What Animal Rights Activism Teaches Us About Sympathy and Focus
The Manchester City Council's Web site uses Jadu, which is proprietary software. This is where we filed a complaint that seems to have paid off so far [1, 2], knowing they have had plenty of time (or opportunities) to get back to us (but did not). This was done to protect local animals (that have been here long before humans erected homes all over the place) from selfish people.
Activism for animals is a precarious and complicated thing; on the one hand, you speak for life forms that cannot communicate directly with humans (at least not in the same sense that humans can). That's just how it is. There's no solution to that. On the other hand, public sympathy typically goes to the animals. Empathy and sympathy typically win. If a sociopath makes a seemingly valid argument, albeit lacking sympathy, he or she will eventually not appeal to anybody.
In activism, it's always very important to maintain public sympathy. Without it, no matter how compelling an argument you have, you will end up losing.
Earlier on we mentioned polarising politics as means of gaining or losing sympathy. In order to make some position popular and attractive, you should (and will be better off if you) stick to the core issues. Suppose climate activism got caught up in veganism. What would that do? It's possible to believe that the planet is warming, that we must do something about it, and still eat eggs and butter.
It saddens us to see some activism - including tech activism - trying to interject unrelated topics. About 15 years ago I saw many atheist channels being taken over by a separate - and not directly related - groups of advocates. Some of them called it "Atheism Plus" or something to that effect. It quickly turned out to be a disaster and a liability. Even actual (ardent) atheists were disguised by it; they deemed it off-putting, a bit like a "takeover" by people who piggyback something else.
In the case of the FSF, we've been noticing similar takeover attempts. As far as we can tell, those attempts failed. The goal was to get the FSF to advocate for things other than Software Freedom, just like the EFF nowadays speaks for particular groups instead of civil rights and Open Rights Group (like EFF but in the UK) was taken over by immigration activists.
Several years ago there were attempts to do the same thing to us, for example conditional "favours" in exchange for compromising our goals. We stopped this after spotting some familiar patterns. █