Archived copy of pluie.me/blog/dont-give-them-the-time-of-day/, fetched 2026-09-10. The post was removed from the site's blog index on 2026-09-10. Content © Leah Amelia “pluie” Chen, CC BY-SA 4.0. Part of The Time of Day, Given.

Don't Give Them the Time of Day

9 Sep '26 nix politics

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How Nix can defend against the encroachment of external influence of politics

Recently, there’s been more news on the techbro side of Twitter, that apparently David Heinemeier Hansson (commonly known as DHH)’s Omarchy “distro”1 is seeking to adopt Nix for declarative system management, as an alternative (or in parallel) to Arch, which they currently use.

As someone who hasn’t been a fan of DHH since the last couple years, I know exactly what his modus operandi is: his expertise is in generating hype in the tech-equivalent of the Twitter Manosphere, and not in making sound technical decisions. In this case, if his goal is to base a distro on Nix without making people spend the time learning how Nix works, I fear that he will be in for a very rude awakening.

He is nonetheless very influential, well-funded and well-connected, and it is completely natural for his opponents to feel intimidated, and for his proponents, vindicated. This is already quite evident by the outbreak of hysteria coming largely from the political left in the Nix Community2 who rightfully criticize him for his increasingly reactionary and appalling ideas regarding ethnicity and immigration, which are extreme even within his cultural context. Many fear that Nix will face an onslaught of right-wing fanatics that oppose our Code of Conduct on respect and inclusivity. We must resist this fear.

On the other hand, figures who have long been exiled from the Nix Community are beginning to crawl out of the shadows again. Like Jon Ringer, who stood with Anduril in their use of Nix in American military and surveillance software, was suspended from GitHub due to refusing to debate the issue in good faith, kept polarizing the community over said suspension and got permabanned, and even tried to commit ban evasion by making PRs to Nix under extremely obvious alt accounts as if we’re all imperceptive imbeciles.

Or Sridhar “srid” Ratnakumar, who got banned for insisting that queer identities aren’t real and are only a malformed political ideology and that systemic racism is only a figment of your imagination. They rally around DHH’s move while parasitizing on his popularity in the Tech Bro Ecosphere™, in order to regain legitimacy for themselves. We must not allow them to do so.

The one thing to understand is that, regardless of your political leanings and ideology, these people are hypocrites. They are the boys who constantly call wolf. They decry others (usually either moderators for Jon, or “woke elements” for srid) of drama, while creating drama surrounding their own inability to stop creating drama due to the incessant need to promote their own rightfully oft-criticized ideology and values.

The only way to stop this loop, however, is not through strongly-worded rebuttals on Twitter, emotionally exhausting polemic essays, or endless fruitless debates on the NixOS Discourse or other such spaces. This only pours more fuel to the flame as they have more “proof” of them being the actual victims and thereby lending themselves more legitimacy.

There’s this old saying on the Ye Olde Internet that people in 2026 seem to have completely forgotten: Don’t. Feed. The Troll. In the backdrop of political and communal discourse driven more and more by social media and political splintering and polarization, attention has become a key strategic resource. Your attention directly affects who is more likely to be seen by other people, and it’s not always guaranteed that you will win against your opponents.

Against particularly influential opponents like DHH, in fact, you’re far more likely to lose, because they have had decades of experience in public relations and playing to the expectations of the crowd at large. Twitter and other forms of mass social media have, through a twisted form of memetic natural selection, already designated people like DHH or Lunduke with the most potent ability to direct the masses in their will.

The smartest way to win is, therefore, to not play their game at all. Some might criticize this as being inactive, passive, counterproductive or even lazy. Eagerness is exactly how we fall in their trap. It’s what boosts the algorithms into drawing more people into the “controversy” and agreeing with people like Jon Ringer that “Nix needs less drama”, all the while disobeying the political establishment, targeting vulnerable minorities, and sowing more chaos and discord in their wake. These are all intentional memetic tactics that many of us still unfortunately are unable to comprehend, let alone counteract.

Some might also naïvely suggest that we should preemptively ban these figures from using Nix. This is worse than simply engaging in pointless debates online, as it not only asserts the veracity of e.g. srid’s claims of Nix having gone “woke”3 and persecuting users for political beliefs, and is also blatantly against the terms of Free and Open-Source Software. Nix is licensed under LGPL 2, and Nixpkgs under MIT. There is nothing we can do to physically and legally limit them from using our software pursuant to the terms of these licenses, and to attempt doing so would mean political and technological suicide for the entire project.

Let us not forget that there is still a significant amount of Nix users disinterested in the drama who might side with Jon Ringer or srid or DHH, should this situation balloon outward any further. Our goal is not to alienate them either by “rooting out subversive elements” or however you want to call it: that will only help in accelerating the atrophy of the Nix Community and trapping Nix within a perceived ideological bubble, and force its users looking elsewhere for greener pastures. Nix’s strength has never been in sheer purity, but in scale, flexibility, and a plurality of diverse use cases and value propositions.

Instead, we need to win our narrative back, through persuasion and careful, rational analysis of the past and present. We need to convince that we removed these people for very good reasons—because they’re people who refuse to collaborate with and have respect towards other people due to their own malignant beliefs. We need to subvert their legitimacy and talking points and stop them from subverting our own, and stop them from turning our own user base (and voter base for the 2026 Steering Committee Election) against ourselves.

So don’t give them the time of day. They’re not worthy of our attention. Build our defenses through solid, reliable, inscrutinizable work that is excellent because it is inherently and functionally excellent. Nix is a wonderful piece of software and my own life as well as many others’ will not be the same without it, so let’s not allow these external pundits to ruin it by flipping the script on who’s the villain here.

Stay calm. Remain where we are. Keep on keeping on.

Footnotes

  1. If you count a bunch of shoddy personal dotfiles with a concerted marketing compaign a “distro”, that is. ↩

  2. I use “Nix Community” as a collective noun for every single user interested in Nix in some way, shape or form. See my response to “Who are ‘The Nix Community’, and why?” from the Steering Committee election last year. ↩

  3. I use “woke” in quotes because I refuse to give legitimacy to a term explicitly made up by alt-right and far-right groups to villainize human respect for all people. Also I can assure you, many people in the Nix Community simultaneously think that Nix is actually not “woke” enough. Fun, huh? ↩