> How much does fascism come up wrt operating systems?

It's not strictly related to operating systems but it's been coming up in many online forums around all sort of topics.

Look at some discussion groups around well-known software projects and you'll find people dropping far-right dog whistles, arguments around someone's pronouns and the occasional flamewar.

here's a good introduction to fascist operating systems: https://vastabrupt.com/2018/10/31/gender-acceleration/

I'm curious to what extent that article is intended to be taken seriously. It makes a lot of big claims and uses a lot of very charged language without much substance to back it up.

The implication that trans women are good at computer science because most languages use 0-indexed arrays sounds like pseudoscientific numerology to me. As well as their claim that using the yannic bit 0 is a way of rising above the phallic "1".

It reeks pseudoscience bullshit.

This reads like a piece of bad misandrist science fiction, i.e. a modern academic paper drowning in critical theory. Pretty entertaining, but frightening when you realize it’s probably taken seriously by its author and others.

i can only hope this is a bad inside joke

Not much more than that fascists can use them. For the rest all this rhetoric about fascism, racism, trans-activism and other critical-theory related issues does nothing but drive a wedge between those who are in support of deconstruction and those who oppose it - there is no middle position here. It is a small but vocal minority which supports this, that is why it keeps on cropping up everywhere. Unfortunately the majority of those who oppose it are afraid to say so out of fear of being ostracized or cancelled.

I've been a volunteer for the GNU project for many years but I vehemently oppose this type of activism. It doesn't help the project, it doesn't help forwarding is goals, it only serves to brand the project and in extension free software as yet another thing to be shunned by those who do not hold with critical theory.