3 ms·
All software is inherently political, whether it's possible to ignore this fact or not is up for debate and your personal situation. Much like a gun, if you loo
by Etheryte 2y ago
All software is inherently political, whether it's possible to ignore this fact or not is up for debate and your personal situation. Much like a gun, if you look at it in complete isolation from everything else in existence, you might be able to make the case that it's just an object with no meaning attached. But just like guns, software does not live in isolation. In the same way that producing guns, access to guns, buying and selling guns, etc is deeply political, so is software. Pretending that it isn't is only hiding your head under the sand in the hopes that the world won't come knocking.
We need to accept this fact as an industry and take responsibility for our work. Whether it's tracking people online, facial recognition at protests, aggregate cellular data used to deanonymize or etc, all of this software was built by people and claiming it's just a tool with no harm no foul is trying to shed responsibility we should bear.