The EFF is and has always been a political activist organization.
Of course they care about ideological concerns.
Of course they care about ideological concerns.
The ACLU was always considered a leftist organization, and I'm sure that in general most of it's staff was so; but their mission was scoped to certain issues, and anybody who agreed with that mission, despite their other politics, could support them. Once partisanship takes over, though, it isolates them.
If the EFF isn't careful, it is going to be an organization not for those who support certain digital freedoms, but for Leftists who support certain digital freedoms. That'll do nothing but make it more difficult to accomplish their original goals.
I expect it'll also come with a loss of focus, similar to what happened at Mozilla.
That wasn't the cause, that was the effect. They got flooded with cash for participating in particular ideological battles, so they continued, the smarter older people got disgusted (and just old) and left, the stupider newer people who came in were only interested in working on those ideological battles, and at some point the ACLU ceased to stand for anything in particular and became Yet Another Democratic Nonprofit.
Hopefully this isn't happening with the EFF. If they just become Democratic Tech CEO Pressure Group, it'll be another once great institution zombified.
> Leftists
Such an abused word. These are just Democratic Party partisans. They have no firm political opinions other than their own moral superiority, just like their opponents. They're building careers; it's a politics of personal accumulation.
I'll ask you then: What are the three main areas of advocacy where you think the EFF has been the most visible and/or effective?
So when people support EFF's technological goals (freedoms for users on technology platforms), if they are themselves possibly on the right, they project their own values onto the organization or system (which here is the EFF).
Never-mind if some of those values are incompatible with the values you think you hold (being authoritarian generally is incompatible with being not being authoritarian about technology). When someone points out the (otherwise obvious) contradiction to you, you're surprised that your set of values is incongruous.
Now this can happen to anyone coming from any political starting point, they agree with something but find it doesn't quite fit with their world views. If you are deeply religious about it, you tend to hold on for dear life and either decide to "pick" on set of values over another (suddenly you realize, actually, yes you would like to enslave everyone) or engage in some form of hypocrisy or another (authoritarians are good, but for some reason or the other I'm going to make an exception for technology).
Is that correct?
Values have a hierarchy. You can't (effectively) agree to painting everything the color blue, if you can't agree what the color blue is.
And you will run into a very similar issue when everyone starts objecting to the pink you have spread everywhere, despite supposedly agreeing to the color scheme.
But then you go on to describe exactly what @Brendinooo described, just under the guise of your system of "value hierarchy." The problem is that you can always default to "our values are hierarchically misaligned" and then never have to do any coalition building ever.
So how do you solve that? Because it seems that you can't.
This part is too broad.
Hierarchical values are just that. Not wholesale. We call that nonsense, e.g. I believe pigs can fly, therefore the sky is red. They are making an ontological error.
But this seems wrong because people of different creeds and value systems do stuff together all the time. Or am I misunderstanding your point? What I understand @Brendinooo to be saying is: "we may not share the same moral framework (or value hierarchy, using your term), but we do agree on X, so let's do X."
I'd have a problem with it if my tax bracket were determined by whether I loved the Christian Lord rather than any other deity.
People of different faiths band together because of shared values that actually make a difference as long as they are happy to live and let live on matters of belief.
It is true that a lot of values sit on a foundation of beliefs, via the teachings we think are inextricably associated with our beliefs.
A Christian's values (e.g. "you are born a boy or a girl') might conflict with a trans person's beliefs ("I was not born with the body that matches my gender identity"). Meanwhile another Christian's values ("God has a plan and your body and gender identity must by definition be a part of that plan") might be entirely compatible.
Beliefs are absolutely foundational but all the values built on them are just received wisdom, interpretation etc.
Of course, it is easy to confuse these things, and people who rise to power are often those who do. Keeping an open mind requires time and mental energy. CEOs and world leaders rarely have time to examine their values, and refraining that act as "questioning my beliefs" reframes a rational act into an invitation to have a crippling crisis of faith - which is much easier to tell yourself is a temptation of the devil that you must not indulge.
By shying away from such examination they have much more time and mental energy and deciseness to execute effectively on their agenda.
The obvious downside is that this lack of reflection means the agenda they execute so effectively on is potentially not what they actually would have chosen if they'd really thought it through in a rational way.
You can hold some values as core to your position, your belief. Outside of your beliefs, there is a strict hierarchy of values.
Colors require perception, kinematics breaks down without velocity/acceleration.
Being Aetheist or Christian conveniently doesn't tend to conflict with the general hierarchy of values, which is independent of your particular religious interpretation of them. Your interpretation of the general hierarchy, can cause issues, however.
By design. Activists and left-wingers in general enjoy losing and being underdogs and infighting constantly
It's per the usual for extremist ideologies, chock full of hypocrisy and nonsense.
Note that, I have no problem with conservative or liberal value systems...
You seem to be saying that people can't paint together unless everyone agrees on who holds the brush, what brand of brush is used, and what everyone's broader philosophy of painting is.
> I guess, to use the terms of your analogy
It is not an analogy, though, it is an example of a hierarchical value.
> You seem to be saying that people can't paint together unless everyone agrees on who holds the brush, what brand of brush is used, and what everyone's broader philosophy of painting is.
But these are not all hierarchical values. You can't paint with a brush unless you know what a brush is. Holding the brush, the brand of the brush, are not values implicit in the hierarchy of what a brush is or how to paint with one.
Your last example "broader philosophy of painting", is an example. You can agree to all use a brush, but if you stare at a wall and call it "painting", you've violated the agreed upon hierarchy.
If "no backdoors on e2e encryption" isn't a sufficient definition of blue, if that's just staring at a wall, then what is the hierarchy, specifically? What do I have to believe, in concrete terms, before my support for digital privacy counts?
I think that this is fairly simple. Digital privacy requires digital autonomy, privacy without autonomy is tantamount to a promise without any way to verify (confirming a negative is often difficult if not impossible).
Your beliefs may conflict if you find yourself pro-authoritarian (no autonomy).
>Your beliefs may conflict
Maybe, maybe not. A libertarian, a progressive, and a paranoid business owner can all fight against encryption backdoors for completely different reasons; if they team up, maybe they can all get what they want. If they think their beliefs preclude cooperation, then their chances of getting what they want in this area are...much smaller.
https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referre...
Granted, it's from 2020, so there may be updated versions by now.
I think that is why, yes.
I also think the differences are really obvious, and I genuinely can't understand why so many people here can't see that.
Insufferable.
I can understand frustration at me being "cryptic and vague" - and that's something I could answer for you!
But it seems like you already have an answer to that question, you have made a judgment about my values, and are now calling me insufferable.
I asked you a question in this comment - and I wouldn't mind an answer, which is why I'm not tacking on a "you people" comment or some kind of insult, because I think that would make it less likely that I get one.
You've implied that digital privacy, encryption, open‑source software, and anti‑patent‑trolling should be treated as pure technical and legal questions, not as expressions of a progressive political ideology.
I'm surmising a desire to roll back the organization’s explicit engagement with social‑justice‑adjacent politics and return it to a more “classical” techno‑libertarian or “just fix the code and laws” stance.
Musk is not a neutral businessman but a political actor whose projects (X, Grok, etc.) help entrench an authoritarian, far‑right political economy. Any attempt to normalize him—or paint his products and services as neutral—is, in effect, reactionary opposition to a broader societal reckoning with fascist tendencies in tech and politics.
The reactionary position is the one that wants to preserve or normalize Musk’s power, image, and platforms as “just business” or “apolitical tech.”
In one sense: yes. But in a different sense, if their post was about how they were leaving a more left-leaning platform and they dropped in a bunch of examples about how it was important to support gun-rights and pro-life groups and was alienating people on the left as a result, I'd like to think I'd be objecting in a similar way. (I certainly wouldn't be saying that you can't be pro-encryption without converting to libertarianism or whatever.)
>should be treated as pure technical and legal question
I would like that, yes. I remember being super annoyed watching net neutrality become a partisan issue in real time. I believe that ideologues are always going to exist, but for a lot of us, it's our choice to decide whether or not we are going to play that game or if we're going to do the work to persuade the persuadable and build coalitions to get wins where we can get them.
That's why I chose to be vague in some of my language, because I think it's important to be able to modulate how you speak to different people in service of other types of goods. I don't see a benefit of trying to litigate abortion or authoritarianism in a Hacker News thread about the EFF. I do see a benefit in trying to convince people that advocacy groups staying in their lanes, and that it's good to have voices that try to operate outside the left/right divide in the US in 2026.
>roll back
I get that you're saying that because it fits certain definitions of "reactionary". I don't believe in turning back any clocks, even if I might be in favor of bringing back, in some form, policies that have been dropped. If you see that as a distinction without a difference, so be it.
But "reactionary" often has a particular set of right-wing connotations that I wouldn't feel comfortable identifying myself with.
From there you pivot hard into your criticisms of a particular person as well as your perceptions about how he impacts the broader political landscape. As I started to reply to some of those ideas I realized that this is all a pretty different line of discussion than the idea that you originally engaged with me on, or even what the EFF said in its own post.
And then like what is the point of your original comment if you agree that what you could only deduce earlier is now an obvious truism?
Keep in mind that X only has ~500 MAU, putting it in the same league as Pinterest or Quora.
> There are fewer and fewer organizations protecting civil rights without being dragged into left/right tribalism.
I would rather challenge this image that civilization is declining, independently of the political forces in power. This is a common motif in facism; I'm reading from your comment something along the lines of: "once we had noble organizations that were pure and didn't bother with ideology -- now things are worse, and in fact those guys are dirty for engaging in politics". What's really happening is that power in the US has been seized by fanatics and you fucks (respectfully) are letting them get away with it.
Do you not see that civil rights are being infringed _right now_, by the republican administration in our government? Protecting those civil rights will require criticizing and acting against republicans because the fascists on the right are trying to turn our country into an autocracy.
Sorry if that hurts your feelings, but you can’t be that fragile if you want to live in a free nation. The EFF taking a stand here is fighting EXACTLY the fight they need to be right now.