#privilege

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commented on Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport

Cal Newport: Digital Minimalism (AudiobookFormat, 2019, Penguin Audio)

"Minimalism is the art of knowing how much is just enough. Digital minimalism applies this …

I've been thinking about this one quite a bit lately. I'm wondering:

To what extent is it a question of economic or social #privilege to be able to make this choice at all? An example from my own life: as the pressures of #inflation continue, it feels like less of a choice to have this-or-that store app with #coupons and #discounts and whatnot on my phone. Even if I minimize the disturbance as much as possible by turning off #notifications, I'm still giving up a little sliver of my available attention in exchange for a (questionable?) economic benefit.

Also, for someone who is saddled with a lot of responsibilities or #mentalload or both, especially when time is low and a lot of planning and coordination is required, how realistic is it that one could make the shift away from depending so much on the phone?

Or looking at it …

“50,000 dead Palestinians isn’t enough to call it genocide.”

How fucking morally vacuous do you have to be to for such a thought to even enter that privileged brain of yours?

Forget the consensus of every genocide scholar out there that this is genocide. Forget the live-streamed suffering. How devoid of humanity are you for your argument to be “that’s just not enough dead people for me.”

This is a very effective demonstration of what 'privilege' is. It doesn't matter what position you're born into: Even if your circumstances are no fault of your own & have nothing to do with your actions, you still have to run the race.

I kind of hate when people post comments assuming domain-specific knowledge from laymen such as "the fact people need to be told this is a little troubling to say the least".

It shows those people have not tried to even see how hard bootstrapping the knowledge they're assuming of others actually is, especially now that search engines have enshittified into uselessness and the hardware their comment pertains to no longer comes with useful manuals for their operation.

In a lot of cases, the knowledge also pertains to hacks for patching over design flaws & botched work that should've been done properly to start with (which would make said knowledge entirely obsolete as anything other than a curiosity).

It reeks of unacknowledged #privilege (and a heaping of normalization of deviance).

Contributing to open source is a privilege. It doesn't mean you have cheated to do it or that you don't deserve praise for doing it!

It only means that not everyone can do it. You need the skills, time and will to do it in addition to doing whatever you need to have a good life.

Not everyone has that time. Not everyone works in the field.

We must acknowledge it to meaningfully convey the value of open source in society.