When I started, EFF was a very effective coalition between (primarily) progressives and libertarians. This had largely been the case since EFF was founded in 1990 by both progressives and libertarians. When people would call EFF a "left-wing" organization, I would correct them. It wasn't a left-wing organization, it was a big tent and had consistently had very significant non-left-wing representation in its membership, board, and staff.
This was perhaps comparatively easy to achieve because EFF was mainly working on free speech and privacy, and both progressives and libertarians were happy to unite around those things and try to get more of them for everybody, even without necessarily agreeing on other issues.
Maybe "both progressives and libertarians" doesn't feel like that big a tent in the overall scheme of things, but it was a good portion of people who were online by choice early on and who were feeling idealistic about technology.
I'm sure everyone reading this is aware that, as American society has become more polarized, there are fewer and fewer institutions that are successfully operating as big tents in this sense. Somewhat famously ACLU is not. EFF is also not.
EFF is still doing a lot of good work in a non-partisan sense. However, the way that they think and talk about that work, in terms of what motivates it or what it is meant to achieve, is now a predominantly left-wing framing. If you don't have a left-wing worldview, you're at least not going to be culturally aligned with EFF's take on things, even if you agree with many of their positions and projects.
This should not be taken to mean that they never take on non-leftist causes or clients or never successfully work in coalition with non-leftist organizations. It's most about how they see what they are trying to do.
I again want to be clear for people who are saying "it's no surprise that a political organization is political" that EFF's politics and rhetoric are not what they were in earlier decades. There are many interpretations of that that you might take if you agree with some of the changes (you might feel that they became more politically aware or more sophisticated or something), but the organization's coalition and positioning is really very different from what it was in earlier eras.
It's very apparent to me that EFF was more skillful at staying neutral on a wider range of questions in the past than it is now. I remember hearing the phrase "that's not an EFF issue" spoken much more frequently in the earlier part of my time at the organization.
(Another more neutral interpretation is that the Internet successfully became a part of everyday life, with the result that more and more historically-offline political issues now have some kind of online component: so maybe it's more of a challenge to deliberately not have a position on a range of "non-tech" politics because people are regularly pointing out how tech and non-tech issues interact more.)
I experienced these changes as an enormous personal tragedy, and it's deeply frustrating for me if people would like to pretend that they didn't happen.
I'm still rooting for them to win most of their court cases.
It was over for me when the EFF advanced the charge of government censorship of the internet.
The EFF had previously been a client of mine so I was somewhat familiar with how things worked and basically once Gilmore was out, it went downhill.
They did a lot of good work (much like the ACLU) but they are now honestly unrecognizable.
My old company donated around $3k/mo of services for almost a decade which in the grand scheme of things isn't a lot but we kept them online when other ISPs would've shut them off.
I've ceased donating to them and the ACLU because they no longer stand for freedom on or off the internet. My money now goes to groups that actively pursue the government for violating our constitutional rights.
It's depressing now, but also was genuinely amazing how great EFF was early on. I think a lot of that had to do with the board, membership, and staff (such as yourself) intentionally trying to keep things balanced and focused. Thank you for all the great stuff you and the rest of the org did back then.
> I remember hearing the phrase "that's not an EFF issue" spoken much more frequently in the earlier part of my time at the organization.
I'm not saying that isn't a valid critique, but from 2001 to 2019 so much more of out culture, politics, and protest have shifted to online spaces (for better or worse). Do you think that the EFF just has _more_ to do now because of the shifting needs of our online spaces and the increased governance on them?
Too late to edit, but I realized that the correct dates for my time at EFF are actually 2001 to 2020 (I was thinking about how I left during the COVID-19 pandemic, but that was in 2020).
Like for the ACLU it seems driven by the personalities that entered the organization.
The type of people who in the most recent generation become professional activists are also those looking for an all encompassing ominicause/ideology that frames disagreement as a fundamental moral failing
A lot of what happened politically in the late 2010s and hit its peak during COVID was that this meme grew that people were thinking and saying things so offensive, we had to make sure they didn’t have a voice on any viable platform.
Oh, yeah, they could still in theory host their own website on Tor Onion, but in practice people would pull whatever domain they had, tell their hosting provider to get these people off of their network, and otherwise try to completely, excuse me, censor what they had to say.
There are two ways to deal with speech we don’t like:
• Do what it takes to bring the speech offline, so no one can read it.
• Respond to the speech with more speech.
Let me give you one example: The manosphere guys. What they believe is that they are learning to somehow become these mysterious “Alpha” guys, they believe the fiction that women only want to sleep with a minority of men, they believe every woman wants to sleep with those relatively few guys, that women will cheat on their partner to sleep with one of those guys, etc.
It’s a pretty misogynistic view of men, in summary.
So, how were they handled in the 2010s? Well, to give one example, one prominent manosphere guy (RooshV) was falsely accuse of advocating for “rape”, his books were pulled from Amazon, hackers attacked his webpage and forum to try and push him offline, forcing him to get a DDos-resistant Cloudflare account, etc. He was kicked off of Twitter. The UK blacklisted him so he is not allowed to travel there; Australia too.
It caused his followers to feel like they were being attacked by “Women and betas”, causing them to further the spread of their beliefs and them continuing to believe they were a persecuted minority.
The lies they believe: That women only want to date and sleep with a few “Alpha” men, that women will cheat on their partner if he is a “Beta provider”, and what not are still memes being widely spread online.
The attempts to censor those ideas didn’t work. They just made the idea stronger when everything was said and done.
What I am doing, however, is spreading facts and information countering their misogynistic lies. [1] Because I agree with Gilmore: The answer to speech we don’t like is more speech.
Point being, insomuch as the EFF feels one should deal with speech one doesn’t like with censorship, instead of more speech, they are no longer following their original ideals.
> the way that they think and talk about that work, in terms of what motivates it or what it is meant to achieve, is now a predominantly left-wing framing. If you don't have a left-wing worldview, you're at least not going to be culturally aligned with EFF's take on things, even if you agree with many of their positions and projects.
Is this due to them literally changing their mission and tack, or is this a shifting of the overton window? I would argue the latter, but you have direct experience there so I'm curious to hear more.
That's a good way to put it. When the response to "this shouldn't be politicized" is "everything is political," that misses the point. Digital freedom doesn't need to be left vs right. A lot of powerful lobbying groups don't pick a party and will fight within both parties during primaries instead, for example PhRMA and AIPAC.
I hear what you're saying and it's very insightful. But I'm under the impression the libertarians have moved a lot closer to fascism I'm the recent years so it's hard to keep them in any tent.
The "society has become more polarized" is an euphemism to describe an important rise of fascism across the world and in the US (that I'm not a citizen of). Yes it's polarized, because there's a side that's trying to create a political police and camps to deport everyone they disagree with as "illegal immigrants".
Circling back to EFF, I have seen many important legal issue related to digital freedom that I thought was important where they were involved. I think they're serving their mission. This decision makes sense, it's just a little bit late
The problems with claiming something is "left-wing", is that without a definition or clear example, the claim becomes highly suspect or appears very subjective.
Yet another problem, in terms of perspective, is seeing anything not right-wing as being "left-wing". The issue with that, however, is there is a very large middle. Neither predominately left or right, independents or switchers, whose opinions depend on the issue being discussed.
1316 comments
When I started, EFF was a very effective coalition between (primarily) progressives and libertarians. This had largely been the case since EFF was founded in 1990 by both progressives and libertarians. When people would call EFF a "left-wing" organization, I would correct them. It wasn't a left-wing organization, it was a big tent and had consistently had very significant non-left-wing representation in its membership, board, and staff.
This was perhaps comparatively easy to achieve because EFF was mainly working on free speech and privacy, and both progressives and libertarians were happy to unite around those things and try to get more of them for everybody, even without necessarily agreeing on other issues.
Maybe "both progressives and libertarians" doesn't feel like that big a tent in the overall scheme of things, but it was a good portion of people who were online by choice early on and who were feeling idealistic about technology.
I'm sure everyone reading this is aware that, as American society has become more polarized, there are fewer and fewer institutions that are successfully operating as big tents in this sense. Somewhat famously ACLU is not. EFF is also not.
EFF is still doing a lot of good work in a non-partisan sense. However, the way that they think and talk about that work, in terms of what motivates it or what it is meant to achieve, is now a predominantly left-wing framing. If you don't have a left-wing worldview, you're at least not going to be culturally aligned with EFF's take on things, even if you agree with many of their positions and projects.
This should not be taken to mean that they never take on non-leftist causes or clients or never successfully work in coalition with non-leftist organizations. It's most about how they see what they are trying to do.
I again want to be clear for people who are saying "it's no surprise that a political organization is political" that EFF's politics and rhetoric are not what they were in earlier decades. There are many interpretations of that that you might take if you agree with some of the changes (you might feel that they became more politically aware or more sophisticated or something), but the organization's coalition and positioning is really very different from what it was in earlier eras.
It's very apparent to me that EFF was more skillful at staying neutral on a wider range of questions in the past than it is now. I remember hearing the phrase "that's not an EFF issue" spoken much more frequently in the earlier part of my time at the organization.
(Another more neutral interpretation is that the Internet successfully became a part of everyday life, with the result that more and more historically-offline political issues now have some kind of online component: so maybe it's more of a challenge to deliberately not have a position on a range of "non-tech" politics because people are regularly pointing out how tech and non-tech issues interact more.)
I experienced these changes as an enormous personal tragedy, and it's deeply frustrating for me if people would like to pretend that they didn't happen.
I'm still rooting for them to win most of their court cases.
They did a lot of good work (much like the ACLU) but they are now honestly unrecognizable.
My old company donated around $3k/mo of services for almost a decade which in the grand scheme of things isn't a lot but we kept them online when other ISPs would've shut them off.
I've ceased donating to them and the ACLU because they no longer stand for freedom on or off the internet. My money now goes to groups that actively pursue the government for violating our constitutional rights.
> groups that actively pursue the government for violating our constitutional rights
Could you share some examples?
> when the EFF advanced the charge of government censorship of the internet
Wait, when did this happen? What are you referring to here?
> I remember hearing the phrase "that's not an EFF issue" spoken much more frequently in the earlier part of my time at the organization.
I'm not saying that isn't a valid critique, but from 2001 to 2019 so much more of out culture, politics, and protest have shifted to online spaces (for better or worse). Do you think that the EFF just has _more_ to do now because of the shifting needs of our online spaces and the increased governance on them?
The type of people who in the most recent generation become professional activists are also those looking for an all encompassing ominicause/ideology that frames disagreement as a fundamental moral failing
Oh, yeah, they could still in theory host their own website on Tor Onion, but in practice people would pull whatever domain they had, tell their hosting provider to get these people off of their network, and otherwise try to completely, excuse me, censor what they had to say.
There are two ways to deal with speech we don’t like:
• Do what it takes to bring the speech offline, so no one can read it.
• Respond to the speech with more speech.
Let me give you one example: The manosphere guys. What they believe is that they are learning to somehow become these mysterious “Alpha” guys, they believe the fiction that women only want to sleep with a minority of men, they believe every woman wants to sleep with those relatively few guys, that women will cheat on their partner to sleep with one of those guys, etc.
It’s a pretty misogynistic view of men, in summary.
So, how were they handled in the 2010s? Well, to give one example, one prominent manosphere guy (RooshV) was falsely accuse of advocating for “rape”, his books were pulled from Amazon, hackers attacked his webpage and forum to try and push him offline, forcing him to get a DDos-resistant Cloudflare account, etc. He was kicked off of Twitter. The UK blacklisted him so he is not allowed to travel there; Australia too.
It caused his followers to feel like they were being attacked by “Women and betas”, causing them to further the spread of their beliefs and them continuing to believe they were a persecuted minority.
The lies they believe: That women only want to date and sleep with a few “Alpha” men, that women will cheat on their partner if he is a “Beta provider”, and what not are still memes being widely spread online.
The attempts to censor those ideas didn’t work. They just made the idea stronger when everything was said and done.
What I am doing, however, is spreading facts and information countering their misogynistic lies. [1] Because I agree with Gilmore: The answer to speech we don’t like is more speech.
Point being, insomuch as the EFF feels one should deal with speech one doesn’t like with censorship, instead of more speech, they are no longer following their original ideals.
[1] https://nuancepill.substack.com/ is spreading the good word.
> the way that they think and talk about that work, in terms of what motivates it or what it is meant to achieve, is now a predominantly left-wing framing. If you don't have a left-wing worldview, you're at least not going to be culturally aligned with EFF's take on things, even if you agree with many of their positions and projects.
Is this due to them literally changing their mission and tack, or is this a shifting of the overton window? I would argue the latter, but you have direct experience there so I'm curious to hear more.
"All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_O%27Sullivan_(columnist)#...
Circling back to EFF, I have seen many important legal issue related to digital freedom that I thought was important where they were involved. I think they're serving their mission. This decision makes sense, it's just a little bit late
> left-wing framing
The problems with claiming something is "left-wing", is that without a definition or clear example, the claim becomes highly suspect or appears very subjective.
Yet another problem, in terms of perspective, is seeing anything not right-wing as being "left-wing". The issue with that, however, is there is a very large middle. Neither predominately left or right, independents or switchers, whose opinions depend on the issue being discussed.