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One of the best pieces of self-hosted software ever to exist.
Edit: This is Immich! for the folks who don't know.
Their argument was that software can, in itself, be fascist, and that's what we went around and around on. The example given was facial recognition software that can determine race (and later, country of origin).
Essentially, I said exactly what you're saying, while they argued the opposite. I wish I quoted them, but I did only directly address their claims, if you'll take my word for it.
I don't want the government to have and use facial recognition software (their example) and extensive security camera systems (my example, such as Flock), not because those solutions are fascist in and of themselves, but that they can be used by fascists to accomplish their goals. Even if the current regime uses them purely for good (i.e. completely opt in facial recognition, cameras inaccessible to police until there's a warrant with no passive collection) the next regime may not.
The extension of the argument I'm making (and maybe them kinda?) is that it's functionally the same as if the software were political.
You can make software that nearly exclusively benefits a particular political belief for family of beliefs.
So even if it's not actually technically political, it can be functionally political, at which point the argument is splitting hairs.
I think those are important hairs to split.
Let's say there's a camera system built due to a direct public vote and rolled out by a political party all agree defends democracy. The stated goal is catching red light violations and speeders, and it's a popular system. As part of the functionality it reads license plates, and that is verified by a human every time, and no footage is stored if there's no violation.
Is that system fascist? Most would say no, and it exists in many states, like California and Washington.
Then the next election, a fascist is elected, and one of the first moves is to repurpose that system to track undesirables, and now it stores a ton of footage.
Is that system now fascist? It's the same exact system as in the previous example, it's just being used for fascist ends, such as tracking vehicles with certain plates (e.g. Illegal immigrants, minorities, etc) Nothing has changed in the capabilities or programming of the system, the only change was when to capture footage, what people use it for, and how long to store it.
Yes, it's theoretically possible to design a fascist system, such as an LLM that only gives fascist answers, but that's an incredibly narrow definition.
Just because a product has a plausibly deniable use case doesn't really mean that it's not functionally political.
If someone creates a super invasive surveillance system and initially uses it for a seemingly benign purpose, that doesn't mean the intention all along wasn't more nefarious, especially if the system was practically irresistible for power structures and it's use directly lead to authoritarianism. Like giving someone their first hit for free.
In a case like that, I would discount the benign use as a red herring, and say that the software is functionally political.
The intention can be fascist, sure, but that doesn't mean the solution is fascist.
For example, I think it's pretty clear that Lemmy was designed by tankies to create a safe space for tankies (why would the instances the main devs maintain be overly protective of China and Russia if it weren't?), but that doesn't make Lemmy "tankie," it's a software project that can be used by fascists, tankies, commies, anarchists, statists, etc, because it's just a software program.
Likewise, a surveillance system can be used by a fascist government, private company to protect company secrets, government agency like the Pentagon for internal use, or even private individuals to ID who is at the door. It's only fascist of it's used to further fascist goals, like identifying minorities or protestors. But then, it's still not the software that's fascist, but the whole system, meaning how people use it and the policies in place.
The chance of a given piece of software being "fascist" is incredibly low, since it would need to act in a fascist way and only a fascist way, or only be useful for fascist ends. Like the fascist LLM example I gave, or a training simulator that is hard-coded to only present fascist ideology.
Right. That's what we're talking about.
But I think the bar is a little lower. I think it's enough to be primarily useful for (eg) fascist goals. If it happens to have minor non-fascist uses, I don't think that materially changes anything.
I don't think that Lemmy is primarily useful for furthering tankie goals.
I think that privacy invading surveillance systems are primarily useful for furthering authoritarian goals, by intention or not. There are some nice alternative uses, but I think that the use case of primary importance is in service to authoritarianism, which makes it authoritarian software.