A great recent example is everyone changing whitelist/blacklist to allowlist/blocklist because Americans are so fucking obsessed with race politics that they see it absolutely everywhere
The software community loves to complain about this stuff like the change from master to main branch but I always get the sense that people just liked to complain rather than any meaningful objection.
No it's not, not at all. Is "blocklist" a list of file system blocks? Bitcoin or other crypro blocks?
As someone who speaks English as a second language, the first time I read "whitelist/blacklist", I simply looked them up in a translation dictionary and immediately understood what they mean. Those are actual words with definitions spanning centuries.
>The software community loves to complain about this stuff like the change from master to main branch but I always get the sense that people just liked to complain rather than any meaningful objection.
Yes we love to complain, but there were many meaningful objections that were ignored. There was a reddit outage that occurred due to the madness around "inclusive language" and removing the word "master": https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditEng/comments/11xx5o0/you_brok...
The pastime is finding people who don’t agree with your orthodoxy and ganging up on them. It can be race, ability, political affiliation, whatever.
America is a country that demands conformance.
pg touches on this in his famous What You Can’t Say essay.
Ensuring that people think that some "other" body of people are against them (right, left, woke, trumpists etc) is a strong tactic to keep people putting there energy into fighting each other and not making a big deal about the people in control of things like the media or government- which we're all too tired to fight and sort of quietly accept.
It sounds like a conspiracy theory, except it's basically well known and nobody really cares it seems, we're too easily baited. (including myself here).
I saw it really obviously recently when the overtone window shifted in the UK and the majority of people became pretty poor pretty quickly; and how the media started going crazy trying to stoke a culture war where people were simply too poor and too tired to put blame anywhere else than the ruling political party.
Which lead to the ruling political party trying to stoke the culture war and a milquetoast response from the audience. Here's the reaction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQsGRwNzs-o
No, it sounds like a conspiracy theory because it is. It has nothing to do with some shady cabal of elites ("the ruling class"). It's just American culture.
Sure, some people are radicalised, but a large part of that radicalisation is a reaction to a perceived equal radicalisation on the $otherSide.
You'll notice that people get divided on things that just "become political" out of nowhere.
Wearing a mask for a really recent example, there was a very small window of time before any politician or media outlet said anything other than "we don't know everything" about the pandemic. In that time window it was pretty clear that most people just do what is needed.
You don't need a formal conspiracy when incentives align though, so as much as you paint it as a "shadowy elite" it's probably just a few people who know that they need to stoke a culture war and a lot of people who will get rich off of outrage bait and creating a cultural moat that makes them the voice of a cultural "side" are more opportunistic and don't particularly care all that much about furthering a particular agenda.
If you actually have time to have a conversation with someone you deeply disagree with you tend to find out pretty quickly that there's a seriously large amount in common and it's the distance to each other culturally that causes a larger rift than anything innate.
Those changes (as wells as master->main) did trigger an initial "get off my lawn" reaction for me, but it's not entirely unreasonable and is no big deal to actually act on.