While organizing my thoughts, I was looking for the “Anduril tweet” someone mentioned when I arrived at this thread.
There are very clear, unworkable logical problems with the arguments that are being extremely unfair to many people in the discussion:
- Moral blackmail – Those opposed to MIC are framing the issue as either opposition to Anduril participating in Nix or else being in favor of the consequences of war. Attempting to call out “dominant war hawk rhetoric” are very clear examples of this kind of blackmail.
- Oversimplification – Moral blackmail depends on alternative choices being morally indefensible, and improper reduction of the problem until only such choices remain is a frequent way of falling into the erroneously constructed blackmail.
- Token Gestures – I’ve stated this before. Nothing that can be accomplished through NixOS will materially affect the problems being fixated upon. Not climate change, not Gaza, not US politics, and not Anduril’s continued existence or progress at weaponizing AI. If it has no effect, what are we being asked to do?
Russia builds weapons for Russian dominance. Europe now re-arms as the nature of fast-evolving drone warfare demands that dozens of European and Ukrainian weapons developers use AI and drones in whatever combinations possible in a race to stop a wave of non-hypothetical war in Ukraine by empowering the Ukrainian people to reject Russian dominance and force Russia into negotiating a peace. To fixate on US weapons and one single US weapons developer is quite the oversimplification of the world we live in.
If you ask my honest opinion, which is an estimation but my strongest belief, based on the overwhelming interest alignment, opposition to Israel’s brutal actions in Gaza and the politically adjacent opposition to the US MIC were quite useful in the creation of the current political situation in the US, which if nothing else, absolutely worked in the favor of the re-election of Trump and his favorable policies gifted to Putin. Protests against the Gaza war have oddly sought to be active within the democratic party with a similarly counter-productive message of disruption we are seeing within NixOS. I consider NixOS to be a spillover of larger, broader, more pernicious online influence campaign aimed at driving US politics by shaping online discourse in the direction of these counter-productive political tactics and deeply flawed arguments, which are very effective in driving unworkable divisions that favor authoritarianism by making alternatives look hopelessly chaotic and unreasonable.
Guilt by Association
Those anxious of the US should note that US citizens involved in NixOS bias similarly to open source enthusiasts elsewhere, usually liberal or libertarian, but certainly not authoritarian. When speaking of increasing European digital sovereignty and such, if you have a problem with the US in general, venting that frustration against US citizens in the NixOS community is essentially venting at your best allies. It is just another example of completely counter-productive behavior and disconnect with how to achieve real results.
Climate Change is Very Financial
Free-market enterprise is only as good as the financial instruments we have invented. Before seashells (currency), it was difficult to connect value at long distances and with great separations in time. Stocks, bonds, derivatives, and so many other instruments enable us to connect supply and demand at longer ranges, directing demand for that future value (or avoidance of destruction) with the capital necessary to make it happen. Climate change is a very long range, very broad kind of cost, so it is quite likely that we have simply not innovated the tools to financialize its avoidance. Among its solutions, any technology that is more competitive and does not use carbon can completely sidestep the issue, as wind and solar electrical generation are poised to do. I didn’t look at the energy ROI, but hydrogen based steel refining is another such possibility. Alternative means of creating plastic and concrete analogs are perhaps on the other end of AI technologies currently being propelled by capital that Anduril and others are pouring into the general set of problems.
In closing, the problems are so complex. The effect of excluding Anduril from NixOS can have such a fleeting impact if any. Immense harm is being created upon the NixOS community and what we could be accelerating elsewhere in open source and the governance of open organizations. Please, have the courage to analyze and more deeply consider broader perspectives.
