Musing out loud some casaul philosophical reflection on fedi and tech ethics, related to this toot:
In our FOSS movement and the social impact movements that favor the fediverse we value a set of principles we think are essential to improve all the things that need fixing, in order to move to a better world.
Fediverse as no other other online space can be considered a “humane technology field lab”. People care about the features of their app, and the impact it has on fedizens that use it. This focus on the human side, ethics, and externalities is highly laudible and much needed to become the norm everywhere. The only future of mankind is the one where we find equilibrium of our exploitation with what our planet can provide. Holistic sustainability.
But do we take all the externalities into account fairly? Or are we fooling ourselves that app-centric humane tech focus is enough. We aren’t able to collaborate at scale in our grassroots environment, as Big Industry™ under hypercapitalism is able to do. Yet we do work in public and give all our innovation away, also to the bad actors. Is that responsible? Are we really creating “humane technology” then?
Are we able to control what we create, as we introduce it into society in real-time?
Will our work remains commons based, for the people by the people? Or won’t we be able to avoid corporate capture of our tech followed by ‘business as usual’? Maybe the way we work together now is the best we can muster. But who is pondering if that is the case, and looking into better ways to work ethical and responsible in large-scale grassroots commons that keep sustainable technology ecosystems afloat?
@aschrijver
Due to a bug in the #Discourse #ActivityPub plugin the image is included twice and with the wrong alt-text (the one that auto-generated on image upload).
The #ALT4you alt-text is the exact text of my toot at this location:
https://social.coop/@smallcircles/114884321738552453
cc @angusmcleod
(Plus the federation of this caused another nginx "504 Gateway Time-out" on SocialHub forum)
#ThoughtProvoker 
Around 1975 Abdul Qadeer Khan, a Pakistani spy, managed to steal nuclear secrets from the highly secure uranium enrichment plant Urenco in the Netherlands. This led to nuclear proliferation and Pakistan having the nuclear bomb.
The layers of security at Urenco could not avoid this from happening.
Now..
Are we in #FOSS enriching uranium fully out in the open in how we develop the decentralized #SocialWeb? Or are we reasonably #secure?
My ethics duties done for the day. It is not a popular subject anyway. 
(original source: https://social.coop/@smallcircles/114884961998102017)
This is a fundamentally mistaken assumption. Throwing money around allows corporations to control the workday activity of more developers, which allows them to pump out polished product faster. But they are worse at collaboration than grassroots tech, not better. Which is why the vast majority of their successes are acquired, not generated in-house.
Everything they depend on for interop (the net, the web, hardware standards from electric sockets to USB) outside their vertically-integrated silos is created by engineers collaborating as public interest professionals (facilitated by standards bodies they establish for the purpose), not as loyal lackeys of Company X.
Exactly! Even in this highly securable situation, where state-level actors were highly motivated to prevent leaks, this information still got out. It’s almost like "information wants to be free "(1). It’s ludicrous to think we could keep anything important secret for long, in a loose network of people collaborating on software and protocols. Where most of us are only known by @handles that could be operated by anyone, because “on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” (1).
(1) These old hacker sayings have become cliches because they each express a grain of hard-won truth, tested and proven in practice again and again.
