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.
No, they got it right the first time. "Everything is political" is a reminder that we do not exist in a cultural vacuum. More pointedly, the simple act of existing in a space as a minority invites what you'd call "politics".
If your existence has never felt "political" to you, cherish that. I've been on the receiving end of many slurs and the occasional attempted assault, and I've watched politicians and pundits debate on cable TV whether I deserve to have the same rights afforded anyone else. I didn't choose to exist "politically", but I sure do notice when folks don't speak up against challenges to my existence because they view it as "politics" and therefore not worth their attention.
Politics happens any time you've got at least three people deciding over what to do with a given resource. If anyone is wondering why three people? Three people is the minimum number for a coalition to form.
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.
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.
Developing software in ignorance of the surrounding social context is -- well, it's worse than writing a file picker and neglecting to add a thumbnail feature.
The core questions she proposes are essential things every software professional should ask themselves and keep in mind as they work. The political context, and which players in that context benefit from the work you do, is not unrelated at all.
