I decided to waste my fucking time and read the awful medium article that keeps getting linked and, boy fucking howdy, it’s exactly what I thought it was. let’s start with the conclusion first:
TLDR: my conclusion is that it is far more likely that Proton and its CEO are actually liberals.
which is just a really weird thing to treat like a revelation when we’ve very recently seen a ton of liberal CEOs implement fash policies, including one (Zuckerberg) who briefly considered running as a Democrat before he was advised that nobody found him the least bit appealing
anyway, let’s go to the quick bullet points this piece of shit deserves:
- it’s posted by an account that hasn’t done anything else on medium
- the entire thing is written like stealth PR and a bunch of points are copied straight out of Proton’s marketing. in fact, the tone and structure are so off that I’m just barely not willing to accuse this article of being generated by an LLM, because it’s just barely not repetitive enough to entirely read like AI
- they keep doing the “nobody (especially the filthy redditors) read Andy or Proton’s actual posts in full” rhetorical technique, which is very funny when people on mastodon were frantically linking archives of those posts after they got deleted, and the posts on Reddit were deleted in a way that was designed to provoke confusion and cover Proton’s tracks. I can’t blame anyone for going on word of mouth if they couldn’t find an archive link.
- like every liberal-presenting CEO turned shithead, Andy has previously donated a lot of money to organizations associated with the Democrats
- not a single word about how Proton’s tied up in bitcoin or boosting LLMs and where that places them politically
- also nothing about how powerless the non-profit associated with Proton is in practice
- Andy can’t be a shithead, he hired a small handful of feminists and occasionally tweets about how much he supports left-wing causes! you know, on the nazi site
- e: “However, within the context of Trump’s original post that Andy is quoting, it seems more likely that “big business” = Big Tech, and “little guys” = Little Tech, but this is not obvious if you did not see the original post, and this therefore caused outrage online.” what does this mean. that’s exactly the context I read into Andy’s original post, and it’s a fucking ridiculous thing to say and a massive techfash dogwhistle loud and shrill enough that everybody heard it. it’s fucking weird to falsely claim you’re being misinterpreted and then give an explanation that’s completely in line with the damning shit you’re being accused of, then for someone else to come along and pretend that somehow absolves you
there’s more in there but I’m tired of reading this article, the writing style really is fucking exhausting
e: also can someone tell me how shit like this can persuade anyone? it’s one of the most obvious, least persuasive puff pieces I’ve ever read. did the people who love proton more than they love privacy need something, anything to latch onto to justify how much they like the product?
I like this a lot! the idea of buying a new (and usually quite expensive) device that intentionally does less has never really sat right with me, but repurposing old or secondhand devices with purpose-built software has always made quite a bit more sense.
to expand on the idea in hopefully not too much of a tangential direction, one very nice thing about repurposed hardware over new bespoke hardware is that if the repurposed device is running an open source software stack with resources to spare (which is often the case), you can extend the functionality of the device in ways that are specifically useful to you personally.
as a real-world example, when I set up a new computer for myself these days I usually start with Linux that boots straight into emacs, which is a very competent typewriter running on a kernel that supports most of the hardware I’ll throw at it and comes with a wide compatibility base and fairly minimal hardware requirements. next if I need to work with more complicated documents, I pull in X11 and go graphical. if I need applications, I pull in EXWM and now I have everything I need for a generalized computing environment. but there’s no need to go that far — and every step of the way, I can customize what I’m doing to fit my own needs.
I usually do all of the above on NixOS, but it feels like the general idea has possibly outgrown Nix, and it might do even better as a dedicated Linux distro targeting repurposed devices.