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.
IMO it's foolish for a company to wade into these waters at all unless activism is part of their brand. If you signal you're going to take a stand it ends up having to be around everything and people are going to have a lot of conflicting agendas. Or you could just sell software tools to people who pay for them.
The only people who consider that "not taking a stand" are the people who don't suffer as a result of that choice. Thus, as the parent poster said, this is a support of the status quo (or an escalation of it) by privileged people who will never suffer the consequences of that choice. Saying "the abuse of police power and the imprisonment of asylum seekers has nothing to do with me or my company" is saying "I'm okay with all of this because it doesn't affect me directly".
As we've seen with Facebook, trying to "not take a stand" is actually taking a stand, and saying "we won't fact check obvious lies or take down calls for violence by the military against our own citizens" is saying "we're okay with our platform being used to erode democracy and threaten people's lives". We're seeing now that Zuckerberg, then, is completely okay with the effective dissolution of everything that the US claims to stand for, as long as it means that Facebook won't be broken up as a result of their unethical and illegal business practices.
In this way, Facebook isn't "not taking a stand", they're specifically taking a stand against corporate and social accountability. Because of their position in the market that means that they can directly and indirectly affect what news people see, what groups people are recommended, and what politics people have, and they don't want to give up that power, so they'll implicitly support a government which will let them keep it, no matter what the consequences to anyone else.
There's no such thing as not "wading into these waters"; only following your ethics vs. signing another contract and making a few million bucks from it.