... + software + politics + ...

a few days ago i saw some tweets:

under no circumstances do i want this to come across as some callout or cancellation type vibe. honestly i really empathize with this viewpoint so i wouldn't be using my limited time on this planet to discuss this if i didn't on some level feel that it was worth trying to stamp out in myself

all i ever want to do with this is raise the discourse, and allow n-flowers to bloom, hopefully i will achieve this somewhat

in short, i believe that the essential tool in a software developer's toolbox is to be able to look at social problems and reach for and implement a technological solution. i think this is basically what makes you a good developer, and this is what we see in the tweets in question, and the oppiliappans are clearly great developers, i think that next to bluesky, tangled.sh (ok, it's tangled.org now, but tangled.sh is unfortunately a catchier name) is currently the best app in the ATmosphere

but of course since i'm writing this, i believe that just because you can produce a technological solution to what appears to be a social problem, that doesn't mean you should. it doesn't mean you shouldn't either. the question to ask is "to what degree is this social phenomena a problem in itself, and to what degree is it a symptom of some deeper problem?"

and of course you won't find what is to be done somewhere out there in the world, but i think that through the practice of examining the world, moral questions will resolve themselves, at least somewhat

and not to be too much of a reductionist, but it's always worth repeating: a basic contradiction to contend with is that the allocation of (techno)capital will always reflect the software which treats symptoms while leaving or intensifying underlying causes. i think about David Harvey's fix-thinking, where the conceptualization of social phenomena as problems that need to be fixed fixes capital in place, becoming a political-economic-geographical drug fix

more concepts! more theory!

if you'll forgive me, it's been like 25 minutes since i talked about Deleuze and Guattari, so it's worth bringing up a few concepts from them that came to mind when i was thinking about the tweets which started this off

we can think about feeds and the digital communities that inhabit them as territories. the essential quality of territories is that they territorialize: they make themselves into territories through the process of enforcing borders

i think that there are like three ways which borders can be enforced

through macropolitics - top-down state-like power. in the case of a feed, the feed operator might hard-code certain users, keywords, etc... to cause posts to be included or prevented from appearing in the feed

through micropolitics - bottom-up social power. from my vantage point, a byproduct of the original tweets were that they produced or expressed or embodied some micropolitical power. some sort of unintended subtext behind them that i experienced is sort of like "pick a lane, keep politics out of my pure software dev land." i really need to stress that i don't think the tweets were a bad action or certainly that the involved individuals are bad people for this behavior. i think the most mainstream and most misunderstood application of micropolitics is the concept of the microaggression. bleh

then there's the third thing, which i'm not sure if there's a name in D&G, but where macropolitics is associated with the molar line, and micropolitics with the molecular line, the more mysterious and nuanced third thing is with the line of flight. the line of flight would be embodied by some sort of change in the physical geography of the territory, that causes the location where territorialization occurs to change. maybe some sort of technological changes to the algorithm or labeling occur which change the poster meta, maybe some big social changes happen out there, but there's some sort of radical shift in the territory so after the dust settles, the new topography affords new kinds of battles to be fought

so that's like one portion of the abstraction i use to think about these sorts of things

as i was saying before, software developers are really good at implementing technological solutions which draw lines of flight; the idea is always some new fix to shake things up so that we have perfect clean setup without any side effects. this is literally what we're trying to do all day on the micro level as we type type type

and i think this is part of why there are the spats between activitypub and atproto. internet protocols are another kind of territory, much heavier geological landforms than platforms, which are much heavier ecosystems than feeds and communities, but they all territorialize in their own ways

when discussions are had about atproto and activitypub, they often seem to take place mostly in the very abstract programmer “what does the platform technologically afford?”-land; compared to web 1.0 and web 2.0, how can we do some kind of terraforming which will fix conflict and allow everyone to stay neatly and happily in their zones? or to fix whatever other pet-problem you have, though it normally comes down to how can we best enable libertarian exit. of course part of my problem is with seeking that out as a goal, but really in my experience as a lousy software developer, i think the desire to think it through from the start with your eyes closed and then one-shot it is a fantasy

though i fully agree with the semantic meanings of the words written in that ATP x AP open letter from whenever ago, i liked Rudy's response to it:

i'm arguing like 5 things at once, forgive me if my train of thought makes no sense...

ok, social problems are very hard and complex beasts, and the programmer mindset is to simplify and abstract away the complexity, and then solve the simpler version of it, and then point to it after the fact like "hey! i solved it!"

some applications

the main reason why the original tweets stuck in my head is because it's a really really scary time to be trans in usa

a concept that i've thought about a lot in the intersection of D+G micro/macropolitics and programmer ideology is microtemporality and macrotemporality. a lot of time in programming education is trying to figure out how to make your program run faster, the analysis of algorithms with big O notation and then going deeper into how operating systems work and all that crap

macrotemporality are all the sorts of macro operations that you carry out. if a program needs to resolve a users DID into their handle, you need to make an http request to plc.directory, no amount of micro optimizations will prevent the macrotemporal pressure of waiting for your request to hit the server, and then waiting for the response. in general, macrotemporality is loops and function calls and stuff like that, stuff you need to do

microtemporality is the bottom up time pressure within loops and functions and all that, the time it takes to heap allocate instead of stack allocate, all the extra fluff of non-productive maintenance labor which still needs to be done, garbage collection and that sort of stuff. everything that normally adds to the forgotten constant factors in front of the big O notation, but which at times is actually even more important than any sort of macrotemporal optimizations

of course the idea behind these concepts is to apply them to more than just programming. i guess my argument is basically that when we view the ecosystem of programming, it's very nice to just pretend that it's an abstract inhuman world of numbers and data, only care about the macrotemporal side of development. what features did you add to your software this week, what features do you still need to add. this summer, i think a really big driver behind my productivity was my ability to metabolize a lot of my fears about the political moment into macrotemporal progress. but i think as we simplify the world more and more so we can ignore all the terrifying data coming out of it, a microtemporal pressure builds

i sure hope some trans people are born into a transgender ideology of joy & pride, but i'm not totally stupid: of course i don't want to be trans and i just want to exit that sphere of life in stealth. but just as reppers eventually must crack when the microtemporal pressure prevents all other courses of action, so too does my self-loathing in the face of an administration that really wants me to disappear

to spell out exactly what i mean by microtemporal pressure: more and more of my time each day is spent in fear that my government is going to ban the medicine i need to live nationally, and deem any DIY mutual organizations as terrorism. i'm getting pings about backsliding rights from random tranny music adjacent discord servers i joined years ago, and a friend of a friend of a friend maybe is on a no fly list. i know that probably a bunch of this is FUD mass hysteria, but a bunch of it probably isn't, and ALL IVE WANTED TO DO THIS WHOLE TIME IS TYPE MY STUPID CODES. all the built up anxiety needs to go somewhere, and, at a certain point, type type typing doesn't do it any more, i need to allocate my time not to software but metabolizing my anxiety through researching if i can get german citizenship, or israeli citizenship. I FUCKING HATE ISRAEL. this is what i mean by a build-up of microtemporal pressure

i really don't want this to be a callout post, but

i don't at all want to make everything political, and no, i really don't want to live in a perpetual state of activism, and no it's not at all very healthy

at a certain point you get caught up in the endless refactor, but at another point everything is spaghetti and you can't add any features

i hate lib scolding and all that crap, but half-listening and nodding to marginalized voices a little bit is not the worst thing in the world. i know because i feel like basically everything good in my life has come out of trying to just hoping to ignore the complexities of the world and it hasn't ended up mattering

self-critique

the main goal of xcvr in my view is to try and draw a line of flight that makes it easier to make friends on social media. i think that the very nature of most platforms as like attention markets causes them to be very alienating and cause the accumulation of attention. on the other hand, i think platforms like discord—dark forests in general—are very closed off and don't function like public spaces

so my experience in the trans alt imageboard sphere, and what i've heard about forums—though they were basically all dead by the time i had internet access—leads me to believe that flatter algorithms and irc-style chat rooms are much better for making friends and all that, but i really have no good reason to believe it has anything to do with the logic of the platforms instead of the scales that they operate at. & of course in addition to reverse chronological and bump-based feeds that i plan on making, i plan on there being a feed generator lexicon like bluesky which means that most of the social problems that i'm setting out to solve will probably not be solved through clever technological solutions

even if my intervention does work to get a diversity of people into a flat digital space, i think the dynamics of territorialization are important to be aware of: every deterritorialization is accompanied by a reterritorialization. this is why i keep coming back to: please don't be mean to the great founders of tangled, these are impulses there in everyone, especially me

idk this has gone on long enough. anxieties and bad emotions have been properly metabolized for now. i just really wanted to convey that unfortunately if ur trans writing software is political at this moment. anyway, i'm ready to go back to living in my simple pretend world and write some microsoft typescript!

i did a bit of work on images last week. i need to look over and think a bit more about the database side of things, but assuming it's more or less ok i'm gonna work on the frontend flow to paste an image and then create my first org.xcvr.lrc.media records (haven't thought about fetching them or distributing them on the lrc event stream yet, but i'm just planning on fetching them immediately after the record is created and storing them on disk for a day probably (& refetching them whenever someone wants them after i delete them), hopefully it won't be the worst)

take care!

rachel