For the past eight months together with a few friends I've been involved with something called Better Tech Club. In the beginning we called our activity "FOSS for Normies", and we had a rather nerdy logo. We've changed the name, but being "for normies" remains part of our mission.

Who is a Normie?

With a bit of a wink 😉 I say that in the context of our work a normie is a person for whom a computer is a mean to some other end. They will use a computer to send an email, file taxes, prepare a presentation, watch a movie, or talk to a friend. But they don't particularly care about computers, as long as their job is done.

This makes them different from nerds like me, and many of my friends from Better Tech Club. For us, computers are very interesting on their own. We like interacting with them just for the sake of "doing computer stuff" and seeing what's possible. It's fun. It's our hobby. So we think a lot about computers and have have many strong opinions about them. Normies typically don't¹.

Historically this made it difficult to make normies care about important, political aspects related to computers - like economic and social inequality, imperialism, and hegemony. Those real life problems, that should concern every intelligent and decent person, were easy to dismiss as "just another rant from those computer nerds and radicals; nobody understands what they say anyway".

This changed with the second coming of Donald Trump², and a noticeable drop in the quality of big tech software³. People who just a few months earlier did not care about politics of technology, suddenly started asking questions about privacy, security, political misinformation, European independence, and complicity of USA big tech in war and genocide. They started asking, if they can install Linux on their iPhone⁴! I'm thrilled about this, because for a meaningful political change we need them on our side.

Now is the time for nerds and normies to unite!