The guidelines specifically state that this would be an "off-topic" submission. If these types of topics are wanted then the guidelines should be modified or a separate section should be created.
Commerce, communications, privacy, speech, expression, lifestyle, journalism, entertainment & culture, knowledge, societal debate, government, money, wealth - it all increasingly flows through technology/platforms that techies, nerds, geeks (whatever term you prefer) now heavily influence or directly control.
There's no going back, it's all going to get more political rather than less as governments gets deeper into assigning regulations to the Internet.
The people who only want to discuss, for example, Android from technical merits and completely leave out any privacy aspect are the ones who have an agenda. They're trying to silence our concerns. We should downvote their opinion as its akin to complains about moderation.
It should be obvious that we can have a conversation about, say, the Android low memory killer's process ordering strategy without having to talk about the social implications of website cookie tracking or whatever.
Yes, mobile technology as a whole is connected to privacy. That doesn't mean that any particular detail of that technology is relevant to any particular political cause, and it doesn't give people the right to inject social issues into discussions into technical matters. You can't be intellectually honest, keep a straight face, and claim that malloc chunking is "deeply intertwined" with some pet political cause.
One reason the West has gone mad the past few years is this bizarre emphasis on the old, bad "the personal is the political" idea. No, it isn't.
Furthermore, we don't always discuss Android's low memory killer's process or malloc chunking; we also discuss iPhone's latest authentication measure FaceID or we discuss the latest inclusions of the Linux kernel. Both of which are more easily related to politics.
> One reason the West has gone mad the past few years [...]
What? Nice political comment.
Which would be when our ancestors first began making hand tools and using fire, right?
However it has become increasingly dominant over our lives with the invention of things like the Internet, computer, car, smartphone, magnetron, and a whole plethora of inventions which I cannot even fathom.
Take for example a very obvious example: electronic voting. It has to do with technology and politics. Should we avoid discussing that? Should we avoid discussing the privacy topics of Facebook? Google? Should we avoid all the topics brought up by a series such as Black Mirror? [1]
And why is it that with non-political topics (as for as these exist) we should be allowed to vote on them, whereas as soon as politics get somehow involved it should be avoided on HN? And, since politics isn't a clear proposition, where do we draw the line?