(C) Alec Muffett's DropSafe blog.
Author Name: Alec Muffett
This story was originally published on allecmuffett.com. [1]
License: CC-BY-SA 3.0.[2]


“responsible capability sharing” | UK civil society creates buzzwords for the new oppression

2023-10-29 09:59:41+00:00

There’s a curious blindness in some parts of civil society where they float new buzzwords to express something that they don’t like — in this case: people are writing apps and there could be bad side-effects — and of course they do this to express how they can add value because as Rachel puts it:

The people who make the product aren’t the best people to predict the risks. https://x.com/rachelcoldicutt/status/1718156851873796547?s=20

Except… sometimes that’s just well-meaning but entirely off the point narcissism.

The Binary Nature Of Shipping Code, And The Risks Of Policing That

In the end code is either written or not-written, and published or not-published; this is a loop and decision path which I had to take in 1991 with the publication of the first modern password cracker, which met with exactly the same “ZOMG THE POTENTIAL HARMS!” opinions from (under-informed, people to whom it was new) pundits over a span of several years, but nobody was/is pricing up the opportunity cost of shipping it precisely as designed rather than attempting to restrict its distribution or to restrict it in some pointless manner.

There’s a lot of truth in the saying that “to ask permission is to seek denial” — and that’s what people who push for “responsible capability sharing” are seeking: the leverage to become people who can deny others the freedom to ship code.

I suspect it’s not perceived in that way, being instead more of a “speech can be a harm and people should be protected from the consequential harms of speech” — but again that’s a purely negative focus and just as one can assert “people who make the product aren’t the best people to predict the risks” — they equally are not the best people to predict how their software may be used for the benefit of humanity.

The fact is: nobody is.

But where I feel this gets really dangerous is that the concepts and framing — that there is software the shape of which is innately somehow bad, that only irresponsible people author such, that we can nudge, even make people more responsible — is highly desirable to the next round of online safety legal debate, where the Government will likely adopt whatever buzzwords like this are lying around and pervert them to their cause of preventing and policing software development.

Lack of self-awareness of this risk is greatly to the shame of Digital Rights Civil Society.
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[1] URL: https://alecmuffett.com/article/108046
[2] URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

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