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Notes -
As a longtime user of Python, I've just dug into this topic. This looks useful.
The answer to "What's the deal" will highly depend on how much context you already have. Python was started by Guido van Rossum in the early 90s and Tim Peters has been another major figure who shaped the language from very early on (Even those who don't know him may have been influenced by his vibe that gave Python a whimsical and fun atmosphere as opposed to the corporate drudgery of Java for example. You may also know him from "Timsort", the sorting algorithm he invented for Python.)
Guido was the so-called BDFL (the tongue-in-cheek "benevolent dictator for life") of the Python project, but he stepped down in 2018 and handed the project leadership over to a Steering Council. Committees and councils certainly have a particular way of operating, and I'm not surprised this has happened and I wouldn't be surprised if Guido exited precisely because he felt "this" type of pressure already.
It looks like the latest thing was:
So my best effort Gestalt-perception is that there is a growing desire to wield the power of cancellation and to weed out undesirable figures from the top of the community if they have the wrong race and gender or are not fully on board with wokeness taking over everything.
I'm not sure if Tim Peters is just naive or is was genuinely trying to fight it but apparently he was quite inquisitive about the reasoning behind this power concentration step and in what kind of case it would be necessary that can't be solved with the current system. His questioning was deemed too rude and a flood of vague and emotional cloud of accusations was collected against him and he got suspended for 3 months, in effect for daring to question why the board needs more power concentration.
From here my subjective view.
When Guido gave up his BDFL status it was 2018, already well within the midst of the Great Awokening, and I remember thinking that this won't end well. Committees and councils have a certain way of operating and offer certain levers that the techie nerds are just too naive quokkas to comprehend. They never stood a chance. It's all about power accumulation, the successor ideology marching through the institutions. We've seen this in astrophysics, in geography, in open source software, in gaming, in movies, in sci-fi books, in knitting, in birdwatching, in hiking, or whatever. The playbook is extremely simple, but works again and again as there is no memetic antidote at hand. "It's just basic decency, we must protect victims from (micro)aggressions, this is harmful, the hidden dogwhistle implications of your words constitute violence, you are causing uncomfortable emotions, you are triggering, we must be more inclusive, you are the reason that black and brown people and women don't join us etc." Codes of conduct, culture war wedge issues shoved into technical discussions, every cause turning into the "Omnicause", accusations of racism, misogyny, calling everything white supremacy etc. I imagine that readers of the Motte are well familiar with this playbook.
I remember when the tech space was all about actual democracy and distributed decision making, decentralization in infrastructure and organization. But essentially all these scifi-reading revolutionary-larping techies got their asses handed to them and got infiltrated with essentially no resistance.
This may turn too ranty, but it just bursts out of me.
One needs to step back enough and see that it is most definitely the fault of van Rossum and Peters and the other nerds. They were naive and got outcompeted. The 90s and 00s are no more. The edginess was welcome when South Park wielded it against Bush and the bible thumpers, but now that the system is run by the "correct people" we need no more of it. The greybeard techie nerd thinks "whatever it's just some code of conduct, I'm a liberal and not racist, of course I support it", still stuck in the culture of 20 years ago. The wakeup is coming gradually, project by project, but there is no unified ability to push back, there is no workable answer to the crybully techniques. So people just turn their heads away and hope it won't show up at their doorstep. But each time we do that, more and more of this suffocating bureaucracy grows yet another tentacle. Yet another committee and department added whose only job is to grow itself and gather more power to purify itself even more and to cancel more and to create more committees with fat jobs and suck more money to workshops that are struggle sessions and to oust more experienced competent people who aren't in full service of this basilisk, if need be by questioning the whole concept of competence and meritocracy as constructs of patriarchal cishet white supremacy. Reading the reactions to the current debacle, many techies still seem to think this kind of thinking is conspiratorial, and it's Fox News misinformation or whatever. And they become surprised Pikachu when it happens to the nicest and kindest of people they know, because in every other instance when the accusation came from the Right Side of History they just believed that it must have been some horrible person, of course. Every single time when such a thing happens, the community members who previously never paid close attention believe it's something specific to their community. They seek to pinpoint how this happened but don't connect the dots, don't see the forest for the trees and start arguing the micro-mechanics of what happened.
The age of Tim Peterses, Guido van Rossums, Linus Torvaldses and Richard Stallmans has ended. Their spaces have been thoroughly conquered by the new corporate-HR ethics ideology using a feminine-coded slippery emotional bullying tactic that these men have no capability to deal with. It's all couched in apparently non-confrontational flowery language out of a nonviolent communication therapy book crossed with Machiavelli. They will readily gaslight you if you claim to have picked up on a pattern. But it's just decency! Unless you harbor crimethink, you got nothing to fear! I do believe that the kind of creativity displayed by these people, or those at Bell Labs before have certain cultural prerequisites and HR schoolmarms breathing down your neck, academic bean counter admins counting publications and their citations will suffocate the creativity. There was something special in the US, just look at how much even Europe has been behind, in the culture of innovation, or how hard and slow it has been for China to start truly innovative creative work despite the resources and work hours pumped into it. It's not automatic and not eternal.
Zooming out further, what happens once all of tech and science and academia and cultural production is taken over by the woke HR-pleasers? Does the US stand a chance long term? The lack of a viable alternative destination means that people can't really escape somewhere that would support their kind of thinking. I don't think China will become a viable refuge. When the Nazis cracked down on "Jewish Physics", those Jewish physicists emigrated to the US and built the bomb that won the war. Too many of us assumed that tech will automatically accelerate towards a libertarian utopia. Forever the year 2000, just with ever faster computers and better gadgets, better graphics in video games and higher-res movies downloaded with higher-speed internet. Turns out things do happen.
What can we as individuals do? I don't think it's worth taking on these fights one by one. That game is rigged, the cheat code has been figured out to turn liberalism against itself in pursuit of authoritarianism. Can one make new projects, communities and institutions? Not without coordination, which is close to impossible. What the next years will bring is more and more surveillance, the UK is already ramping up facial recognition capabilities. There will be more and more online censorship, LLM-driven moderation and flagging, including stylometry. More and more blocked bank accounts and journalistic hitpieces against anyone who tries to ramp up something outside the tentacles of this all-strangling thing.
But what we can and should do is think. And think deeply. Tune out the noise and read - ancient and medieval philosophy, the bible, the classics of fiction, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and Shakespeare. Watch old movies, get out of the current-year narratives. Humans are the same as ever, we have been here before. Techies are caught with their pants down the moment a "wordcel" applies their verbal judo on them, as there is no foundation there, besides the axiomatic belief that Star Trek is the obvious default. Instead of the Family-Guy-like irony and post-irony there people have to figure out positive values to unironically stand behind and believe in.
I don't think any of this is the end of the world, the generations before us have been through much tougher times and power centers have shifted over the course of history. But I guess many of us never expected to be part of history. A lifetime is almost a century. A lot can happen in a century.
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