We are going through a very strange and extreme period in US History. Corporations are a huge part of the political landscape. Of course workers who are powerful will demand things of their workplaces.
All corporations are political. By accepting the ICE contract previously it was political. Now by reversing they would be changing sides. They were already in the political fray.
The idea that all corporations are political is obviously quite true, especially insofar as potentially-everything is political.
What's interesting is erosion of the norm that corporations should not be particularly political (picking and choosing customers based on politics, touting allegiance to one specific side). This was once a somewhat stronger (political) norm that has fallen by the wayside as the nation has grown more bitterly divided.
I would be happy to see it come back somewhat; I am not convinced that corporate CEOs having an outsized influence on politics is going to take our nation to a healthy place in the long term, either politically, economically, or intellectually. I also expect that the demands of the new orthodoxy will get much, much worse before the situation gets any better.
> This was once a somewhat stronger (political) norm that has fallen by the wayside as the nation has grown more bitterly divided.
Just a thought: what if the nation's divide comes from companies taking more political stances, instead of the opposite? As an example to entertain the thought, when Nike takes a political position through their advertising on social platforms, people react to it by taking side. If done at a scale big enough, with enough companies pushing their customers to take a side, would that be enough to result in visible divide in the country?
I think the hyper politicization of just about everything definitely contributes to polarization, and particularly the “cancel culture” approach to politicization is a blunt instrument that seems very likely to push people to take sides against each other, and see differing beliefs more as opponents that must be defeated rather than neighbors with different priorities.
I think this ultimately comes down to where individuals see effective levers for expressing political opinions at a policy level.
There is very little trust across the entire political spectrum that the US government is an effective policy maker and enforcer. It often feels like our representatives at the state and federal levels no longer represent individuals, and so we've turned to corporations and US government suppliers looking for leverage to force change instead.
Corporate CEOs have always had an outsized influence on politics, it's just now that said influence is not all pro-right-wing (because many of the right's social stances are completely intolerant), Republicans have started wringing their hands, and clutching their pearls, and predicting bedlam, cats and dogs living together, etc, etc.
Were the outsized influence limited to run-of-the-mill pro-corporatism politics (Or anything that aligned with their social agenda, as in the case of firms like Hobby Lobby), we wouldn't be hearing a peep from that camp on the subject. (As if that's somehow apolitical.)
Providing standard, regular service to anyone willing to pay for it is almost always the "default" non-political way of doing business. Do you want an ideological purity test to buy a bagel or a car? Refusing to provide a service when you have the capacity to provide it is a much stronger political act because it essentially implies "I hate you so much that I'm willing to harm myself (foregoing profit) in order to thereby harm you."
There is almost no such thing as standard contracts in b2b and especially business-to-government segments. You'd best believe that ICE has a special contract that it negotiated with GitHub/MS, and it would not be out of the ordinary for the terms to have been influenced by political favors at some level of the negotiation.
I'm sorry, but with power comes responsibility. The poor little CEOs are going to have to recognize that their decisions have consequences, and those consequences must be thought through. They don't just get to play Capitalist without any repercussions because they call themselves non-political.
If you have power, you are responsible for what happens with it. It's not just free money.
And if you don't get your way, what's next? Shutting off ICE employee's water, electricity, and telephone service? And why not kick them out of their apartments too since sheltering an ICE officer helps enable them.
ICE as an institution doesn’t even know what Github is, and they won’t blink an eye if suddenly it goes away. It’s ICE engineers lives which are suddenly miserable because they would have to deal with setting up new systems and processes for source control and bug tracking on top of whatever else they were working on.
Cutting off GitHub access to ICE engineers is like sitting outside their offices banging pots and pans together for a few weeks. A lot of people are generally worse off for a short while, GitHub revenue goes down, maybe they lay off a few engineers who were supporting that customer, a few news articles are written alternatively praising another step towards corporate activism or bemoaning cancel culture.
The most important part of convincing GitHub to cancel ICE to those who are rooting for it isn’t so much ICE losing access to GitHub, but another drop in the bucket toward normalizing the politicization and disruption of basic services to deplorable customers.
This isn't about me getting my way. I'm just very, very opposed to the idea of someone wielding massive amounts of power without it being a burden. Power is burdensome because it means responsibility. If you just want just the power but not the responsibility, you're being a parasite. It's not okay.
I find that completely absurd. I work at a large bank. If my employer provides services to ICE am I practicing politics by showing up to work? Is my employer practicing politics by providing loans at the standard rate and standard anti-discriminatory process equally to all applicants? To be free of politics should my employer stop providing loans to everybody?
At what point does this make sense in an objectively measurable way?
Demonstrably and rather obviously untrue. They're violating the law in many instances, including but not limited to the cases of asylum seekers and current green card holders; it's just they're following the evil, xenophobic whims of the current political leadership, who are failing to hold themselves or ICE accountable to the rule of law, so they are, for the moment, getting away with their lawlessness. I hope we can change this with voting in new leadership, but I fear it may be too late.
Aside and personal observation: it's interesting how the same people so vigorously crying for "law and order" are rather particular about which laws they care about enforcing, and which they're willing to overlook. Of course I'm not the first to make this observation.
Given that the pictures of kids in cages came from before our current president was in office, this is the first time I've heard anyone call president Obama both evil and xenophobic.
Every leader the country has had is trash. That doesn't detract from the fact that the current leadership has managed to lower and re-lower the bar. Consistently widening the window of what outrageous behavior is acceptable.
At this point the office of the president is a no holds barred free-for-all and whoever occupies it next will be doing so with a precedent no near zero actionable oversight.
I disliked the Obama administration’s stance on several policy issues, including immigration and his fondness for using drones, executive orders, and the secret powers of the state.
All of which and much more are significantly worse under the vile, toxic, xenophobic current administration.
But nice try at attempting to derail the conversation with some good old-fashioned whataboutism! Better luck next time!
This omits the important fact that ICE arrests steeply decreased year–over–year for seven out of Obama’s eight years in office, while arrests have increased year–over–year for two of Trump’s three years [0]. That doesn’t exonerate Obama, but it does say something about the administration that a new president inherits.
And who writes the laws of the land? Slavery and Jim Crow were also laws at certain periods of American history. I'd hope it's pretty uncontroversial to say that those laws were also very divisive political issues at the time.
Correct. Not all laws are good or morally acceptable, and they need to be changed.
If Github was to pull out, ICE could simply find someone else willing to sign a contract with them, except it will make things worse, as that other provider will not be as diligent or reliable (if it was just as good, it would have been picked in the first place instead of Github).
When you see an unjust law, it should be pushed to get changed. Back when gay marriage was illegal, it made more sense to push for its legislation, instead of providers refusing service to state governments where it was illegal. People need to protest, call their elected officials, sign petitions, etc. Most importantly, people need to regularly vote, not just during general presidential elections.
That has nothing to do with Github. As a customer, I want to be confident that my service won't get terminated for some arbitrary reason, as long as I obey terms of service and don't break any laws. Giving providers the ability to cancel my service due to random whims in their workforce isn't something that I want to see in tech.
Would you have held the same opinion if you were around in the US in the 1930s and discovered that IBM was developing a new-fangled census system for the newly-elected German government[1]? Or after the news of the death camps was made public, you discovered that IBM had continued to maintain the system they'd created to help track people for the Nazis? Would you have worked for IBM at the time, knowing this was going on?
If you would've spoken out, then you agree with the principle but don't agree that ICE is "bad enough" to warrant this treatment. If you wouldn't have spoken out but wouldn't have worked for them, then you agree that working on these systems is clearly unethical (and thus IBM was acting unethically) but feel that ethics are less important than not disrupting the freedom of a company to sell their services to whoever they like. If you would've worked for them and wouldn't have spoken out, then we have very different views on ethics and I'm not sure we're going to agree on anything.
Yes, laws should be changed but businesses should be held accountable for who they do business with. You'd better believe that the US government wouldn't have the same rosy outlook you do if they discovered that GitHub was selling software to known terrorist groups.
That's a stretch. Many think what they are doing is not legal. And I doubt that everything they do is spelled out in law. There is a lot of policy to what happens in ICE.
I think that a large part of the issue is that ICE is violating human rights on a massive scale. Where they might be executing some laws, they're violating others.
And just a reminder, "just following orders" brings up some scary historical context that a lot of people don't want to help recreate.
How is it political to accept business from a federal agency? One could argue it’s more political to pick and choose which federal agency to work for - or whether to do it at all - based on whether you agree with that agency’s mission. This is really getting out of hand. Now businesses have to let the world (and mostly people who are not customers) know where they stand by choosing customers based on where those customers stand on various issues? This is insanity.
>All corporations are political. By accepting the ICE contract previously it was political. Now by reversing they would be changing sides. They were already in the political fray.
This is only the case if you can find a substantial number of customers Github has turned away. As long as the stance was "as long as it's legal," they stayed out of politics. They were willing to take ICE on as a customer, and they would have been willing to take on organizations fighting against ICE (if for some reason they needed software). That's impartial.
Trying to say that taking on the contract is a political decision just sounds like your forcing your political stances on Github itself... Github had never implied they took politics into account when taking on a customer.
Over most of the last few decades, most corporations' politics were limited to things like United Way drives, etc. Right or wrong, the situation today is very novel, and we may discover why companies were loath to get involved in this sort of thing in the past.
Personally, I'm finding it a significant distraction in my organization. It does leave me wondering if I shouldn't leave for a more neutral one.
You're right, and it goes much deeper. These corporations effectively own enough of our data to trivially deanonymize and target people. An organization of people who believe they are morally justified in they cause are liable to abuse such information, regardless of which side they belong to.
That's the most terrifying part to me as a dev. We don't even need neural networks to search petabytes of social media content for keywords. If we allow corporations to become politicized then we open ourselves up to unprecedented abuses.
You're right that Internet-ish companies are a special risk. But even run-of-the-mill organizations seem to be drinking the Kool-Aid these days. I sat today in an all-hands anti-racism videoconference. It was bland enough, though it would at one time have made a good SNL skit. (It was a bunch of woke white women declaiming our failures.)
Committees were proposed and also the hiring of (even) more D&I consultants and personnel. As usual, no actually useful action was proposed, but we have once again checked the box.
GitHub has banned repos that they don't like (not even talking about breaking ToS). It's not the same as refusing a paying customer, but it's close enough. They've already chosen to be political.
I guess when they start administering ideological purity tests at the bagel shop, I'll know who to thank. After all, providing any type of sustenance or service to a person with the wrong political beliefs helps enable their wrong-ness, doesn't it?
The other is that it usually takes serious labor and negotiation to land a government contract. It's not like ICE went to some Web UI and bought GitHub Enterprise with a company credit card, and now we're asking GitHub/MS to ban them from the e-store.
Are you thinking about the consequences of your breathing? Because every breath grants you the oxygen that your body needs to metabolize the food you eat into useful energy for you to fight the power. So even breathing is political!
Again, it's a meaningless statement. We deliberately draw the line somewhere, partly to avoid incessant infighting over pedantic "political" but not actually political things.
Do you want to know how to turn an entire generation of people against your cause? Impose your politics onto them at work and facilitate a culture of suppression and targeting for anyone critical. This is happening all across society right now and the pendndulum is already starting to swing back and when ivory tower CEOs impose their views onto people who just want to do their jobs, the swing only builds momentum
Your sarcasm is not appreciated. This is a serious matter, and that fact that you can't bring yourself to empathize with people being brutalized reflects very poorly on your ethical code. It's not meaningless at all to point out that actions have consequences, and in this case they are measured in human suffering.
If folks at GitHub believe they offer a product of value (which I suspect that they do), then the necessary corollary is that by offering that product to an agency responsible for a reprehensible abrogation of human rights makes it easier, cheaper, and/or faster for that agency to degrade humanity. To stick one's fingers in one's ears and claim that it is "apolitical" to continue to do business with such an agency is embarrassingly similar to the defenses that IBM executives must have made in the 1930's.
>This is a serious matter, and that fact that you can't bring yourself to empathize with people being brutalized reflects very poorly on your ethical code
1/3 of my people were subject to genocide infamously by oven, more recently than slavery, but I'm not expecting people to remove any reference to fire or pizza from my life, that would be absurd. So is this. None of the people coding were slaves, I guarantee it, and they can move past it just like all other populations move past various atrocities that they experience. This focus on blacks is a fad, you can arbitrarily define a near infinite number of "marginalized" groups if you carve up 360MM people.
But what does make it difficult is being told all your life that you are a victim, held back by something about yourself that you cannot change; that's how you breed weakness and teach learned helplessness.
For what it's worth I was talking about ICE tearing apart families and laughing at people dying in their custody.
Treating other humans with respect is a core value of mine. I try as much as I can to listen to their concerns and be mindful of them. I'm truly sorry that you seem to only see this long-awaited reckoning with America's deep white supremacist roots as a "fad".
All corporations are political. By accepting the ICE contract previously it was political. Now by reversing they would be changing sides. They were already in the political fray.