When People with Privilege Don't Use It

I saw a post from Jeremy Soller regarding Aral Balkan that made me raise an eyebrow. I've had prior engagements with Aral and found them to be a bit like me, slightly abrasive but ideally with the targets in the right place. Taking some time to read the post and those following it, my initial response was to prevent the propagation of a notion of virtue signaling, a concept that initially came up in right-leaning religious circles as a way to counter critique against conservative stances^[1]. I have to admit, there were posts that I missed before engaging^[2]. The point of turn for me began with katzenberger's post that I initially agreed with. As you can follow from that thread, I decided to clear up the point regarding signaling and suggest a path forward for both parties. However, today, things changed. A mutual posted a longer post that I'll partially quote and add some emphasis here:

You have a massive platform. Use that platform to help make a change. You can start by helping people understand what actual issues exist. "$THING is broken" is not actionable feedback. Help break down what's missing from our accessibility stack for the use cases that matter to you or those you know.

This is on par with what I was hoping both sides were willing to do. My (now naive) assumption that software developers who both understood the importance of extending F/LOSS's capacity to reach people, especially in our computing landscape where Apple double-downs on its violence^[3], Microsoft's blatant pivot into spyware-by-default^[4] and the nascent arrival of a massive advertising dragnet coming to the Fediverse via Facebook's P92, that we need to not fight each other and instead work together. I'm starting to believe that I expect too much from people without first examining their actions (or acknowledging it altogether). Aral, with no irony implied, has this pinned to his profile:

The only legitimate use of privilege is to help bring about the kind of world where you would not have had it to begin with.

With someone who has 44,000 accounts following them, the ability to raise money for their foundation^[5] and whose more prominent app outside of their SmallWeb work, isn't accessible, I expected a little bit more. Just to make more clear, Aral's issue with GNOME is that they haven't worked enough (or at all) on accessibility and an application he paraded for some time hasn't worked to deploy that themselves.Even with the following quote he also has pinned by Angela Davis, a Black woman who's spent her life championing for people of all creeds, has me questioning both our collective understanding of liberation and those who use it as marketing slogans.

Are you simply going to ask those who have been marginalized or subjugated to come inside of the institution and participate in the same process that led precisely to their marginalization? Diversity and inclusion without substantive change, without radical change, accomplishes nothing.

At this time of writing, Aral and I are still mutuals. By the time this is published, that'll no longer be the case. What I expect to happen is that he'll block me as he's done to another Black queer person and the leader of the Elementary project. The fact that he hasn't replied to anything mentioned in the thread regarding the bridge of efforts and has a history of blocking people of color that call out his behavior^[6], tied with his seeming inability for self-reflection, it's a bit easy to see where this will end up.

Aral Balkan is the privileged white man in tech that people of color warn others about. It took me way too long to realize this, even after learning how he disparaged another community I'm in and with his reaction to anyone that talks about his failed attempt to build the "IndiePhone". Going into his history, you'll see a lot more marketing - and code - but more marketing on the hopes of tomorrow instead of working with people today.

What really sucks that Aral's only one of the loudest (so far). There's plenty of others who people have clamored around and this fuels the distance that people of color have towards the Fediverse. It's disappointing because at the end of the day, Aral still will have a loyal following^[7] that'll see this as a smear campaign. That means he'll suck up valuable resources and attention that we need to focus on things like:

• Supporting the efforts on improving accessibility on libre systems: these communities do not have the funding, labor, marketing or time of multinational organizations like Apple, Microsoft, Google and the ilk. If you can donate to the AccessKit project (or even give them a follow), that'd make a difference.
• Reading the works of the people we quote: In immediate recoil of name dropping, I can't imagine folks like Davis being comfortable with how Aral's used her name as a banner.
• Avoid centering white cishet able-bodied men^[8]: This could have been avoided. Folks have noted online that this has been endemic of Aral and should have been clocked sooner. We, as a community, need to do better about this.

If I can leave you with anything, it's to not put people beyond reproach, focus on actually helping people and to read (beyond the headline). There's a book, Elite Capture, that talks about how public resources are absorbed by a few based on their status. It's not too far off to see that playing out here. Folks might dismiss it because the amount of fiscal capital is small but ignoring the role that social capital has in either amplifying or even getting fiscal capital is risky (and an excellent shield folks like Aral unintentionally hide behind, regardless of what capital comes in). I apologize to those who I've now mistakenly retorted in hopes that clarity could be found, most notably Michael A. Murphy for implicitly defending Aral in this situation. In fact, I suggest people take time to both see what folks at System76 are tangibly doing to bring open computing to the masses in a tangible way^[9] as well as Elementary to bring an approachable desktop to folks.

An Addendum

Aral's mentioned to me that the accessibility concerns with the application he's worked on is more of an upstream issue^[10]. Though this shows progression, this doesn't negate the fact this was a more viable path of focusing on accessibility in a way that can be done through experience-based advocacy. Had more effort been focused here to help upstream these changes from their tool into Elementary (and perhaps into GNOME mainline), people might have had more of a belief that Aral's intent here as pure as it comes off to be. Going from this to making the slapstick stance that both Fedora and GNOME are in this anti-accessibility cabal doesn't help (and could even prevent other groups from considering their support of funding GNOME accessibility as a whole).

Stepping back a bit, as a developer, being met with "patches welcome" isn't the end of the world. At worst, I can close the tab and go about my day. The aforementioned reaction Aral kept with the GNOME developer (who he's since blocked) that highlighted that, at any time, he can help, as Aral's done with getting his tab switching tool mainlined into Gala, the windowing system for Elementary, is what sticks with me. Instead of doing what we're hoping to get more funding for, the retort (and the inability frankly to acknowledge that he still optimized blocks for people who prove him wrong) makes me distrust any further thought without concrete action.

In short, do better.

Another Addendum

I've been asked to cite sources regarding evidence of Aral blocking people of color routinely. Since ActivityPub doesn't operate like BlueSky, there's no public log of block transactions that one can observe. My noting of the history is from independent reports of the such. However, this is a trap for me to link to a bunch of people in lieu of providing canon fodder for harassment^[11]. I can list the explicit call-out at https://crab.garden/@brainblasted/112661075882415170 as well as https://mastodon.social/@nekohayo/112661113080091608. I'm not a journalist^[12] so I can't just post screenshots of DMs or any other private messaging without the consent of those folks.