Guess what? Politics are interwoven in every aspect of our lives. You cannot choose to “avoid” them; even suggesting you can be politically neutral is a political stance that comes from a place of privilege, because only the privileged can avoid experiencing negative political consequences inside their bubble.
Collaboration with ICE is collaboration with ICE, whether it’s “just hosting code” or actually contracted by them to develop their systems. It’s the same deal with Amazon or Facebook or whoever. If you work for them you need to admit to yourself that you are an enabler. Most people can’t admit that to themselves, so they maintain an unhealthy cognitive dissonance to keep going.
And it hurts when that dissonance is shattered.
Comparing supporting ICE to a marriage is nonsense, and thinking you can somehow help them be better by keeping them as a customer? A totally naive concept that has been shown not to work in practice since the US 2016 election. (In fact, supporting the monster makes them stronger; if it made them weaker, why would they keep using your product?)
The reckoning we are seeing in tech is long overdue. As developers we are no longer seeing our actions as “politically neutral” and are starting to understand the power we yield collectively to make positive change to our industry.
Nat Friedman is on the wrong side of history here. These empty words are no longer sufficient. Hopefully he figures that out before his tenure at GitHub comes to an end.
There are well-known historical analogues for many of the people now attempting to refrain from making political statements. Namely, there were those Germans in the Nazi era who were neither pro-Nazi nor openly anti-Nazi and who underwent so-called "internal emigration". And there were those Soviet dissidents who didn’t want to have any part in that decades-long fight between the West ("You Communist countries don't respect individual liberty and free markets!") and the Socialist Bloc ("You capitalist nations don’t respect workers, lynch black people and engage in colonialist oppression!").
Neither of those groups were "privileged", indeed these particular analogues were living in oppressive regimes that were suspicious of lack of enthusiasm and these people often suffered for that. But now, from our modern vantage point, we can have a lot of sympathy for them. They made a decision that was right for their own lives, and some of what these groups’ artists created may not have been fashionable at the time among all the polemic, but now it is seen to be very moving and have great staying power.
Of course, a big corporation with large government contracts is quite different from individuals choosing to refrain from being involved, or a small circle of people thereof that constructs its own shared private world to retreat into, separated from contemporary debates. But still, I think that we should refrain from condemning cases where one group of people has not joined its peers in adopting political statements or actions, even if we strongly sympathize with those political movements and believe them just.