[Noisebridge-discuss] Sigh -- I'm not helping with Maker Faires this year.

Matt Joyce matt at nycresistor.com
Tue Apr 3 22:03:50 UTC 2012


The instated goal in your proposed hypothetical scenario is to force a
bias that did not exist before into Makerfaire.  As an intellectual I
would be concerned with the criteria of that bias.  This hasn't been
discussed in specificity anywhere today by anyone.

It kind of makes debate in this arena pointless.

-Matt

On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 3:01 PM, Seth David Schoen <schoen at loyalty.org> wrote:
> bandit writes:
>
>> An absolute refusal to associate oneself with anything tainted by
>> the military also leads to the refusal to have anything to do with
>> technology transfer from military use to civilian use. The medical
>> advances alone are reason enough for tech transfer - think of the
>> blood clotting bandages as a zen-like example.
>
> We could also distinguish between "working on things that are receiving
> military funding (now)" and "using knowledge or technology that were
> developed with military funding".  I think people in this thread haven't
> made this distinction this way when they've referred to things like the
> Internet that were created through military funding.
>
> Here's one way this distinction could be useful: someone with a lot of
> colleagues or customers who object to military involvement could
> plausibly be influenced to decline it because of their objections, but
> someone doing research with a lot of future applications can't really
> hear from prospective users who object to the military role, nor can
> those prospective users make a very credible commitment as a group
> today to boycott the applications in the future.
>
> If the Maker Faire organizers hear "hey, a couple of awesome hackers
> who were great contributors to the Faire, and some attendees, have a
> problem with this thing", that's a clear, immediate concern for them.
> By contrast, if someone hears "hey, a couple of awesome hackers are
> boycotting GPS, the Internet, and cyanoacrylate glues because they
> have a problem with where they came from", it creates a pretty diffuse
> concern that some unidentified people _might_ also boycott the
> still-unknown fruits of some current research far in the future.
>
> One way of summing this up is that boycotts are probably more
> effective and credible when they target ongoing behaviors that the
> boycott participants object to, rather than trying to punish past
> objectionable behavior in terrorem.  But I'm not claiming a general
> theory of what makes boycotts tactically or ethically appropriate.
>
> --
> Seth David Schoen <schoen at loyalty.org>      |  No haiku patents
>     http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/        |  means I've no incentive to
>  FD9A6AA28193A9F03D4BF4ADC11B36DC9C7DD150  |        -- Don Marti
> _______________________________________________
> Noisebridge-discuss mailing list
> Noisebridge-discuss at lists.noisebridge.net
> https://www.noisebridge.net/mailman/listinfo/noisebridge-discuss



More information about the Noisebridge-discuss mailing list