Pluralistic: Tech's benevolent-dictator-for-life to authoritarian pipeline (10 Dec 2024)

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Originally published at: https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/10/bdfl/



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A cliched hacker-in-a-hoodie figure; inside the shadows of the hood is a Keppler caricature of a tinpot general in a Napoleon hat, brandishing a saber and seated atop a child's rocking-horse.

Tech's benevolent-dictator-for-life to authoritarian pipeline (permalink)

Silicon Valley's "authoritarian turn" is hard to miss: tech bosses have come out for autocrats like Trump, Orban, Milei, Bolsonaro, et al, and want to turn San Francisco into a militia-patrolled apartheid state operated for the benefit of tech bros:

https://newrepublic.com/article/180487/balaji-srinivasan-network-state-plutocrat

Smart people have written well about what this means, and have gotten me thinking, too:

https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/why-did-silicon-valley-turn-right

Regular readers will know that I make a kind of hobby of collecting definitions of right-wing thought:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/29/jubilance/#tolerable-racism

One of these – a hoary old cliche – is that "a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged." I don't give this one much credence, but it taken on an interesting sheen when combined with this anonymous gem: "Conservatives say they long for the simpler times of their childhood, but what they miss is that the reason they lived simpler lives back then wasn't that the times were simpler; rather, it's because they were children."

If you're a tech founder who once lived in a world where your workers were also your pals and didn't shout at you about labor relations, perhaps that's not because workers got "woke," but rather, because when you were all scrapping at a startup, you were all on an equal footing and there weren't any labor relations to speak of. And if you're a once-right-on tech founder who used to abstractly favor "social justice" but now find yourself beset by people demanding that you confront your privilege, perhaps what's changed isn't those people, but rather the amount of privilege you have.

In other words, "a reactionary tech boss is a liberal tech boss who hired a bunch of pals only to have them turn around and start a union." And also: "Tech founders say things were simpler when they were running startups, but what they miss is that the reason no one asked their startup to seriously engage with the social harms it caused is the because the startup was largely irrelevant to society, while the large company it turned into is destroying millions of peoples' lives today."

The oft-repeated reactionary excuse that "I didn't leave the progressive movement, they left me," can be both technically true and also profoundly wrong: if progressives in your circle never bothered you about your commercial affairs, perhaps that's because those affairs didn't matter when you were grinding out code in your hacker house, but they matter a lot now that you have millions of users and thousands of employees.

I've been in tech circles since before the dawn of the dotcoms; I was part of a movement of people who would come over to your house with a stack of floppies and install TCP/IP and PPP networking software on your computer and show you how to connect to a BBS or ISP, because we wanted everyone to have as much fun as we were having.

Some of us channeled that excitement into starting companies that let people get online, create digital presences of their own, and connect with other people. Some of us were more .ORG than .COM and gave our lives over to activism and nonprofits, missing out on the stock options and big paydays. But even though we ended up in different places, we mostly started in the same place, as spittle-flecked, excited kids talking a mile a minute about how cool this internet thing would be and helping you, a normie, jump into it.

Many of my peers from the .ORG and .COM worlds went on to set up institutions – both companies and nonprofits – that have since grown to be critical pieces of internet infrastructure: classified ad platforms, online encyclopedias, CMSes and personal publishing services, critical free/open source projects, standards bodies, server-to-server utilities, and more.

These all started out as benevolent autocracies: personal projects started by people who pitched in to help their virtual neighbors with the new, digital problems we were all facing. These good people, with good impulses, did good: their projects filled an important need, and grew, and grew, and became structurally important to the digital world. What started off as "Our pal's project that we all pitch in on," became, "Our pal's important mission that we help with, but that also has paid staff and important stakeholders, which they oversee as 'benevolent dictator for life.'"

Which was fine. The people who kicked off these projects had nurtured them all the way from a napkin doodle to infrastructure. They understood them better than anyone else, had sacrificed much for them, and it made sense for them to be installed as stewards.

But what they did next, how they used their powers as "BFDLs," made a huge difference. Because we are all imperfect, we are all capable of rationalizing our way into bad choices, we are all riven with insecurities that can push us to do things we later regret. When our actions are checked – by our peers' social approval or approbation; by the need to keep our volunteers happy; by the possibility of a mass exodus of our users or a fork of our code – these imperfections are balanced by consequences.

Dictators aren't necessarily any more prone to these lapses in judgment than anyone else. Benevolent dictators actually exist, people who only retain power because they genuinely want to use that power for good. Those people aren't more likely to fly off the handle or talk themselves into bad places than you or me – but to be a dictator (benevolent or otherwise) is to exist without the consequences that prevent you from giving in to those impulses. Worse: if you are the dictator – again, benevolent or otherwise – of a big, structurally important company or nonprofit that millions of people rely on, the consequences of these lapses are extremely consequential.

This is how BDFL arrangements turn sour: by removing themselves from formal constraint, the people whose screwups matter the most end up with the fewest guardrails to prevent themselves from screwing up.

No wonder people who set out to do good, to help others find safe and satisfying digital homes online, find themselves feeling furious and beset. Given those feelings, can we really be surprised when "benevolent" dictators discover that they have sympathy for real-world autocrats whose core ethos is, "I know what needs to be done and I could do it, if only the rest of you would stop nagging me about petty bullshit that you just made up 10 minutes ago but now insist is the most important thing in the world?"

That all said, it's interesting to look at the process by which some BDFLs transitioned to community-run projects with checks and balances. I often think about how Wikipedia's BDFL, the self-avowed libertarian Jimmy Wales, decided (correctly, and to his everlasting credit), that the project he raised from a weird idea into a world-historic phenomenon should not be ruled over by one guy, not even him.

(Jimmy is one of those libertarians who believes that we don't need governments to make us be kind and take care of one another because he is kind and takes care of other people – see also John Gilmore and Penn Jillette:)

https://www.cracked.com/article_40871_penn-jillette-wants-to-talk-it-all-out.html

Jimmy's handover to the Wikimedia Foundation gives me hope for our other BDFLs. He's proof that you can find yourself in the hotseat without being so overwhelmed with personal grievance that you find yourself in sympathy with actual fascists, but rather, have the maturity and self-awareness to know that the reason people are demanding so much of you is that you have – deliberately and with great effort – created a situation in which you owe the world a superhuman degree of care and attention, and the only way to resolve that situation equitably and secure your own posterity is to share that power around, not demand that you be allowed to wield it without reproach.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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This day in history (permalink)

#10yrsago Tech companies should do something about harassment, but not this https://www.theverge.com/2014/12/8/7350597/why-its-so-hard-to-stop-online-harassment

#10yrsago Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free: the audiobook, read by Wil Wheaton https://craphound.com/info/2014/12/10/information-doesnt-want-to-be-free-audiobook/

#10yrsago World-beating email EULA https://memex.craphound.com/2014/12/10/world-beating-email-eula/

#10yrsago Great Firewall of Cameron blocks Parliamentary committee on rendition/torture https://b2fxxx.blogspot.com/2014/12/virgin-media-blocking-website-of.html

#10yrsago Police, technology and bodycams https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/12/obamas-plan-better-policing-good-bad-and-body-cameras

#10yrsago NYC theater overrules MPAA rating for Snowden documentary https://twitter.com/tommycollison/status/541787027315101696

#5yrsago Youtube copyright trolls Adrev claim to own a homemade MIDI rendition of 1899’s Flight of the Bumblebee https://www.ghostwheel.com/2019/12/08/the-absurdity-of-youtubes-copyright-claim-system/

#5yrsago NYC paid McKinsey $27.5m to reduce violence at Riker’s, producing useless recommendations backed by junk evidence https://www.propublica.org/article/new-york-city-paid-mckinsey-millions-to-stem-jail-violence-instead-violence-soared

#5yrsago Chinese law professor’s social media denunciation of facial recognition in the Beijing subway system https://docs.google.com/document/d/18L4FuiUjGN5Y2j_4-VnYi2U116KWEIaG4pxVp78x-ss/edit?tab=t.0

#5yrsago Distinguishing between “platforms” and “aggregators” in competition law https://memex.craphound.com/2019/12/10/distinguishing-between-platforms-and-aggregators-in-competition-law/

#5yrsago Pete Buttigieg’s prizewinning high-school essay praising Bernie Sanders: “the power to win back the faith of a voting public weary and wary of political opportunism” https://jacobin.com/2019/12/pete-buttigieg-essay-contest-bernie-sanders/

#5yrsago Amazon’s Ring surveillance doorbell leaks its customers’ home addresses, linked to their doorbell videos https://gizmodo.com/ring-s-hidden-data-let-us-map-amazons-sprawling-home-su-1840312279

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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Recent appearances (permalink)


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Latest books (permalink)


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Upcoming books (permalink)

  • Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025

  • Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Status: second pass edit underway (readaloud)

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

  • Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

Latest podcast: Spill, part six (FINALE) (a Little Brother story) https://craphound.com/littlebrother/2024/12/08/spill-part-six-finale-a-little-brother-story/

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BDFL? “Die” a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.