Wear your values

Dear blog readers & Fedi friends,

Over the past couple of days I shared toots on Mastodon about the possibility of creating t-shirts and sweatshirts with a message in Latin that promotes the Fediverse. This was in reaction to Mark Zuckerberg’s recent appearance at Meta Connect, where he proudly displayed a custom made black sweatshirt with the message, in Latin, “Aut Zuck aut nihil” (either Zuck or nothing). The phrase is inspired by Caesar, the Roman emperor, who had once said “aut Caesar aut nihil” (either Cesar or nothing). The sweatshirt and its message made headline news around the world; the Guardian wrote this great piece: “Zuckerberg Augustus: Meta’s emperor rebrands in new clothes”.

After exchanging messages about this with people on the Fediverse (@oblomov@sociale.network in primis, who wrote a great blog post in Italian about this) I would like to put that idea on pause and offer an apology.

@oblomov@sociale.network‘s post made me realize that the phrase is imperialistic and it makes me feel nauseous to associate something dictatorial and authoritarian to the Fediverse. It just feels wrong. Absolutely wrong. In the heat of the moment it had felt like a good idea: a gentle but trollish pushback to the founder of Meta and his brazen ambition for total world domination. But upon further reflection it feels icky to attach such a sentence to the Fediverse.

I’ve been having a great back-and-forth with Oblomov and other Italians in the Fediverse (fun fact: in many Italian high schools you typically study Latin for five years) about alternative, positive phrases in Latin that could promote the Fediverse. My gut feeling right now is to go with something like “the future is federated” or “federation is the future” – inspired by the title of my newsletter about all things Fediverse. As Oblomov smartly remarked, all the best Latin phrases have already been taken (“E Pluribus Unum” by the United States and “Unus Pro Omnibus, Omnes Pro Uno” by Switzerland).

I’d love to hear your ideas and come up with something in Latin, pro Fediverse. Why Latin? Because it still gives me pleasure to be a gentle troll towards a certain imperialistic entrepreneur. And I love wearing my values.

Years ago I had created and sold my own t-shirts and sweatshirts promoting the visibility of female filmmakers; ampersand t-shirts with their names were always great conversation starters. I had also created a line of t-shirts with the message “this is what a film director looks like” or “this is what an entrepreneur looks like” that women bought and proudly wore. This had made me so happy and I’d like to do something similar to promote the Fediverse. The small earnings the t-shirts would make (typically $1-2 per item) could be donated to Fediverse servers I use – I could split them evenly between mastodon.social, pixelfed.social and poliverso.org (the Friendica server I am on). These are just some ideas… I would love to hear what you think about this.

Onwards and upwards!

Elena

P.S.: find me on Mastodon at @_elena@mastodon.social