate line to walk where you don't "purity test" casual racists by being super aggressive to them, but instead you make it clear that while *they* are welcome, their *racism* isn't welcome, so you can try to rehabilitate the casual rubes while aggressively excluding the heartfelt bigots. it's kind of impossible, which is why I am more sympathetic to this sentiment than to other recent formulations of this problem.
@glyph @matt So, this is probably the most misunderstood part of the piece, and that's on me. I am concerned about ideological purity in this context. Purity as a concept, whether ideological or otherwise (i.e. racial), is what I was calling dangerous. And racism, among many other things, is a derangement that weaponizes purity. This is an instrument capitalists used heavily throughout the latter 19th and early 20th centuries to disrupt labor movements and prevent workers of different races from finding common cause. That's not to say racism wasn't elsewhere or sourced from within all socioeconomic echelons. Even so, the weaponization and exacerbation is relevant. Purity is a way to pit people against each other.
Ideological purity, less dangerous than racism, still prevents finding common cause. Building movements requires working with those who do not agree with you on everything. There are lines we cannot cross to be sure, but we must be vigilant to prevent those lines from excluding all but exact matches to our own beliefs. This is the challenge, and one we are not meeting.
Am I a fascist for having used Claude Code and paying $20 to test it as others have? Some will say I am, or adjacent, because I have used a fascist tool. I find this deeply unhelpful to anyone. And that's my point. If you demonize anyone who touches this technology, your opposition movement is doomed to failure.
What do we want to accomplish? Stopping or stemming the spread of the disease, or building a commune of the untouched?
PhDogI also had questions about this section. While I read, I wondered how you thought of maintaining a social unit of any kind without censure and expulsion in some cases. And that's not a trick question btw; maybe you havr some ideas.
Or to pose the question to this toot, what makes you think purity itself is the problem, as opposed to a fixation on it? Compare with money, which isn't itself evil, but an over-veneration of it can ruin a person.
@dogfox @glyph @matt To the first:
There are lines we cannot cross to be sure, but we must be vigilant to prevent those lines from excluding all but exact matches to our own beliefs. This is the challenge, and one we are not meeting.
Once again, I am making no case for a lack of boundaries. I am making the case that the boundaries currently in play are counterproductive.
I can not and will not give you a maxim for establishing them. Looking for empiricism there is where you get into weird inversions of moral obligation.
As for obsession versus the thing itself, I see a distinction without a difference. To maintain "purity" as a virtue is to seek it, and without clarity that it is unattainable, you end up with some version of obsession. I would prefer a heuristic of growth and estimation of intent. Not perfect metrics, and deeply subjective. It's something best done in human relations, and not conducive to a few hundred characters of pith.
I get what you're saying a lot better now. Thank you.
Strength of agreement isn't the same as purity. Purity also insists on completeness of agreement with predefined doctrine, if i am reading right.
In that case, I think I agree with you that that is always pathological.