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Has anybody ever wanted politics in any of their software?

jddil 5y ago
Some of the earliest software I know of was for guidance systems. Was that political? Edit* To expand I think it was and we are naive if we believe we aren't making political statements with a lot of the choices we make.
senectus1 5y ago
emphatically no.
eyelidlessness 5y ago
Politics is in all of your software. As a simple demonstration of that, either you wrote it, it’s licensed to you under specific terms, or you’re using it unlicensed and likely violating some set of laws. If you mean “political disagreements I would prefer didn’t overlap with my software priorities”, yeah some of us do want that. Part of achieving any goal is persuasion and leverage. Humans are involved in making software and we put our priorities into that as we see fit. I’m not saying this malware is good (it’s not), but this question deserves an answer in its own right.
- bigDinosaur 5y ago
  There's politics in the procedural sense of adhering to laws and regulations, which is just something we have to accept as part of rule of law, contracts, etc. They're usually far from perfect but will always exist in some kind of form. Then there's the politics of protest, and you sure as hell don't want those in any critical software. Would you want the software that controls your water supply to be similarly politicised in the way this peacenotwar package does? No - because water supply should be politics free at providing the actual service (i.e. water) even though the actual infrastructure was funded by politicians.
  - eyelidlessness 5y ago
    I want the politics of protest in software. I want us as a community to be better prepared for the responsibility of our profession—like engineers—and better stewards of our society, and to protect people from the dangers of sabotage while advocating for the people who rightly see sabotage as a viable option… possibly the only one. We have extraordinary privilege and power as workers. We have the power to make the world better. The people who want to make it worse already see us and our domain as an attack vector. We cannot change that. We should rise to the occasion, not declare neutrality in its face.
    - bigDinosaur 5y ago
      You really want infrastructure to become political in the sense of the service that's actually provided? As an example, I heavily disagree with the focus on car infrastructure and the extreme amount of billions I consider largely misallocated. Does that give me the right to inject my politics into traffic signaling software? The possibilities for that are endless and almost all of them are bad. These areas must not be political to prevent spirals of politicisation (remember, if this becomes the norm then it'd justify your political enemies doing the exact same thing). As far as I am aware, engineers do not inject politics into bridges or rail infrastructure or anything else, and though they do have codes of conduct and legal responsibility for what they sign off on that's not so much political as it is discouraging negligence. Nothing in my position is against engineers having political opinions, or campaigning for what they want, or resigning or whatever. I just think that that's not appropriate in terms of the actual service they concretely provide to society during their employment.
      - eyelidlessness 5y ago
        > You really want infrastructure to become political in the sense of the service that's actually provided? As an example, I heavily disagree with the focus on car infrastructure and the extreme amount of billions I consider largely misallocated. Does that give me the right to inject my politics into traffic signaling software? It’s already political. Those targets are already used when people see fit to use them. What I want is for us to stop pretending that there’s a possibility of a multi-trillion dollar industry that can be absent political impact and conflict. It cannot happen. We need to be engaged politically because many of those impacts are or will be harmful like you say. We also need to be engaged because our neutrality determines what is and isn’t acceptable as a status quo. And yes, in certain very specific circumstances we need to decide whether our conscience rejects, accepts, even abides or joins certain demonstrative or material actions even if they’re generally out of bounds. We live in a world. It’s nowhere near so compartmentalized.
- tpmoney 5y ago
  I think the problem with these sorts of “everything is political” responses is they preclude the possibility of politically neutral grounds for otherwise different people to interact and find shared humanity. If every place and action is filtered through all the possible political angles, it becomes impossible for two opposing people to find common grounds. Further it ignores that there’s a difference between related political concerns and unrelated political concerns within any given activity. Statistically some software maintainers are going to be evangelical christians. They don’t need to be using their node packages to evangelize or drop “god hates fags” messages on computers in IP blocks belonging to pride month participants. Statistically some are going to be communists. They don’t need to be dropping Karl Marx quotes into software installs running in republican strongholds. Some are going to be antivax, they don’t need to have their nose packages start sending “vaccines cause autism” messages to the logs. Some are going to be Biden supporters, they don’t need to be having their packages delete files when installed on computers run by Bernie Sanders supporters. In fact even for tangentially related topics, unilaterally changing the conditions of the interaction you have with your fellow maintainers and developers in order to insert your current important political issue into their machines is a fundamentally dick move. The GPG maintainers might be all about encryption and encryption rights, but if the EARNIT act passed tomorrow and in response they quietly changed all versions of gpg to send plaintext unencrypted copies of everything it’s asked to encrypt or decrypt to Wikileaks as a protest, that’s still a dick move even with the politics being explicitly related. It’s unnecessarily bringing politics (encryption rights) into a non political transaction (using encryption software to encrypt something). When people say they don’t want politics in their software that’s what they’re taking about. They don’t want people taking an existing agreed upon sphere of politics and influence and suddenly injecting new rules into it that fundamentally alter that relationship.
  - eyelidlessness 5y ago
    Defining neutral (or even claiming such a thing exists) is inherently a political claim. Even if what you want is the most politically uncharged space where it’s maximally available and accessible to the largest proportion of society who would benefit from and foster that… look how many qualifying words I needed for this sentence. Can you imagine any of them being specified in a way none of that potential set of people objects to? Part of the reason I can’t is… there are things I can’t be neutral about because lives depend on it, including my loved ones and my own in some cases. I don’t think this was the right way to put very real human cost into software as an agent of change or discussion, but I can think of ways it could be (because) I can think of dozens of other ways necessary social progress would have been impossible without people interjecting “neutral” which wasn’t. And if that feels too radical for you or HN, let’s not forget that this is a common tactic of combat (and the “political” subject is literally war). Railroads and landing strips aren’t instruments of war, they’re ostensibly neutral. But they’re widely regarded as conventional targets because they facilitate otherwise non-neutral activity. The same goes for any other infrastructure. Again I don’t think this was a helpful action. But I think it was an inevitable one, and I think hoping for neutrality in software is just naive.
zucker42 5y ago
Yes, I want the political ideas that "the user should maintain control over software he/she uses" and "the user has a right to repair technologies he's using" reflected in my software. This is definitely a terrible and destructive decision by the maintainer(s) but not because its politics.
- zorpner 5y ago
  Why should the maintainer not have the freedom to write the software they wish? The users of their software aren't being denied their freedoms to control and repair the code.
  - zucker42 5y ago
    Sorry, those ideas were not meant to necessarily be directly related to the topic at hand. They were examples of political ideas that I want to be reflected in my software (just like apparently this maintainer wanted the political idea that "citizens of Russia/Belarus should have consequences if they use this software" reflected in the software he wrote).
    - zorpner 5y ago
      ah, understood -- thank you for the clarification!
klyrs 5y ago
[laughing in RMS]
- eyelidlessness 5y ago
  I upvoted this despite vehemently disagreeing with RMS on many topics, because it’s the most glaring politics in software intersection that’s invisible here.
spyremeown 5y ago
Open Source? Yea? I mean, that's the whole point.

Some of the earliest software I know of was for guidance systems. Was that political? Edit* To expand I think it was and we are naive if we believe we aren't making political statements with a lot of the choices we make.

senectus1 5y ago

emphatically no.

eyelidlessness 5y ago

Politics is in all of your software. As a simple demonstration of that, either you wrote it, it’s licensed to you under specific terms, or you’re using it unlicensed and likely violating some set of laws. If you mean “political disagreements I would prefer didn’t overlap with my software priorities”, yeah some of us do want that. Part of achieving any goal is persuasion and leverage. Humans are involved in making software and we put our priorities into that as we see fit. I’m not saying this malware is good (it’s not), but this question deserves an answer in its own right.

bigDinosaur 5y ago
There's politics in the procedural sense of adhering to laws and regulations, which is just something we have to accept as part of rule of law, contracts, etc. They're usually far from perfect but will always exist in some kind of form. Then there's the politics of protest, and you sure as hell don't want those in any critical software. Would you want the software that controls your water supply to be similarly politicised in the way this peacenotwar package does? No - because water supply should be politics free at providing the actual service (i.e. water) even though the actual infrastructure was funded by politicians.
- eyelidlessness 5y ago
  I want the politics of protest in software. I want us as a community to be better prepared for the responsibility of our profession—like engineers—and better stewards of our society, and to protect people from the dangers of sabotage while advocating for the people who rightly see sabotage as a viable option… possibly the only one. We have extraordinary privilege and power as workers. We have the power to make the world better. The people who want to make it worse already see us and our domain as an attack vector. We cannot change that. We should rise to the occasion, not declare neutrality in its face.
  - bigDinosaur 5y ago
    You really want infrastructure to become political in the sense of the service that's actually provided? As an example, I heavily disagree with the focus on car infrastructure and the extreme amount of billions I consider largely misallocated. Does that give me the right to inject my politics into traffic signaling software? The possibilities for that are endless and almost all of them are bad. These areas must not be political to prevent spirals of politicisation (remember, if this becomes the norm then it'd justify your political enemies doing the exact same thing). As far as I am aware, engineers do not inject politics into bridges or rail infrastructure or anything else, and though they do have codes of conduct and legal responsibility for what they sign off on that's not so much political as it is discouraging negligence. Nothing in my position is against engineers having political opinions, or campaigning for what they want, or resigning or whatever. I just think that that's not appropriate in terms of the actual service they concretely provide to society during their employment.
    - eyelidlessness 5y ago
      > You really want infrastructure to become political in the sense of the service that's actually provided? As an example, I heavily disagree with the focus on car infrastructure and the extreme amount of billions I consider largely misallocated. Does that give me the right to inject my politics into traffic signaling software? It’s already political. Those targets are already used when people see fit to use them. What I want is for us to stop pretending that there’s a possibility of a multi-trillion dollar industry that can be absent political impact and conflict. It cannot happen. We need to be engaged politically because many of those impacts are or will be harmful like you say. We also need to be engaged because our neutrality determines what is and isn’t acceptable as a status quo. And yes, in certain very specific circumstances we need to decide whether our conscience rejects, accepts, even abides or joins certain demonstrative or material actions even if they’re generally out of bounds. We live in a world. It’s nowhere near so compartmentalized.
tpmoney 5y ago
I think the problem with these sorts of “everything is political” responses is they preclude the possibility of politically neutral grounds for otherwise different people to interact and find shared humanity. If every place and action is filtered through all the possible political angles, it becomes impossible for two opposing people to find common grounds. Further it ignores that there’s a difference between related political concerns and unrelated political concerns within any given activity. Statistically some software maintainers are going to be evangelical christians. They don’t need to be using their node packages to evangelize or drop “god hates fags” messages on computers in IP blocks belonging to pride month participants. Statistically some are going to be communists. They don’t need to be dropping Karl Marx quotes into software installs running in republican strongholds. Some are going to be antivax, they don’t need to have their nose packages start sending “vaccines cause autism” messages to the logs. Some are going to be Biden supporters, they don’t need to be having their packages delete files when installed on computers run by Bernie Sanders supporters. In fact even for tangentially related topics, unilaterally changing the conditions of the interaction you have with your fellow maintainers and developers in order to insert your current important political issue into their machines is a fundamentally dick move. The GPG maintainers might be all about encryption and encryption rights, but if the EARNIT act passed tomorrow and in response they quietly changed all versions of gpg to send plaintext unencrypted copies of everything it’s asked to encrypt or decrypt to Wikileaks as a protest, that’s still a dick move even with the politics being explicitly related. It’s unnecessarily bringing politics (encryption rights) into a non political transaction (using encryption software to encrypt something). When people say they don’t want politics in their software that’s what they’re taking about. They don’t want people taking an existing agreed upon sphere of politics and influence and suddenly injecting new rules into it that fundamentally alter that relationship.
- eyelidlessness 5y ago
  Defining neutral (or even claiming such a thing exists) is inherently a political claim. Even if what you want is the most politically uncharged space where it’s maximally available and accessible to the largest proportion of society who would benefit from and foster that… look how many qualifying words I needed for this sentence. Can you imagine any of them being specified in a way none of that potential set of people objects to? Part of the reason I can’t is… there are things I can’t be neutral about because lives depend on it, including my loved ones and my own in some cases. I don’t think this was the right way to put very real human cost into software as an agent of change or discussion, but I can think of ways it could be (because) I can think of dozens of other ways necessary social progress would have been impossible without people interjecting “neutral” which wasn’t. And if that feels too radical for you or HN, let’s not forget that this is a common tactic of combat (and the “political” subject is literally war). Railroads and landing strips aren’t instruments of war, they’re ostensibly neutral. But they’re widely regarded as conventional targets because they facilitate otherwise non-neutral activity. The same goes for any other infrastructure. Again I don’t think this was a helpful action. But I think it was an inevitable one, and I think hoping for neutrality in software is just naive.

zucker42 5y ago

Yes, I want the political ideas that "the user should maintain control over software he/she uses" and "the user has a right to repair technologies he's using" reflected in my software. This is definitely a terrible and destructive decision by the maintainer(s) but not because its politics.

zorpner 5y ago
Why should the maintainer not have the freedom to write the software they wish? The users of their software aren't being denied their freedoms to control and repair the code.
- zucker42 5y ago
  Sorry, those ideas were not meant to necessarily be directly related to the topic at hand. They were examples of political ideas that I want to be reflected in my software (just like apparently this maintainer wanted the political idea that "citizens of Russia/Belarus should have consequences if they use this software" reflected in the software he wrote).
  - zorpner 5y ago
    ah, understood -- thank you for the clarification!

klyrs 5y ago

[laughing in RMS]

eyelidlessness 5y ago
I upvoted this despite vehemently disagreeing with RMS on many topics, because it’s the most glaring politics in software intersection that’s invisible here.

spyremeown 5y ago

Open Source? Yea? I mean, that's the whole point.