Rebecca Giblin on chokepoint capitalism

Hand waving this away as “politics”, i.e. forgiving Amazon for the same crooked demeanour Microsoft had in the 90s and which it *has been doing* in the tech industry (keyword: AGPL3), does not sit right with me. There's something insidious in the current state of civilization about tech sector people who fixate on Technology™ as an imagined self-sustaining concept in a context-free vacuum, a perpetual motion machine of thinkpieces that don't require one to think, who then balk in disgust at anyone who dares to lay bare the consequences all this has on real people. Never *at* the consequences. It's why the FSF has been an ineffectual joke for most of its existence.

I'd rather read things like this than the next instalment of the 10,000-comment systemd soap opera. That, to me, is also politics: a bunch of incredibly boring talking heads loudly incorrecting each other over something of infinitesimal consequence. Computing as a two-way medium is inherently political; I for one would rather see politics that try to *do* something than surrender the stage to a crowd that gets violent in a 16th-century way over ini files on their hard disk.

That comment could be posted verbatim under an article about codes of conduct and be no less semantically valid. The tone and intent would be a lot less ambiguous though. Would you feel comfortable doing that?