Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy[1] states that in any bureaucratic organization
there will be two kinds of people:
First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization.
Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many
of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some
agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective
farming administration.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples
are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of
education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff,
etc.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep
control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions
within the organization.
I like to term the Second class that generally predominates in large enterprises, normally termed "middle management", the "Middle Management Machiavellis" for whom life is nothing but budget boundary assault/defense, and the assassin's game of angling for promotions.
I am thankful programming jobs paid pretty well such that it was roughly equivalent to several levels up the ladder in other professions without nearly the same soul-crushing view into the venality of mankind.
But this, I think, is a temporary thing. I look at the shockingly low salaries of ACTUAL ENGINEERS that went to ACTUAL ENGINEERING SCHOOL like chemical engineering, nuclear engineering, civil engineering, and they make much less than programmers.
The thing that’s hard to intuit is that salary isn’t a reflection of the difficulty or importance of your job. It’s a reflection of economics. The skill set of a software engineer enables a better business model than that of a civil engineer. These superior economics get reflected in better salaries, even if the two people are equally skilled in their respective fields.
A construction company will need to spend cash on machines, permitting, raw materials, labor, and more to earn money. A software business needs to pay for compute and labor.
Many posts are comparing this development to the ACLU's gradual heel/face turn (depending on which camp you are cheering for), but here I am left wondering, as someone with little knowledge about the workings and legal foundations of NGOs, why these sorts of developments even happen. Why do nonprofits not get "hardcoded" to advance a particular cause in a particular way, by way of a charter or otherwise? Is this just not legally possible, is it not done for some other reason, or is it done but all of the changes we are observing fall short of violating the relevant legal code (which just means that our predecessors failed to make it specific enough)?
I imagine that, as a prospective donor, I would certainly much prefer if there were some form of legal assurance that the Dog-Grooming Union that I would be giving money to will continue advancing the cause of well-groomed dogs tomorrow, rather than deciding that it would instead rather fight for the cause of creating salons for cats, or even completely turn around and say that it will now fight against human intervention in the natural phenotypical fur-styles of dogs.
(As a concrete example, this feeling of incomprehension always makes me wonder about "GPL vN or later" licenses. If the ACLU can start agitating against free speech, what would stop some future societal development from inspiring the FSF to release a GPL v4 that says "this source code is exclusive property of Microsoft to use as it sees fit"?)
> I imagine that, as a prospective donor, I would certainly much prefer if there were some form of legal assurance that the Dog-Grooming Union that I would be giving money to will continue advancing the cause of well-groomed dogs tomorrow, rather than deciding that it would instead rather fight for the cause of creating salons for cats, or even completely turn around and say that it will now fight against human intervention in the natural phenotypical fur-styles of dogs.
How many pet-owning PETA supporters actually know that PETA believes that pet ownership is equivalent with slavery, wants to abolish it and that its shelters have the highest euthanization rates because they consider killing domesticated animals to be a mercy.
PETA does not believe pet ownership is equal to slavery, it ran an ad campaign comparing abused animals captive for things like circus acts, marine parks, and factory farming to slavery. That said it does believe animals should not be domesticated, but has never suggested that owning a pet is the same as slavery. Okay fine you can disagree with that as I do, but don't exaggerate their position.
Finally the reason it has the highest euthanization rates has nothing to do with mercy, but because it never refuses to take in any animals, period. Other shelters, especially no-kill shelters, achieve their objective by refusing to take in an animal when they reach capacity and they avoid reaching capacity in the first place by refusing animals that are unlikely to be adopted such as those that are aggressive, or old, or are injured.
PETA never refuses any animals and as such people go to PETA often as a last resort when no other shelter will take their animal. In cases where PETA comes to the same conclusion that a no-kill shelter will come to about the prospects of an animal finding a suitable home, and after PETA confirms that no other nearby shelter will take in the animal, instead of simply refusing the animal which often results in dumping, or further neglect of said animal, PETA euthanizes it. Consider that there are over 60 million stray dogs in the US roaming about compared to about 3 million dogs living in a shelter. It's simply not possible to shelter all abandoned animals, so either PETA euthanizes them, or the animal lives out in the wild where it ends up reproducing and introducing or exacerbating negative effects to its environment.
All of these are positions that you may disagree with and criticize without exaggerating or misrepresenting them.
Such a great example of the tailspin of modern activism. We better come to terms with the reality that modern activism is proselytism for secular causes, framed as moral imperatives. Rapidly morphing into proselytism by the sword: either you repent and fully embrace the cause, or we will destroy your livelihood.
Links please. Not really a fan of PETA but I've heard so much misinformation about them that I really don't think they're as bad as everyone makes them out to be.
> Why do nonprofits not get "hardcoded" to advance a particular cause in a particular way, by way of a charter or otherwise?
Because if they did, and the charter could not be amended, then a change in the opinion of people who support the mission on the optimal mechanism kills the organization and requires the costs of building a whole new organization.
The same reason why the whole of the law of a nation isn't fixed for all time out the outset.
But that's okay. A non-profit is just a company. No one is born into it, it holds no legal power over anyone, it can't send troops to conquer foreign lands, and most notably can't stop anyone from leaving it or working against it.
I don't see why a non-profit can't work just like a legacy trust---fulfil the mission left behind by its founder, and manage its monies to do that and only that.
If a non-profit's mission is successful, it can disband. It doens't need to pivot with its current supporters to find new things to do. Additioanlly, it need top change to suit the whims of its supporters. The supporters can simply support someone---anyone else (non-profits are far more numerous and easy to start than a new country). The original non-profit will die on the vine.
That's not a problem. If they believe the original mission is not relevant, then, dissolve and form a new entity that espouses their new-found points of view.
'We do longer believe in our founding principles, therefore we will dissolve and form a new entity and will evangelize according to this new set of principles, if you agree, come and join us. Those who believe in our old principles are free to re-form around the cause'.
Imagine a non-profit that believes in abolishing the death penalty. It has a change of heart at the top and decides it's for the death penalty. I think this deserves dissolution and forming a new non-profit or PAC, whatever.
> what would stop some future societal development from inspiring the FSF to release a GPL v4 that says "this source code is exclusive property of Microsoft to use as it sees fit"?
Nothing, but the "or any later later version of the GPL" clauses have protection against this scenario. Section 14 of the GPLv3 contains the nice sentence "Such new versions will be similar in spirit to the present version, but may differ in detail to address new problems or concerns.", which is essentially legalese for "if it differs in the spirit of the license, it is not considered a new version of the GPL and the upgrade clause does not apply".
Any one who signed the FSF's CLA to get their code into Emacs is still boned.
This is particularly dangerous because in the anglosphere, open source licenses are by default bare licenses -- they do not have the force of contract, meaning they can be revoked at any time. An organization which released any code under the GPL or any open source license can revoke the right to use that code on a whim (yes, the GPL'd code itself, not future revisions of that code), meaning a hostile FSF can prevent use, distribution, or -- critically -- forking of Emacs.
Projects such as Linux without a CLA requirement are better protected against this because of their patchwork ownership. A single contributor has less to gain, and more to lose, by revoking their license to their contributions. That's not to say it's perfect protection but it does help.
> Why do nonprofits not get "hardcoded" to advance a particular cause in a particular way, by way of a charter or otherwise? Is this just not legally possible, is it not done for some other reason, or is it done but all of the changes we are observing fall short of violating the relevant legal code (which just means that our predecessors failed to make it specific enough)?
Because as they grow they become interesting for people with an agenda: 3 letter agencies, lobbyists. See how Greenpeace has evolved for example.
You would essentially need a Terminator robot to enforce it. Something deployed independently that could destroy you if you deviated from the specified mission, and could not be reasoned with or recalled. This might be possible someday, maybe even soon. Smart contracts, orbital lasers, etc. But then the org would just spend all their time arguing about how to define the mission and protocol and never get it done.
But another reason is that organization would probably just stop being funded when it upheld its hard-coded mission in ways that were unpopular. If the mission is that you must advocate for providing speech/payment platforms for someone who is saying heinous things, people will just stop donating to you. The org has to survive to execute its mission, and it needs to adapt to survive. That will always result in drift, decay, and death.
And the powers that be would not let such an organization gain enough ground that it could become independently wealthy.
A nuance I see missing from the censorship/free speech dichotomy is around what's essentially DDOSing of speech. I think that the free-est speech has something equivalent to the voting idea of "one person, one vote." No one should be silenced, but also everyone should have equal representation.
In the same way that being very rich generally gives you effectively much more power than having a single vote, and so is a corruption of democracy, I think we see a similar thing with online discourse, where those with extra resources are able to essentially "flood the zone" and dominate the discourse.
So the question is what should be the effective response? Those pushing the censorship/free speech framing argue that removing voices is wrong -- banning, deplatforming, etc. That may be right, but it's also incomplete as it doesn't address the dynamic of the well-resourced voices overwhelming everyone else.
I don't know what an effective solution _is_ here, but I know what it _looks_ like -- all voices with equal access. I don't think the censorship/freedom framing gets us there.
This is basically one of the oldest problems on the Net, spam, back to haunt us. We got complacent, sitting back while Google filtered the junk out of our search results and inboxes. But who watches the watchmen? Now, v1agra ads and Serdar Argic[0] have evolved under our noses into camouflaged and effective predators glutted on endless Eternal September fodder.
Now that the Net has devolved into a political battlefield, how do you draw the line between a censorship regime and a spam filter? Was there ever a difference?
> So the question is what should be the effective response? Those pushing the censorship/free speech framing argue that removing voices is wrong -- banning, deplatforming, etc. That may be right, but it's also incomplete as it doesn't address the dynamic of the well-resourced voices overwhelming everyone else.
It's a good point, but the loud voices that have been driving this "anti-free speech" shift are also a loud minority. The people who got Alex Jones banned everywhere, got YouTube to start demonetising videos, got Trump banned from Twitter, were essentially a small group of influential Twitter users (some of whom also had jobs in the media, giving them huge platforms to put pressure on these companies). It's a "natural law" of human societies that the 1% are disproportionately loud, on any issue, and drive what the other 99% hear and think; not just a feature of online spaces. When you think of a liberal, or a conservative, or a college student, for example, whatever you picture in your head is just the loudest, most visible portion of that group, but is likely a tiny minority of that group. Whatever opinion you have on science, or nutrition, is driven by a very tiny loud minority, whether that's lobbyists, or a few influential individuals (maybe Neil deGrasse Tyson, maybe Al Gore, maybe a prominent scientist, or maybe the Coca Cola company). Without them, the popular mind might think quite differently.
Ergo; the "censorship shift" isn't about giving the minority their voice, it's two warring minorities struggling for control of the Overton window.
This is the key ingredient missing from most online fora that is not missing in most face-to-face fora and the actual halls of government (well, most of them): equal time.
In a public physical venue, it's much easier to allocate one person, one time slice to present their views. There are exceptions (lobbying is a huge hack on this, and indeed, there's a reason many see lobbying as anti-democratic). But in contrast: online speech is dominated by whoever has either the most leisure time to toss at an online forum or the willingness and resources to sock-puppet up and turn their one voice into an echoing hydra. Factor in state spending on those hydras and the situation turns pretty un-democratic pretty fast.
While I don't know anything about the board's decision, I think someone who is anti-censorship would be out of favor with a Silicon Valley world that increasingly believes in censoring anything someone (in power) considers "misinformation." This is a big, big change from the early days of the Internet when people believed in free flowing information.
John's attitude is so old school. Shaping the attitude of the populace through selective amplification is now.
The reading I take is that Gilmore opposed censorship, and presumably was impeding actions of the EFF which might be interpreted as same, effectively exercising power through veto (see Francis Fukuyama's concept of a "vetocracy", and note that I'm not familiar enough with EFF's governance to know specifically what veto or obstruction powers exist).
The irony is that the EFF routed around Gilmore's presumed obstruction.
For the record, I'm increasingly of the view that free-speech absolutism is very badly flawed. If my reading of the situation is correct, then I'd agree with the action. That said, I'm as much in the dark as anyone whose information is the Register piece itself, so don't read too much into what I'm saying.
Honest question: why use words like "antepenultimate" that are not in common use and don't convey any more meaning than a more common form (like third-last)?
And I thought knowing what penultimate meant was fun. For those that don't know, penultimate means second to last and antepenultimate means third to last.
I stopped giving money to them a couple of years ago and have started to become highly critical of recent stances they've taken but every time I mention this I get berated/downvoted to oblivion.
It's sort of vindicating to start seeing others feel the same way finally.
Judging from what's happened with many similar activists, I'm guessing a hard-line anti-censorship mindset isn't compatible with today's social/political landscape in which rampant misinformation on the internet has direct effects on meatspace.
Of course, this is purely conjecture. It could be completely unrelated.
A commenter on The Reg speculated that it's because (according to this commenter) Gilmore has lately veered into arguing publicly for legalising marijuana, and the EFF doesn't want to be associated with that.
If he has, that feels more plausible a cause than him being "an old-school internet freedom activist" per se.
If the reasons don't leak (they usually do) then it will still be possible to see what Gilmore was blocking by watching what the EFF does over the next six months that it hasn't done before.
The non-profit whose board I'm on does, I believe, have bylaws filed with the state we're incorporated in. And I know board member names (or maybe just the executive board) are filed as well. But we definitely don't have to make board minutes public.
"Diversity of life experiences makes a big difference in how we identify and litigate cases, design privacy-enhancing software, and organize our activism."
Another institution has been taken over. I can't find the donor list, it would be interesting.
It was already posted a few times, but might be worth being reposted as it didn't get much traction. I'd be curious if somebody knows more about the reasons for him being removed?
Readit News
I like to term the Second class that generally predominates in large enterprises, normally termed "middle management", the "Middle Management Machiavellis" for whom life is nothing but budget boundary assault/defense, and the assassin's game of angling for promotions.
I am thankful programming jobs paid pretty well such that it was roughly equivalent to several levels up the ladder in other professions without nearly the same soul-crushing view into the venality of mankind.
But this, I think, is a temporary thing. I look at the shockingly low salaries of ACTUAL ENGINEERS that went to ACTUAL ENGINEERING SCHOOL like chemical engineering, nuclear engineering, civil engineering, and they make much less than programmers.
The thing that’s hard to intuit is that salary isn’t a reflection of the difficulty or importance of your job. It’s a reflection of economics. The skill set of a software engineer enables a better business model than that of a civil engineer. These superior economics get reflected in better salaries, even if the two people are equally skilled in their respective fields.
A construction company will need to spend cash on machines, permitting, raw materials, labor, and more to earn money. A software business needs to pay for compute and labor.
I imagine that, as a prospective donor, I would certainly much prefer if there were some form of legal assurance that the Dog-Grooming Union that I would be giving money to will continue advancing the cause of well-groomed dogs tomorrow, rather than deciding that it would instead rather fight for the cause of creating salons for cats, or even completely turn around and say that it will now fight against human intervention in the natural phenotypical fur-styles of dogs.
(As a concrete example, this feeling of incomprehension always makes me wonder about "GPL vN or later" licenses. If the ACLU can start agitating against free speech, what would stop some future societal development from inspiring the FSF to release a GPL v4 that says "this source code is exclusive property of Microsoft to use as it sees fit"?)
How many pet-owning PETA supporters actually know that PETA believes that pet ownership is equivalent with slavery, wants to abolish it and that its shelters have the highest euthanization rates because they consider killing domesticated animals to be a mercy.
Support your local SPCA.
Finally the reason it has the highest euthanization rates has nothing to do with mercy, but because it never refuses to take in any animals, period. Other shelters, especially no-kill shelters, achieve their objective by refusing to take in an animal when they reach capacity and they avoid reaching capacity in the first place by refusing animals that are unlikely to be adopted such as those that are aggressive, or old, or are injured.
PETA never refuses any animals and as such people go to PETA often as a last resort when no other shelter will take their animal. In cases where PETA comes to the same conclusion that a no-kill shelter will come to about the prospects of an animal finding a suitable home, and after PETA confirms that no other nearby shelter will take in the animal, instead of simply refusing the animal which often results in dumping, or further neglect of said animal, PETA euthanizes it. Consider that there are over 60 million stray dogs in the US roaming about compared to about 3 million dogs living in a shelter. It's simply not possible to shelter all abandoned animals, so either PETA euthanizes them, or the animal lives out in the wild where it ends up reproducing and introducing or exacerbating negative effects to its environment.
All of these are positions that you may disagree with and criticize without exaggerating or misrepresenting them.
Dark times ahead.
Because if they did, and the charter could not be amended, then a change in the opinion of people who support the mission on the optimal mechanism kills the organization and requires the costs of building a whole new organization.
The same reason why the whole of the law of a nation isn't fixed for all time out the outset.
I don't see why a non-profit can't work just like a legacy trust---fulfil the mission left behind by its founder, and manage its monies to do that and only that.
If a non-profit's mission is successful, it can disband. It doens't need to pivot with its current supporters to find new things to do. Additioanlly, it need top change to suit the whims of its supporters. The supporters can simply support someone---anyone else (non-profits are far more numerous and easy to start than a new country). The original non-profit will die on the vine.
'We do longer believe in our founding principles, therefore we will dissolve and form a new entity and will evangelize according to this new set of principles, if you agree, come and join us. Those who believe in our old principles are free to re-form around the cause'.
Imagine a non-profit that believes in abolishing the death penalty. It has a change of heart at the top and decides it's for the death penalty. I think this deserves dissolution and forming a new non-profit or PAC, whatever.
Nothing, but the "or any later later version of the GPL" clauses have protection against this scenario. Section 14 of the GPLv3 contains the nice sentence "Such new versions will be similar in spirit to the present version, but may differ in detail to address new problems or concerns.", which is essentially legalese for "if it differs in the spirit of the license, it is not considered a new version of the GPL and the upgrade clause does not apply".
This is particularly dangerous because in the anglosphere, open source licenses are by default bare licenses -- they do not have the force of contract, meaning they can be revoked at any time. An organization which released any code under the GPL or any open source license can revoke the right to use that code on a whim (yes, the GPL'd code itself, not future revisions of that code), meaning a hostile FSF can prevent use, distribution, or -- critically -- forking of Emacs.
Projects such as Linux without a CLA requirement are better protected against this because of their patchwork ownership. A single contributor has less to gain, and more to lose, by revoking their license to their contributions. That's not to say it's perfect protection but it does help.
Because as they grow they become interesting for people with an agenda: 3 letter agencies, lobbyists. See how Greenpeace has evolved for example.
But another reason is that organization would probably just stop being funded when it upheld its hard-coded mission in ways that were unpopular. If the mission is that you must advocate for providing speech/payment platforms for someone who is saying heinous things, people will just stop donating to you. The org has to survive to execute its mission, and it needs to adapt to survive. That will always result in drift, decay, and death.
And the powers that be would not let such an organization gain enough ground that it could become independently wealthy.
Although I doubt this could successfully prevent slow drift in the mission of an entire organization (as we're seeing with the ACLU).
They can hardcode their nonprofit mission into their corporate charter, and many smaller nonprofits do.
He's widely credited as the source of the famous aphorism "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."
-
The EFF has routed around John Gilmore now.
In the same way that being very rich generally gives you effectively much more power than having a single vote, and so is a corruption of democracy, I think we see a similar thing with online discourse, where those with extra resources are able to essentially "flood the zone" and dominate the discourse.
So the question is what should be the effective response? Those pushing the censorship/free speech framing argue that removing voices is wrong -- banning, deplatforming, etc. That may be right, but it's also incomplete as it doesn't address the dynamic of the well-resourced voices overwhelming everyone else.
I don't know what an effective solution _is_ here, but I know what it _looks_ like -- all voices with equal access. I don't think the censorship/freedom framing gets us there.
Now that the Net has devolved into a political battlefield, how do you draw the line between a censorship regime and a spam filter? Was there ever a difference?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serdar_Argic
It's a good point, but the loud voices that have been driving this "anti-free speech" shift are also a loud minority. The people who got Alex Jones banned everywhere, got YouTube to start demonetising videos, got Trump banned from Twitter, were essentially a small group of influential Twitter users (some of whom also had jobs in the media, giving them huge platforms to put pressure on these companies). It's a "natural law" of human societies that the 1% are disproportionately loud, on any issue, and drive what the other 99% hear and think; not just a feature of online spaces. When you think of a liberal, or a conservative, or a college student, for example, whatever you picture in your head is just the loudest, most visible portion of that group, but is likely a tiny minority of that group. Whatever opinion you have on science, or nutrition, is driven by a very tiny loud minority, whether that's lobbyists, or a few influential individuals (maybe Neil deGrasse Tyson, maybe Al Gore, maybe a prominent scientist, or maybe the Coca Cola company). Without them, the popular mind might think quite differently.
Ergo; the "censorship shift" isn't about giving the minority their voice, it's two warring minorities struggling for control of the Overton window.
In a public physical venue, it's much easier to allocate one person, one time slice to present their views. There are exceptions (lobbying is a huge hack on this, and indeed, there's a reason many see lobbying as anti-democratic). But in contrast: online speech is dominated by whoever has either the most leisure time to toss at an online forum or the willingness and resources to sock-puppet up and turn their one voice into an echoing hydra. Factor in state spending on those hydras and the situation turns pretty un-democratic pretty fast.
John's attitude is so old school. Shaping the attitude of the populace through selective amplification is now.
b) As far as I can tell, Gilmore was not trying to censor anyone. It seems more like the EFF has put Gilmore on the other side of their firewall.
The irony is that the EFF routed around Gilmore's presumed obstruction.
For the record, I'm increasingly of the view that free-speech absolutism is very badly flawed. If my reading of the situation is correct, then I'd agree with the action. That said, I'm as much in the dark as anyone whose information is the Register piece itself, so don't read too much into what I'm saying.
And I thought knowing what penultimate meant was fun. For those that don't know, penultimate means second to last and antepenultimate means third to last.
It's sort of vindicating to start seeing others feel the same way finally.
It looks like there is subtext that there was a contentious issue they couldn't agree upon, I wonder what it is.
Judging from what's happened with many similar activists, I'm guessing a hard-line anti-censorship mindset isn't compatible with today's social/political landscape in which rampant misinformation on the internet has direct effects on meatspace.
Of course, this is purely conjecture. It could be completely unrelated.
That's what makes an anti-censorship stand relevant and important. Nobody would censor if there were no physical impacts.
A commenter on The Reg speculated that it's because (according to this commenter) Gilmore has lately veered into arguing publicly for legalising marijuana, and the EFF doesn't want to be associated with that.
If he has, that feels more plausible a cause than him being "an old-school internet freedom activist" per se.
Are board minutes considered private? What is the logic behind not posting the constitution, that sounds odd...
But I can't find any bylaws or board meeting minutes. I'm a bit disappointed.
Yes.
The non-profit whose board I'm on does, I believe, have bylaws filed with the state we're incorporated in. And I know board member names (or maybe just the executive board) are filed as well. But we definitely don't have to make board minutes public.
So the EFF has also departed from its mission. We learn (https://www.eff.org/de/pages/effs-diversity-statement):
"Diversity of life experiences makes a big difference in how we identify and litigate cases, design privacy-enhancing software, and organize our activism."
Another institution has been taken over. I can't find the donor list, it would be interesting.
Jacobs: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/14868600/25/todd-v-love...
Todds: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/14868600/24/todd-v-love...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28962841
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28985369