charles @ charles @lemmy.computer.surgery

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2 yr. ago

It was something like this,

Surely people who argue that Linux isn't politically charged because its creator is politically charged will also argue that Lemmy isn't politically charged even though its creators are, right? Right?

except it was written in a way that was more annoying to read.

Stuxnet itself doesn’t care whose centrifuges it destroys (in fact it doesn’t care or have an awareness that it’s destroying anything at all), it does what it’s programmed to do and is deployed to do by people with political goals. It’s not the same thing as Stuxnet itself being political.

This was actually pretty thought-provoking, so thanks for that. It seems like your argument is founded on the idea that non-sentient entities are incapable of being politically charged. In a vacuum where no sentient entities exist to charge them politically, this is trivially true. However, we don't live in such a vacuum. As such, one must take into consideration that a subset[^{1] of people do consider a subset[}1] of non-sentient entities to be inherently politically charged, and since one can't know who considers what to be politically charged, one must treat all non-sentient entities as (at least potentially) politically charged. Of course, one may choose to ignore that subset[^1] of people (which itself is a politically charged decision) but that doesn't change the fact that any given non-sentient entity could be considered politically charged.

I did say that I could conceive of one way that software licenses could be considered somewhat political if one’s politics reject the validity of intellectual property. But then again, the software licenses are also not the code itself. If one doesn’t believe in the concept of intellectual property, one is free to accept whatever risk is involved with breaking the license and using it anyway. The software doesn’t care who’s running it.

Sorry, it seems you've repeated yourself rather than addressing the specific point I had asked for elaboration on. Would you mind trying again?

[^1]: Specifically a "non-strict subset" in the mathematical sense

Programming code is pure logic and has no opinions.

Can you explain to me how, for example, Stuxnet is apolitical?

All they do is permit/restrict specific rights to attribute, use, modify, reproduce, distribute, etc. the code.

Can you explain how these restrictions/permissions are apolitical?

Honestly I don't understand this kind of argument. Linux is political: compare it to its alternatives, look at the license it's released under, and so on. Lemmy is the same way. Lemmy even has a section in the manual about how it's fundamentally political: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/users/07-history-of-lemmy.html