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.
Yes, but also companies exist literally only to make money. Companies can't exist without workers. Once a company finds itself in a position of conflict of interest between political views of workers and point of existence of the company - where contracts bring money... we're going to see interesting things.
I wonder, who will break first?
The company will decide it's better to bend to political opinions of employees and end the contract == pay a lot of $money$ for breaking the contract early without delivery and set another precedent where employees decide how and with whom company makes money = uncertain company. Who will make future contracts with such company? Would you outsource your project delivery to a company where employees decide whether your project/office/political stand is good or bad?
Or maybe employees will decide they don't want to work for a company and risk unemployment? Who will risk employing a person who rebels against board members of a company and causes financial damages over broken contract?
I would like to see 100s of GitHub employees leaving GitHub and MS to prove their point, rather than working on the contract, being paid 10x salary of their immigrant desk cleaners and shouting how bad it is the contract exists.