{"id":8609,"date":"2020-02-27T19:55:03","date_gmt":"2020-02-28T00:55:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=8609"},"modified":"2020-02-28T10:20:03","modified_gmt":"2020-02-28T15:20:03","slug":"the-right-to-be-rude","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=8609","title":{"rendered":"The right to be rude"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The historian Robert Conquest once wrote: \u201cThe behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Today I learned that the Open Source Initiative has reached that point of bureaucratization.  I &#8211; OSI&#8217;s co-founder and its president for its first six years &#8211;  was kicked off their lists for being too rhetorically forceful in opposing certain recent attempts to subvert OSD clauses 5 and 6. This despite the fact that I had vocal support from multiple list members who thanked me for being willing to speak out.<\/p>\n<p>It shouldn&#8217;t be news to anyone that there is an effort afoot to change &#8211; I would say <em>corrupt<\/em> &#8211;  the fundamental premises of the open-source culture. Instead of meritocracy and &#8220;show me the code&#8221;, we are now urged to behave so that no-one will ever feel <em>uncomfortable<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>The effect &#8211; the <em>intended<\/em> effect &#8211; is to diminish the prestige and autonomy of people who do the work &#8211; write the code &#8211; in favor of self-appointed tone-policers.  In the process, the freedom to speak necessary truths even when the manner in which they are expressed is unpleasant is being gradually strangled.<\/p>\n<p>And that is <em>bad<\/em> for us.  Very bad.  Both directly &#8211; it damages our self-correction process &#8211; and in its second-order effects.  The habit of institutional tone policing, <em>even when well-intentioned,<\/em> too easily slides into the active censorship of disfavored views.<\/p>\n<p>The cost of a culture in which avoiding offense trumps the liberty to speak is that crybullies control the discourse.  To our great shame, people who should know better &#8211; such as the OSI list moderators and BOD &#8211; have internalized anticipatory surrender to crybullying. They no longer even wait for the soi-disant victims to complain before wielding the ban-hammer.<\/p>\n<p>We are being social-hacked from being a culture in which freedom is the highest value to one in which it is trumped by the suppression of wrongthink and wrongspeak. Our enemies &#8211; people like Coraline Ada-Ehmke &#8211; do not even really bother to hide this objective.<\/p>\n<p>Our culture is not fatally damaged yet, but the trend  is not good.  OSI has been suborned and is betraying its founding commitment to freedom. &#8220;Codes of Conduct&#8221; that purport to regulate even off-project speech have become all too common.<\/p>\n<p>Wake up and speak out.  Embrace the right to be rude &#8211; not because &#8220;rude&#8221; in itself is a good thing, but because the degenerative slide into suppression of disfavored opinions has to be stopped right where it starts, at the tone policing.<\/p>\n<p>The OSI membership page is <a href=\"https:\/\/opensource.org\/membership\">here.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The historian Robert Conquest once wrote: \u201cThe behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.\u201d Today I learned that the Open Source Initiative has reached that point of bureaucratization. I &#8211; OSI&#8217;s co-founder and its president for its first six years&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=8609\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">The right to be rude<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,23,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8609","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-hacker-culture","category-politics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8609","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8609"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8609\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8618,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8609\/revisions\/8618"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8609"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8609"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8609"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}