Every organization gets converged sooner or later. Sooner, in the case of those that don’t actively guard against it.
There’s a tweet from 2016 that has aged better than almost anything else on the internet:
1. Target a respected institution 2. Kill and clean it 3. Wear it as a skin suit, while demanding respect
I thought about that tweet this week when the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) announced it was leaving X.
EFF was, for a long time, genuinely great. Founded in 1990 by programmers, hackers, libertarians, and progressives united around a single premise: the internet should be free, and someone needed to fight for it. They took on the government’s attempt to control cryptography and won. They fought the PATRIOT Act. They built tools that protect millions of people who will never know their name.
That organization is gone. What remains is wearing its skin.
It’s a pity, but the surveillance state is too important to Clown World to permit pesky electronic freedoms to get in the way.