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There is no need to bring politics into software development wherever possible. I don't care who has written the code, code itself is apolitical.

• ipsocannibal 6y ago
  "I don't care who has written the code, code itself is apolitical" When backdoors are added to your service framework, when dragnet data collection services copy every artifact of your digital existence in the name of "national security" or when algorithms have been trained to distinguish faces specificly of your race you will damn sure want to know who wrote that code and why. Its just naive to think tools exist outside of their intended function and political ends often determine those functions.
  • MaKey 6y ago
    I agree. I was aiming at the context of the parent comment. The employer of someone (e. g. Facebook) shouldn't have an effect on how their code is treated.
    • gnud 6y ago
      But when you use projects pushed by big companies, you are giving those companies word-of-mouth advertising, and when their projects become popular they get a pool of pre-trained engineers for free. So if you honestly feel that a company is pure evil, you really ought to avoid any open source project they publish. Not because the code is political, but because everything surrounding the code is.
• Spone 6y ago
  > code itself is apolitical I suggest you read Larry Lessig's Code 2.0 book.
  • rkho 6y ago
    I do not believe "read a 426-page book" should be considered a reasonable response here. At best this response is short-sighted.
  • ipsocannibal 6y ago
    You could at least post a link or say why this is a good book to read. While we are suggesting books I think "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" is a great work highlighting the political motives behind the making of the 20th centuries most important "tool".
    • devdas 6y ago
      The book is pretty much a thesis on why code is law, and therefore very political.
      • mcosta 6y ago
        I can't put police at your door, whatever code I write.
        • devdas 6y ago
          You can literally disallow speech, by restricting what can be said. Or remove your ability to speak to people by shadow-banning you.
• bitwize 6y ago
  Everything is political. Everything is affected by, and affects, the political decisions we, the people, make. The last few years have been instructive in what happens if we ignore fascism and allow ourselves to relax when it comes to anti-fascist vigilance.
  • Fellshard 6y ago
    I'm going to be somewhat blunt in response, but I hope it's not seen as an attack. The phrase 'everything is political' is not a statement of truth, but rather a statement of demand: 'make everything political'. That is a tool to turn up the temperature of a given topic dramatically, not to encourage thoughtful change.
    • enraged_camel 6y ago
      On the contrary, the only people making a demand are developers who insist that their work does, or should, exist in a vacuum, outside of and independent of what is going on in the world, i.e. politics. Reality, however, is there, whether we would like it to be there or not. Look, I get it: sometimes you just want to put your head down and focus on technical details, and let someone else worry about the context. But keeping your head buried in the sand all the time isn't the answer.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      • ljm 6y ago
        Reality is also a lot larger and more complicated than the simplistic context a small slice of it is placed in, with everyone demanding their particular context is _the_ important one. We dumb down our reality all the time in order to fit it to our agenda, selectively picking and choosing the bits we like, and what else can we do in a world with over 7 billion conscious minds? My worry about your line of thinking, and the everything is political one, is that it feels a bit like eradicating diversity of thought and experience. To relate it to the start of this thread, plenty of the world outside the US will have so much of their own shit to deal with than the politics that are _important to you_ are not at all important to them. For anyone to suggest or demand or require otherwise would seem to be quite imperialistic to me.
• sam_goody 6y ago
  This. I wholeheartedly agree. Which is why I disagree with Vue (and others) putting gigantic BLM banners on their sites. Even if the cause is just, by mixing in politics, you create less of a common ground for those working on and using the code, thus creating rifts where there need not be any. Everything becomes "us" and "them".
  • majkinetor 6y ago
    We may all agree, but that doesn't change the fact that it increasingly isn't nowdays. With corps controlling main dev portals it will stay with us unless we have decentralized platform.
  • ipsocannibal 6y ago
    Yeah there is a fine between espousing and radically shoving down someones throat a political point of view. The former is commendable the later is often divisive.
• qmmmur 6y ago
  Everything is political.
  • vaulk 6y ago
    Talking point used by communists to push for authoritarian control over every sphere of life.