Carina C. Zona> Caring about software can be a political act. Governments, schools, nonprofits, mutual aid groups, and public-interest organizations need tools that do not depend on surveillance capitalism. They need software shaped by people who care about accessibility, translation, editorial workflows, security, privacy, and long-term maintenance.
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> As Paul said, defaults rule the world. Defaults are not neutral. They express values, whether we admit it or not. Free software lets us argue about those values in public. It lets us change the defaults. It lets us ask not only “Can we build this?” but “Who does this serve?” and “Who could this hurt?”
I express that a little differently though:
_Defaults are not neutral. They enact political values._
Looking at Chrome's example from yesterday's news, its default of downloading a 4gb model file to each user enacts political values including
* Everyone should be paying for unlimited bandwidth
* Everyone should have large storage devices with lots of free space
* Conserving energy doesn't matter
* Conserving bandwidth doesn't matter
* Pollution doesn't matter
* Consent doesn't matter
* Disclosure doesn't matter
* Usefulness doesn't matter
* The user doesn't have the right to delete unwanted material from their device
One default, embodying and imposing right-wing political values. Be rich, be profligate, be wasteful, be disrespectful, be subservient to the tech oligarchy, be docile.
Look into your software and ask whose interests are being served by it and whose interests have been deemed unimportant. Its core politics are embedded in that.
gsec@cczona the user *has* the right to uninstall unwanted software and the moral obligation to do so, *especially* with software that has the properties you've listed.
@gsc yeah you would think so. But in the Chrome example, it actually redownloads the 4gb model to the user's device if they have deleted the file. So the Chrome team stand in defiance of what we imagine to be a universal value.
@gsc that's what I did