additional meis meiing meifully meihapsulating meibe (@mei)

what is ethical software supposed to mean without ethical hardware? I feel like this is the oppression of first-world residents that causes us to not be able to opt out of congoloese cobalt mines and so on, if we wish to meet a reasonable standard of living like having access to digital services or owning a wheelchair (not to mention extremely online dependence on the internet, that is sometimes the only option for people living rurally.)

i am writing this with the power of the most advanced semiconductor fabs, so that my little 9" laptop can chooch its fans on fancy transitions before sending it at 1Gbit across fiberoptic cables to be fanned out to similar processors all over the world. I am dependent on an absurd network, and this process has brought me tremendous wealth in terms of interpersonal growth and fulfillment. I get to talk to the most amazing people I can find whenever we agree to. This is probably the reason I am still alive, and definitely involved in making me happy.

I write fun code. I write code that makes me happy, that involves actual computer science problems that are perhaps unnamed; that I rediscover for myself as I naturally toy with the only machine that tells me if I'm right or wrong. This is computing, for me.

But for the world, computing seems to be everything. I don't want that.

I am working on a chat protocol, as I have been on-and-off for years (though the exact one has changed): @polyphonychat. The purpose is to design an arbitrary simulated space that enables people to communicate effectively and have fun outside of surveillance capitalism. But of course, this is still on the internet. We are reacting to the "my chat platform that is funded by a loan and now needs to pay it back" problem with "let's make our own chat platform".

And this is a nice proposition, or I wouldn't be doing it.. But what exactly? On the one end, I could be like my grandpa — building circuits with no PCBs, and connecting them to mains. Make a radio transceiver like that, and build community with others who have this type of equipment.

Or I could buy perhaps-used microcontrollers and find a way to network them, then join/organize a chat ecosystem on top of that.

Or I could just keep on what I'm doing, and work on software (perhaps censorship-resistant) that has responsible design. Put in a shit-tonne of work to encourage people to be good via the medium. It is the message, after all.

..Where on this spectrum does this become an exclusive hobby that requires irreducible and great time/monetary investment for normal people to use? How do I balance fighting my local struggles with addressing global inequities like the Congoloese mines I opened with? These questions are hard to answer, and even harder because I live far away from the EU/US mainland and benefit from having these virtual connections back there.

So soon, one day, I will make the jump and suffer all the pains of an immigrant. I will live close to a hackerspace, and community spaces will not be full of genocide supporters ✊️🍉. I will be incredibly lonely, then I will find a home and accustom myself to traditions. I will become more marginalized in some ways, and less in others.

There will be, for the first time in a (very) long time, people who think like me. Who I can simply exist around without having to skirt the elephant in the room of whether or not they would like to kill my neighbours..

And what then? To be found out..