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---------------------------------------- poisoning the well December 16th, 2019 ---------------------------------------- This week I learned that the RSS aggregator I use, tt-rss, is developed by an individual whose personal politics are at odds with my own. This morning I became aware that the creator of the television show, The IT Crowd, appears to be a scumbag. If we look back over the last year or two it's easy to spot Chik Fil A and Harvey Weinstein and a hundred other cases where a person or organization has become pariah. Their works are stained forever. A number of questions came to me after considering our present reality: - Is it universal? Does the idea of individual moral judgement apply the same way to all people? What about companies? - Is this new? Is it a continuous development from some earlier state? - Is it "fair", not to the subject of the moral judgement, but to the works? What about collective works where only a single contributor is a problem? Does their position of authority change the judgement? There's too much to go into in a gopher phlog. I'm not going to write some massive moral treatise here. There's really two bits I'm focused on anyway, so pitter-patter, as they say… First is the question of large collective works, like film. According to some web page I read in passing, which queried data from the top IMDB films, the average crew on a film is about 588 members strong. If we assume that the moral distribution of individuals on a given film is representative of the general population (safe enough, not given a specific film) then we might expect some sort of normal distribution of morality (if such a thing were quantifiable). If one of these individuals were to score at an extreme to one degree or another it will not shift the distribution noticeably. The overall morality of those making this piece of collective art is unchanged. But we punish them, don't we? Many of us will boycott the movie because of what that actor said, or what the director did. We will spite the 587 others on a film for that one person. They have, in effect, poisoned the well. But maybe it's not about the math of morality. Maybe it's because we must take action in the face of injustice. Something we perceive as wrong cannot be allowed to occur, even if our methods will cause harm to others. That sounds silly, doesn't it? It does to me. Maybe it matters more when justice would not be done without the masses acting in protest. If the courts won't prosecute, then the voice of the consumer will blacklist them. Let capitalism rear its power for justice for once, right? Ultimately I think it's harder to let go of something we see as wrong than it is to ignore the damage we cause others. Collateral damage is a shame, but at least we got THAT guy. So yeah, there's some moral ambiguity here in collective works, but what about individual creators? Should everyone boycott tt-rss? Should we avoid using suckless code? Stop listening to somebody's music? Maybe that's easier here. After all, we're not hurting anyone else with this sort of mob justice. There's just so many "what ifs" floating around. What if the despicable person created something that helps people? What if they pioneered a green energy revolution? What if they found a disease cure? What if they make a really good software package for the blind? Yes, on the one hand it is the old debate about whether you can separate art from artist. But there's the question of utility as well. At what point does the good of the work outweigh the bad of the individual. This is where my head has been all morning and I'm not coming up with any concrete answers. That's probably a sign that I shouldn't expect a fixed set of rules to apply. In the case of films, I'll probably keep seeing them. In the case of tt-rss, I will probably jump to another project if I find one comparable. In the case of the IT Crowd, I'll continue to quote and enjoy it and probably use that moment to also inform others around me that Graham Linehan as a shitbag. Double-win, right?