Wasn't there a different post before that aimed to discuss this matter on DEV too? Well regardless, I'm personally fine. Though surely the affects, even if just in terms of logistics, would be quite large. Also, it should really be asked what necessitates such a change. One way to do that is of course to go back towards the people who are closest to the presumably impacted and ask their feedback and to assess the effectiveness of the move against the outcome and expectations. It's good to not want to do harm, it is another if that desire turns its head to self-righteousness.
But overall I'm fine with it, but I'm not the one most affected by the terminology.
With regards to the political nature of technology that some people have mentioned. Not all technologies carry political weight or will, but some certainly do. You can understand "politics" from various angles, but it is at the heart about the governance of things (people, places, words, thoughts etc.) and the practice of maintaining and creating policies to assist in the governance of these things.
Sometimes politics are retroactively co-opted towards a particular technology. The internet web can be seen as such with recently being more and more associated as a tool with both the ability AND the ideology of being a way to maintain and propagate free speech. That is, it is ideologically palatable for the internet to be seen as a democratizing technology among other things, and the terminologies of politics are now more and more associated with the internet. Though someone might say the internet was from the very beginning a tool with politics by virtue of being developed by the US military, an institutional government body.
At other times technology can be seen as coming to fruition WITH a political standpoint embedded within its logics and mechanisms. Blockchain would be such a modern technology. Sprouted into prominence by Bitcoin from the turmoil of the financial depression in 2008-2009, it (well Bitcoin to be exact) sought to create the traditional way monetary value was governed and handled with a different method. Its decentralized design among other things IS a political decision, deciding that centralization is a worse way to manage the financial world, both for public and personal.
I do think technical developers interact with politics all the time even within the confined discipline of tech. Documentation, styling, linting, guidelines, RFCs, GitHub PR templates are some of the things that police the behavior and conduct of developers.
So while particular technologies do not necessarily always have political will or meaning attached to it, that doesn't mean it can't or that no such political technology exists, in past, present or future.
// , “It is not so important to be serious as it is to be serious about the important things. The monkey wears an expression of seriousness... but the monkey is serious because he itches."(No/No)
At other times technology can be seen as coming to fruition WITH a political standpoint embedded within its logics and mechanisms. Blockchain would be such a modern technology. Sprouted into prominence by Bitcoin from the turmoil of the financial depression in 2008-2009, it (well Bitcoin to be exact) sought to create the traditional way monetary value was governed and handled with a different method. Its decentralized design among other things IS a political decision, deciding that centralization is a worse way to manage the financial world, both for public and personal.
Bravo. This is an excellent perspective I had not considered. And many of the concerns of designing an effective Blockchain involve consideration of adversarial thinking and governance from the start, as in the case of Tezos.
A technical solution was not made to solve a "problem of trust," it was specifically intended as a solution to a betrayal of trust by the makers and chief financial beneficiaries of USA monetary policy.
This may be splitting hairs, but I'd be careful to say that the technology itself is not political, any more than a bomb is political, more that the urge to make it and use it was political.
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Wasn't there a different post before that aimed to discuss this matter on DEV too? Well regardless, I'm personally fine. Though surely the affects, even if just in terms of logistics, would be quite large. Also, it should really be asked what necessitates such a change. One way to do that is of course to go back towards the people who are closest to the presumably impacted and ask their feedback and to assess the effectiveness of the move against the outcome and expectations. It's good to not want to do harm, it is another if that desire turns its head to self-righteousness.
But overall I'm fine with it, but I'm not the one most affected by the terminology.
With regards to the political nature of technology that some people have mentioned. Not all technologies carry political weight or will, but some certainly do. You can understand "politics" from various angles, but it is at the heart about the governance of things (people, places, words, thoughts etc.) and the practice of maintaining and creating policies to assist in the governance of these things.
Sometimes politics are retroactively co-opted towards a particular technology. The internet web can be seen as such with recently being more and more associated as a tool with both the ability AND the ideology of being a way to maintain and propagate free speech. That is, it is ideologically palatable for the internet to be seen as a democratizing technology among other things, and the terminologies of politics are now more and more associated with the internet. Though someone might say the internet was from the very beginning a tool with politics by virtue of being developed by the US military, an institutional government body.
At other times technology can be seen as coming to fruition WITH a political standpoint embedded within its logics and mechanisms. Blockchain would be such a modern technology. Sprouted into prominence by Bitcoin from the turmoil of the financial depression in 2008-2009, it (well Bitcoin to be exact) sought to create the traditional way monetary value was governed and handled with a different method. Its decentralized design among other things IS a political decision, deciding that centralization is a worse way to manage the financial world, both for public and personal.
I do think technical developers interact with politics all the time even within the confined discipline of tech. Documentation, styling, linting, guidelines, RFCs, GitHub PR templates are some of the things that police the behavior and conduct of developers.
So while particular technologies do not necessarily always have political will or meaning attached to it, that doesn't mean it can't or that no such political technology exists, in past, present or future.
Bravo. This is an excellent perspective I had not considered. And many of the concerns of designing an effective Blockchain involve consideration of adversarial thinking and governance from the start, as in the case of Tezos.
A technical solution was not made to solve a "problem of trust," it was specifically intended as a solution to a betrayal of trust by the makers and chief financial beneficiaries of USA monetary policy.
This may be splitting hairs, but I'd be careful to say that the technology itself is not political, any more than a bomb is political, more that the urge to make it and use it was political.