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I very much disagree.

Any such bans will always take the path of least resistance to cover the largest possible population with the easiest means. Pareto Style. And I care much more about those 80% of people having access over maintaining my own. Because ultimately, those people will set cultural standards of the future, not some technologist with their fully libre laptop.

And those attacks are, as of now, not that sophisticated or blatantly censoring. An overwhelming majority already do their computing on locked down devices (running iOS, Android and ChromeOS) and the big censorship wave hasn't hit them. Every half decade or so Amazon removes a book from Kindle as a side effect of capitalism and copyright and there's a huge HN thread mistaking it for deliberate censorship, but overall it really doesn't matter.

Also, let's be completely clear that DeSantis didn't ban math books. This was an attack on ideologically inconvenient books, mostly queer literature. It's part of the push to label us as "groomers" for merely existing around underage people that has caused a spike in violence and mistrust directed towards trans people. Once our rights are sufficiently eroded, they'll go after the gays again, and after that, maybe, we'll have progressed on the fascist cataclysmic us versus them rhetoric to revive blatant antisemitism. Or racism. Who knows. But safeguarding the high end bit of tech that is not even mainstream anymore wouldn't help society out of this and being concerned for it is a very individualistic choice.




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