The Most Dangerous Email (to my career) I've Sent

This is the way a lot of people feel lately, and it's nothing to do with being a dinosaur. It's a whole movement.

I'm wary though, because lots of things start nicely but fail to manage complexity of even a moderately sized app, and everything grows over time. I feel like a lot of people are going to rediscover why we started making everything a SPA.

There have been a lot of approaches on the frontend over the years and it's been my job too many times to clean up where that approach eventually collapsed as the app grew larger or ran into limitations. I am looking for the upgrade path -- I want to start simple but not risk an entire rewrite when the complexity exceeds that pattern. To date, very few of these things work well enough together to consider it seriously. (htmx+react would work fine but you'd pay a large cost for upgrading a single component, like rewriting it and a chunk of new runtime code. And if everything eventually gets more complex, somebody starts asking "why we have two ways of doing things?? We should consolidate!" And the rewrite cycle continues...)

It's a balance between hard-won experience and becoming too wary of new things. It's hard to see new frameworks completely based on events, for example, and not cry does nobody remember that we tried it already? Having a glob of untyped context in Angular v1 was always bad, and I refused it even when it made me look like a dinosaur back then. But React was a great pattern for complex code, and I immediately switched to that. I would switch to something tomorrow if it kept those good parts, like handling complex apps, but didn't have to render everything a minimum of two times server and client. Maybe a new winner will emerge.

Experience is still good to have. It doesn't === dinosaur. Instead, it has saved me a lot of misadventures.

> At best it's supposed to mean no reprisals from public institutions, such as the TSA, IRS, DMV, and the like.

That is the ONLY purpose of “free speech” - that governments and their institutions cannot prevent you from speaking freely.

And even there, some small exceptions should be carved out in terms of clearly unambiguous hate speech and bigotry. But with the Republican Party (in America, specifically) becoming Christofascist fundamentalists (Canada has the CPC and it’s openly racist little sibling, the PPC), good luck with blunting the hate speech and rampant bigotry that is the conservative platform’s bread-and-butter.

Freedom of speech at its minimum is freedom of reprisal from government institutions. But it is also (or should be) a set of social norms, and a goal to aspire to. A freedom which is only enjoyed against the government is useful, but without public support is fragile. Without the social norms to back it up, it is easier for demagogues and tyrants to chip away at those freedoms, until all thats left is technicalities and de-minimus freedom.

A world where your every word is analyzed, scrutinized and ground through the sausage factory that is current popular trends and then used for or against you at arbitrary times in arbitrary and distantly connected ways is a world that is pure hell. Most of us experienced something similar in middle school. Many might have experienced such a world in small insular communities where everyone knows your business. What good is freedom of speech when social norms make it such that exercising that freedom is punished just as destructively from society itself as it is from the government? If you can lose your income, your livelihood, access to food or even your home from private institutions reacting to your speech – and that is a normalized thing to happen – how is that functionally different from being jailed for your speech? At least if the government jails you for your speech, they have to house and feed you. If your industry blacklists you, and your bank freezes your accounts, and your grocer closes the doors in your face, then what do you do?

Should apartments disqualify you from renting a place because you support Palestine or Israel? Should banks deny you a mortgage for what religion you subscribe to? Should your boss deny you a promotion because you are a registered democrat? Should your company fire you because you are a registered republican? Should the local pharmacy refuse to serve you because you support the black panthers? Should you local grocery store refuse you entry because you donate to the salvation army? If you support unions should AT&T cut off your phone service? If you support right to repair should Amazon stop shipping to you? If you support Net Neutrality should your ISP deny you service? These are all private individuals or corporations, and of course "freedom of speech is no freedom from consequences". They probably do (modulo some court cases restricting that in certain circumstances) and should have that right if they really chose to exercise it but having the right to do something is not the same as whether you should do something, or whether doing that thing should be a normal thing to do.

Mind you I think no one should post about any major issue on social media because I consider posting on social media to be the equivalent of trying to hold a debate by way of bumper stickers. But people do post about major issues on social media. And some non-insignificant fraction of those people are going to be "wrong" on one or more of the things they post about, and sometimes egregiously so. But I don't want to live in a world where it is routine for someone who is on the opposite side of an issue as me to be denied a mortgage, even if that means they might become my neighbor. I don't want to live in a world where someone who is "wrong" about some massively complex multi-decade geo-political minefield is denied promotions or hiring, even if that means I might work with or for them. The personal might be political, but not all of us have the luxury of being able to live in politics all day long, and only associate with the right kinds of people. Not all of us have the luxury to be allowed to have the right politics, whether because of lack of education, or possibly because of those same private individuals and corporations already exercising their right to inflict "consequences".

Private companies and individual might and should have the ability to make their own association decisions, but that doesn't mean I don't want them to hold themselves to high standards and aim for impossible to achieve ideals. Because the alternative is that we live in a world where either you or I are at serious risk of losing everything we have because of this exchange.

And one should have that right, but whether one should exercise that right is another matter. A thought experiment: If you could pick any point in history and make it so all people expressing socially unpopular views were permanently cast out from society, and all other people never spoke or traded or dealt with them ever again, when would you choose to freeze social opinion? Which modern day group of normal every day people, who we consider unobjectionable now, would be cast into the dustbin of history if societal opinion was frozen at your chosen moment of time?

> That is the ONLY purpose of “free speech” - that governments and their institutions cannot prevent you from speaking freely.

I'm not sure I look forward to an America where the social norms, when the "Republican Party becoming Christofascist fundamentalists" is voted into power again, that make it routine for people to be denied employment, banking services or promotions because they aren't sufficiently Christian.

Freedom from governmental intervention is ONE purpose of free speech. But without social norms that encourage private restraint as well, we would be living in the very same Christofascist hell you already fear. Ask anyone who grew up in a small insular town what sort of damage "private" individuals can do when the social norm is punishing you for speech they didn't like.