YaelSorry I didn't respond to your text, I was trying to figure out how a normal person would respond and then just gave up.
| Everywhere | Endareth |
@Endareth
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Lance Taylor đź’ľ
Jillian C. York
How Alaa Abd El-Fattah Connects Everything
In 2011, during the early days of the Arab Spring, Alaa Abd El-Fattah, 29-year-old software developer, blogger, and activist, made history as one of the leading architects of Egypt’s January 25 Revolution, which led to the downfall of President Hosni Mubarak. This year, on November 18, Alaa turned 41 in one of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s notoriously brutal prisons, convicted of “spreading false news.”
Jonty WareingI did not see "Raspberry Pi co-founder becomes ridiculous conspiracy theorist" coming but here we are.
You did some bad PR, then handled it incredibly badly when everyone called you on it. That's it. Stop trying to blame everyone but yourselves.
@kangaroo5383 Four bulbs: while trying to sleep!
CrimethInc. Ex-WorkersToday is the birthday of Peter Kropotkin—anarchist, scientist, and author of Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution.
To honor the occasion, we invite you to read this account of his daring escape from prison:
Enron HubbardI'm a maker. I've been using your boards for years. I've recommended their use to countless people, advocated for your goals, and remained excited for everything you had done to further coding in education. You were doing good work, and had an immense amount of goodwill within the maker community. Have credit where it's due.
But your recent antics are wholly unacceptable.
Firstly, you have abandoned the maker community in recent years by prioritizing your industrial customers over them. The very same maker community that fueled the wide adoption of your products, the people who tirelessly evangelized your mission, are being left behind.
You're right - people are cross that they can't get your products any more. And that's because you're not making them for us any more. And we know it.
Secondly, your recent "Hey, we hired a cop!" post is concerning. UK law enforcement has a long history of terrible behavior in infiltrating activist circles, establishing sexual relationships with activists, and in some cases abandoning the children they fathered in those relationships.
This is a well-documented pattern of behavior, and is still playing out in the courts. The individual you hired most likely had a direct hand in enabling that behavior, as his role was in developing surveillance techniques. That history should be considered shameful, yet somehow you've decided it's a selling point.
This raises further concerns when considered within the context of your recent pivot towards prioritizing industrial customers over the maker community. In many perfectly reasonable ways, this could be considered a signal to government and law enforcement agencies of your willingness and intent to expand your business with them.
After all, you also manufacture small cameras as well as small, network-enabled computers. Now you're advertising that you've brought someone in-house with extensive experience in law enforcement under a dubious title (what exactly is the job description of a "Maker-in-Residence" anyhow?).
It's clear that your original vision has changed, and not for the better.
All of this is concerning enough. But when these perfectly valid criticisms and concerns were brought to the attention of your Fediverse instance, your brand ambassador responded with glib dismissals and began blocking the very people who have supported you for the past decade.
Not to mention the absolutely ridiculous recent claims by your co-founder, Liz Upton, that this backlash is due to not putting a CW on a picture of pigs in a blanket. That's patently absurd, and had she taken any time whatsoever to seriously look at the conversation, she would know it.
But, again - we're not the customers you care about any more. And we know it.
The fact is, you have managed to burn down a decade's worth of goodwill in the span of a day or so by being condescending, inconsiderate, and tone-deaf towards your most loyal customers and their extremely valid concerns. And on a personal level, I'm wildly disappointed and feel a certain amount of betrayal.
Of course I'll be vigorously recommending your competitors from now on, for both moral and practical reasons. There are far superior alternatives on the market already. At the basest level, I'm quite comfortable forgetting that #RaspberryPi is even an option for a single-board computer, and never mentioning the name to another potential maker again.
Not that it matters, since we can't even get your boards without an obscene markup anyways.
scyThe sensible thing to do:
“Okay, we screwed up yesterday, sorry.”
The corporate thing to do:
[ignore everything on the matter, continue posting marketing stuff]
The batshit thing to do:
Talking to Buzzfeed about how “this is all an organized effort by a woke crowd with bad intentions because we didn’t put a content warning on a food picture two days ago”
For some reason we’re in the timeline where @Raspberry_Pi decided to do the latter.
Aurynn ShawWell, if you're interested in such things, I wrote up a case study on the Raspberry Pi thing that happened yesterday/today
https://eiara.nz/posts/2022/Dec/09/a-case-study-on-raspberry-pis-incident-on-the-fediverse/
@atomicpoet Since stupid devs using 9* for their Windows 95/98 version check apparently.