Discussion
I worry that some people aren’t taking Omarchy seriously enough. It’s not just another Linux distro. It’s a well-orchestrated campaign to centralize power and influence within the Linux FOSS ecosystem. And it’s working.
Anyone paying attention to DHH and what he stands for can see what’s going on here. When the guy who thinks that brown people don’t belong in society hires the guy who thinks trans people shouldn’t exist, you can see where this is going.
@errant @neatnik @scanlime@misc.name
The people demanding "no politics" in things at best want to just close their eyes and ears. At worst, they are complicit.
I recently wrote about the adjacent field of people demanding artists and their art being apolitical, and how this itself is of course a political demand - and how it mostly serves the purpose of protecting the perpetrators and the ignorant to be reminded of the consequences of their (in)actions.
Let's just in turn not be silent :)
@thepurpleoctopus @errant @neatnik The people who want to take politics out of art would be funny, if they weren't so much part of the problem.
When they think "art," they clearly think "pretty pictures with no particular meaning," not things like Picasso's Guernica. BTW: if you're not familiar with that painting, don't be in a fragile state of mind when you look it up.
But OK, boys (and you know they're mostly boys) let's do that. No more Star Trek, Star Wars, in fact, all SF including the entire field of cyberpunk, all fantasy fiction, especially Lord of the Rings and V for Vendetta... wait, guys. What do you mean, "don't take away my shiny things"? You wanted to get rid of art that has politics in it! This is not the time to sing "you can't take the skies from me."
@KatS @errant @neatnik
That's one part of it. And of course, then there is also the ideological background of the demand for "apolitical art". I've recently written a piece on exactly this:
-> https://ko-fi.com/post/The-Fascist-Lie-of-Apolitical-Art-E0U026JMAA
(freely accessible, no paywall)
@neatnik This corruption is not just about DHH. Anyone who wants to complain about agentic distros need to be focusing just as much attention on the fact that Linus has made it clear the kernel is going to be AI-generated & if we don't like it, then to fork it & leave. And who are the biggest donors to The Linux Foundation? Would it surprise anyone that many of those TLF donors wrote a check to DHH (Dell, Shopify, Stripe, Cloudflare, Oculus, etc.)? I hate to write this, but Linux is compromised.
@archivescribe I wonder how Linus Torvalds would respond to this. @neatnik
@rishidass @neatnik Likely, by yelling at me and swearing nothing of the kind is happening, and all of the donors to his check are nice people...really (and AI a "useful tool" [his own words]). I mean, if nothing else, he's consistent. He didn't just develop this view. He practices what he preaches. That is the problem not just of Linus but the entire TLF board that has allowed this. I hate seeing this situation & wish it wasn't happening.
@neatnik How is it doing that? It's just some shitty dotfiles I really don't understand how that can be a well-orchestrated campaign to centralize power and influence within the Linux FOSS ecosystem?
@sackofbones See, this is exactly what I'm talking about when I say that I'm worried about people not taking it seriously enough. A collection of shitty dotfiles doesn't need millions of dollars. But Omarchy is getting that money, and they're using it to organize. Now use your imagination to think about how a group of fascists might use a huge pile of money to influence modern software. If you're not concerned, you should be.
@neatnik I just want to point something out to y'all: before this kerfuffle, I had never heard of omarchy. And now part of me kinda wants to try it. Do you maybe worry about a streisand effect here?
@ech @neatnik there could be, but I have a feeling the results will be very underwhelming, it's not much after all, technically speaking. Ideologically speaking it's worse than asbestos, but yeah, there's no reason at all for this distro to get so much money besides all those companies saying yes, fascism is good actually, all at once so none of their circle will be left behind.
@ech @neatnik Not really. Let's be honest, whose voices are getting drowned out here? It's not theirs. Normies looking to get out of Windows are going to those MSM sites telling them about Omarchy. Unless the mainstream media takes a stand, & it won't (because they rely on those corps for ad $), we'll get sidelined.
@ech @neatnik Streisand-effect is the wrong term here, rather a "Trust me, I'm lying "effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_Me,_I%27m_Lying)
@neatnik Can you expand on this? Why is it more than a niche (agentic workflows and high performance gaming) in a niche (desktop Linux)?
I get that it’s bad, but not that it’s dangerous. What are the next steps?
@phipunk When was the last time you saw a niche in a niche raise $18M in 20 days? Not from venture capital, but from direct donations from people and companies.
The dangerous part is in that amount of cash being raised through so many people who obviously don't care about DHH's fascist ideology, and the money going to the very person with the fascist ideology.
omarchy
@neatnik
ok but like, how does one fascist having 20M USD change anything in a world where some fascists have billions of USD?
What are you afraid they will do with that money?
Pay other fascists to write more code that nobody outside of their bubble will use?
Bribe FOSS maintainers who aren't fascists yet to accept fascist changes into their codebase?
@wolf480pl A friend of mine who doesn't even use Linux just wrote me, unprompted, raving about Omarchy.
@wolf480pl @phipunk "Nobody outside of their bubble will use" is optimistic. I would love it if that turns out to be the case, but looking at the patron list it's pretty clear that some big companies are primed to elevate this distro. That hasn't happened yet, so of course it's fair to dismiss my own speculative concerns, but it's still early days and it feels somewhat inevitable.
But regarding the $20M, no, this isn't about bribing anyone. It's about creating a footprint that could ultimately become too large and too influential, and establishing a level of influence that could be used to further advance harmful ideologies.
@phipunk @neatnik here's a random post from his blog. plenty of others in there that lay bare his dream.
https://world.hey.com/dhh/three-sacred-cows-that-must-die-so-europe-can-live-1afb203d
@neatnik you're right about how bad it is, but what are we supposed to do about it if we were to take it seriously?
@aburka @neatnik I tell people who bring Omarchy up enthusiastically about DHH's fascism and about how bad the code is.
So far even two very AI pilled individuals (one fight at the time) are horrified enough to either say they won't check it out anymore or to stop bringing it up.
But it's worrying how being aligned on vibe coding makes these people enthusiastically extol this shiny new thing without the most rudimentary background check - another example of AI addiction eroding critical thinking, or increaaing people's impatience I guess
A single chemical monopoly in Germany funded the Nazis. Banks helped hide the money trail & launder the looting later.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/how-big-business-bailed-out-nazis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IG_Farben
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/jul/31/bank-of-england-and-nazis-stolen-gold
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-23513654
Don't ignore the malign social engineering that The Moneyed can & will buy.
Narratives that aim to dehumanize ethnicities, genders, or religions are used later to justify wars, slavery, and genocides.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cq5p70lpwzqo
This isn’t about Linux. It’s about building and systematically growing a technology-backed ideology of hate. It’s about creating a space in FOSS where hate can flourish, and overriding systems of accountability by making them irrelevant.
@neatnik it simply doesn't take that much money to develop a distro, however sophisticated. It's basically a political donation disguised as a technology partnership.
@thomasjwebb @neatnik Um. I think this depends a lot on what one means by "develop a distro". It takes *a lot* of money if the distribution is actually employing people to work on core technologies (e.g., Fedora, openSUSE), maintain build systems, and so forth.
Omarchy, though? No. Not so much. Even if its founder was otherwise unobjectionable (sadly, not) there's no reason that an Arch-based project that largely consists of minor tweaks should need anywhere near that kind of funding.
It's shameful that people are supporting not only DHH's politics, but firehosing him with more money while projects like GNOME, KDE, LibreOffice, Python, and many others struggle for funding.
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@neatnik @scanlime what really pisses me off is when I've tried to point out to people whats happening all I get back is 'uhh, I dont like politics in my open source, please dont bring that up' or 'people should be free to use what they want'. Nobody wants to engage with the problem.