Cassandra Granade 🏳️⚧️
I could dissect why; perhaps the FOSS movement could have better prepared for this moment if the Right to Read had instead been the Right to Make Art, the Right to E-mail Your Friends, or the Right to Be Trans Online.
But ultimately, there's grief under it all. It's not praxis, it doesn't help us survive this moment, to reflect on what could have been. It is human, though, and I will posit that it's OK to grieve that. Perhaps I'm just being selfish because I do grieve it. Still.
Cassandra Granade 🏳️⚧️
I grieve it because what we lost is what we so desperately need right now, in this moment. A fascist movement has successfully compromised huge swaths of human communication, including both social media and person-to-person communications — but we've lost so much of the resilience of the pre–Web 2.0 world.
Cassandra Granade 🏳️⚧️
The internet has come so far and changed so much in my lifetime, but I also grieve almost every day for what we've lost along that journey.
Decentralized networks used to be the default, from IRC to Usenet. When they were centralized, adversarial interop allowed things like Trillian and Pidgin to flourish. So much more used to be client-side, so that you owned your data in a meaningful way. Perhaps most importantly, it used to be much easier to put your stuff on the web.
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