You've expressed a sense that the organization has become “too political” in a specific way (e.g., emphasizing equity, anti‑discrimination, or skepticism of state/corporate power as a matter of justice), and that this is a kind of ideological overreach.
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.
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.”