The Anti-Social Century

If you read only one long article this month, it should be The Anti-Social Century by the The Atlantic.

I planned to write about tribalism for a long time, as it bothers me a lot and often puts me in trouble. Unfortunately, most people think in tribes, such as “I’m a Democrat”, “I’m a Republican”, or “You’re either with us, or against us”. Something similar also exists here in Hungary. When I agree with something that others also support, those people think that I belong to their tribe. However, as soon as I disagree with them about something, those same people immediately think that I belong to another tribe. But nothing could be further from the truth–I do not belong to any tribe. If I agree on something with the Democrats, it does not mean that I reject everything what the Republicans say. And the same is true the other way round.

And this applies not just to politics, but to all aspects of life, including IT. Just think about my operating system affiliations. I consider myself a FreeBSD guy at heart. Still, I use openSUSE as my main OS on my laptop, as it provides the best installation and hardware support (often better than Windows) and has most of the software I need. My colleagues have a lot more trouble using the same company laptop with other operating systems. That said, I also use Windows, even if my title is “open-source evangelist”: Teams and PowerPoint for work, while Capture One and Ableton for my hobbies. And even if I use FreeBSD, openSUSE and Windows as my daily drivers, most of my friends are from the Fedora / RHEL (& compatibles) community, as most syslog-ng users use CentOS and friends, which means that I spend most of my time with those people. Would it help in any way if I embraced a tribal mindset for the various Linux distros or operating systems? Certainly not.

Long story short: Forget tribalism and be social! The article in The Atlantic describes many changes that led to this situation. If we are aware of these, we can hopefully reverse the trends.

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