Often when moral question pops up on HN, the top comment is some variation of
> But where do we we draw the line? > I wonder whether we should even try.
Counterpoint: cynicism is too easy. Actually giving a shit is harder, it's uncomfortable, it involves compromise.
Yes, there's ambiguity.
Yes, the line the law draws is very loose. Github can't legally let someone from Iran or North Korea host repos, but just about anything else is legal. If Golden Dawn (the greek fascist party) wanted to use your product, nothing legally prevents you from having them as a customer.
This is no excuse to avoid the question.
Every person has to decide for themselves the boundaries of who they're willing to work for. If you work for a company, you have a voice in that company's decisions. I think many tech workers underestimate how much power they have. Good engineers are in tremendous demand.
The most compelling arguments I found is that just because we happen to work in a field that lets us exert our influence over society doesn't make our moral sensibilities any better than the rest of society. What us privileged few who work in technology see as using our position of influence for good, many other people may see as a small minority abusing their power to manipulate society for the worse.
I think many technology worker do understand the power they have, and make the deliberate decision that refraining from exercising that power is the morally optimal choice.
I agree this is problematic. However, programmers are uniquely well situated to create a system for asking "the rest of society" questions about what kinds of systems they would like a programmer to support.
> make the deliberate decision that refraining from exercising that power is the morally optimal choice.
Quitting would be (as close as one gets to) refraining from exercising power. What you're describing is cooperating with the status quo, which is definitely an exercise of power.
Working for ICE as an engineer would be you exercising your power for ICE. But working for GitHub as an engineer, where GitHub is customer-agnostic, doesn't seem like an exercise of power to me. Anyone can use the product you build, it's not specifically for ICE. Similarly if you design a car and some cars of that design get used by ICE, that doesn't seem like an exercise of power in favor of ICE, unless you build features specifically for ICE.
Threatening to quit if GitHub continues to sell to ICE seems like an exercise of power against ICE. Silently quitting and not telling anyone why you quit I would consider a very slight exercise of power against ICE, because over time if it happens enough, businesses that deal with ICE will be less competent that businesses that don't deal with ICE, and that will harm ICE slightly.
In that sense, continuing to work for github forwards the net moral "output" of its work. Each wrong or right is weighted differently and though I think we can all agree that there is a direction amplitude is harder.
I just want to add that, in the same sense that quitting github quietly is a tiny blow against ICE, continuing to work for github silently is also clearly supportive of ice. Actions are rarely totally morally neutral, which is ok as long as we don't pretend they are.
Nevermind "good" or "bad" by the select judgement of a few privileged people -- it's whether you even bother to _consider_, or instead just claim "this is hard".
We can create influencing machines, or consensing machines. Your rightful concern is applicable to influencing machines imho. A consensing machine has no centre it's drawing people into. It's a technology for users to find and coalesce around the centres that work for them.
The things the OP is implying unnavigable are the same class of challenges we navigated hundreds of years ago with intellectual property. We thought ownership was worth controlling access over, and we made arbitrary laws to propagate that regime in the world. We could deign it worth creating processes to collectively negotiate moral right/wrong together (without presupposing the will of the steward of the tech is right/wrong) and hold ourselves to that.
The fact that we don't even bother to consider the question of "should we do this" and instead fall on "this is challenging" -- that speaks volumes to how some of us are limited in our imagining of what the sickness in society might be.
I don't mean that in a cynical or nasty way. As the years go by I get more convinced that the rise of atheism is causing some of our biggest problems in western society, and I'm not religious myself. But it seems that for all its flaws, Christianity at least was an infrastructure of people and principles that hung together in some vaguely coherent manner such that people could pose the question "Is this right? Is this good?" and either answer it themselves by reference to a book, or ask it of a full time moraliser (priest).
The reason the OP is expressing unease at this kind of tech worker "morality" is because it's wafer thin in a way that makes medieval theology look like a towering pinnacle of intellectualism.
They aren't making moral judgements of their customers consistently. ICE is targeted only because a bunch of journalists started covering it extensively as part of their anti-Trump agenda. ICE did similar things before Trump but they weren't in the news, so GitHub workers ignored it.
Moreover their morality isn't universal. ICE is bad because it hurts people who only want a better life. OK, so, should there be no borders at all? What happens then to all the American workers in marginal jobs who suddenly lose their income because an immigrant willing to live in practically sub-Saharan conditions took their job? That worker only wanted a better life too, do they not matter? If not why not? Is it because they're white and GitHub workers are racist against whites? What about other border control agencies? What about governments in general?
Christian religious morals are very far from ideal but at least make a show of being universal. You forgive those who trespass against you - it doesn't matter who they are or what they did. You forgive them. You are the good Samaritan who helps those in need. Doesn't matter who they work for. You love your neighbour. Doesn't matter if they voted for the other guy.
You're arguing that tech workers should engage with morality as if it's any other hard question that can be whiteboarded out in a few hours. But tech workers have got nothing to say on this topic that hasn't already been said hundreds of years ago. They have no special insights to provide. The rigour of their moral logic is trivial compared even to a bunch of men in funny clothes reading stories about camels out of a book written anonymously 2000 years ago. Why shouldn't they be reminded of this?
Don't you think the FSF exists as a huge counterpoint to this? The FSF deliberate makes the decision that copyleft is the morally optimal choice and forces others to comply - and I'd imagine more developers view the FSF as a good thing.
All in all, the FSF is arguing for restrictions about how one class of individuals may use what they produce and for the benefit of the other class. Just like how FSF prevents other developers from using their products to lock other users out of their software, similarly, the employees are asking to prevent ICE from using their products against the questionable imprisonment of other human beings.
But I think the main difference lies in that copyleft limits itself purely to the realm of controlling how modified software is distributed. The only thing it limits is how modified software is distributed. The only thing it requires is how modified software is distributed. When a developer writes software to be used by others, it's necessary for the developer to decide how to distributed it, and copyleft provides an answer. Copyleft doesn't venture past the developer's necessary role.
On the other hand, limiting providing stuff to ICE ventures out of the developer's necessary question of how to distribute software and now starts thinking about human suffering, jails, politics, etc. You've gone past the question of how to distribute software, and are now thinking about broader topics.
Developers are allowed to create commercial or otherwise restricted software with FSF tools like gcc.
What, then, does?
Democracy is a good idea, sure. But what happens when democracy reaches a conclusion that seems obviously unjust? Do we decide that our own sense of right and wrong must be flawed? (This is a question I have no good answer to—where should we develop our sense of right and wrong?)
Moreover, historically there are many times that democracy says something is right that the people of a later era (perhaps even just a couple years later) decide was actually wrong, and that's the reason we have constitutional limits on what voters can do—but who decides what the Constitution says? We obviously need a veto over the will of the voters, but who should we trust with it?
What if instead of technical skills you have money? Is it wrong to use money in the service of influencing political goals? (In the US, neither the voters nor the Constitution believe so, by the way.) If others are influencing society with money, is it wrong to use money to counter them?
What about speech and communications media? If you have a platform (say, you're a popular entertainer or writer or talk show host), should you use it to convince others of a particular political position? If you have many listeners and your political opponents don't, is it still okay for you to speak to your listeners, or are you a minority unjustly using your influence and power?
What about weaponry? Traditionally, military might has settled many questions of whether a government should be permitted to engage in an action. Is it unjust to go to war with a country with a smaller army? Would it have been morally optimal for the US to say, we have about 5% of the world's population, the morally optimal choice is to not interfere with World War II?
I worry the argument that it's not our place to act on our principles is popular because it's easy and comfortable—keep your job, don't rock the boat—not because it's morally compelling.
And of these groups who can influence society—the politically-well-connected-200-years-ago, the rich, the media, the military, and the technical builders—if there is an argument for any of them to exert disproportionate influence, it seems to me the strongest argument would be for the builders, since technical work necessarily requires intelligence snd systems thinking more strongly than the others do. That is, if any group is to be entrusted with a veto if the rest agree and they disagree, the builders seem most likely to have a legitimate, informed, reasoned, and non-self-serving reason for the veto.
Society, incidentally, has no stories of praising people who exercised restraint when they saw an obvious injustice and the rest of the world going along with it. It usually disdains them as weak, cowardly, and opportunistic. It does have strong praise for those who took a stand even when it seemed like their position was in the minority.
In that case, we imagine a better democracy. If someone feels empathy is what makes their local democracy work better, and the further-above larger spheres of democracy no longer embody that:
We should imagine a new democracy that optimizes for empathy, no?
Are the protesters in Hong Kong imagining a new democracy that optimizes for empathy? Did the plaintiffs in Obergefell do so? What about the soldiers at Normandy?
Is refusing to work for employers that sell to ICE part of imagining a better democracy?
You don’t need to pick and choose because ICE is splitting up families AND detaining children!
Edit: Of course asylum seekers are a different case and should not be separated.
No matter what thing you are talking about, whether technical or political decision, a decision has to be made. Once it is made, as an employee, I think you've got to either go with it or decide to go somewhere else (perhaps starting your own company if you need to). I say this as a person who obviously holds a minority point of view in most of the companies I've worked for ;-)
At the end of the day, you've got to decide if you are aligned with the ideals of the employer you work for or not. Making suggestions is one thing, but trying to put political pressure on your employer to act in a particular manner is something I would advise people to refrain from.
Engineers are a powerful class of people with the opportunity to swing their weight around on political issues like this. Some believe this opportunity should be seized for good, others believe it is just a soft form of tyranny, an undemocratic exercise of power. This is particularly true when in your own country, where you ought to use the power of the vote to make a difference.
At the same time GitHub should absolutely pay a bit more to get engineers who don't care about this issue.
We don't need to censor employees, and at the same time we shouldn't expand the moral opinions of a vocal minority of opinions to be automatically indicative of what GitHub "should" do. What Github "should" do is replace these employees who are exercising their right to quit.
Why? If it's within your power to prevent your work from being put to use in service of something you find immoral, why not attempt to organize with like-minded workers and put a stop to it?
If you can force your company to make a choice between a contract and its workforce, you can achieve your goal. There's no reason to let things go.
> Why do Github employees get a special right to withhold consent for their product to be used in a setting they might object to?
Because they have, or may have, the power to do so. If they can take control of their work, there's no reason not to do so.
EDITED TO ADD:
> Why don't the employees at all these other companies object like Github employees?
They either don't object, or don't have the power within the company to object effectively.
[1]: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/342440/time-to-take...
With these kinds of contracts it feels much more akin to a partnership, so I think the feedback makes more sense. Its odd to me that we question why employees would want to have a say in how their company conducts business. Sure, its a choice for the company to make, but saying it is entitled for the employees to speak out just seems insane to me.
Wokeness and the recent trend of trying to cancel anything that doesn't align within a narrow spectrum of progressive viewpoints is a big reason here.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/17/us/immigrant-detention-forced...
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2017/04/10/wages/
That's not to say its a good practice or policy but nothing there looks like its any different for ICE detainees.
"Prisoners are being forced to work for almost no pay, its modern day slavery."
"Yeah but think about jury duty, I'm the real slave labour in my middle class lifestyle, having to participate the function of my democracy."
I'm sure you think that taxation is theft as well.
Maybe you and GP are not seeing the stories because the outlets you read choose not to cover this
Simply saying they are doing bad things is reducing the problems to a soundbite.
It is entirely possible to curtail the number of people coming here once there is NO work or services for them. It works, and we know it works, because we have done it before.
No one wants to "solve it" because our entire food supply and production (meat packing to local restaurants) is powered by illegal immigrants. Lawn care, construction, plenty of industries run on cheap (illegal) immigrant labor.
I'd be completely in favor of that. Especially in the recent case where ICE raided a factory in the south owned by the Koch brothers. We need congress to act on that though as AFAIK there is not a current framework to prosecute businesses for it.
> No one wants to "solve it" because our entire food supply and production (meat packing to local restaurants) is powered by illegal immigrants. Lawn care, construction, plenty of industries run on cheap (illegal) immigrant labor.
I agree. Once we stop the illegal flow we could start offering more work visas and other things to the people already here and newcomers. But without stopping the flow the people doing it the legal (hard) way are now competing against the illegal migrants leaving little incentive to do it right.
Trump is kind of a hypocrite on this point: he happily hires illegal labour because it's cheap, but then wants to put up walls politically.
FYI I believe that illegal labour is a major source of economic inequality as well: it hurts the working class the most, and the gains go to capital and middle class.
I got 5 replies in a span of 5 minutes. I can't respond that fast with the detail and nuance of my positions.
> Also, 300k/year was the maximum in 2000.
And now we are up to 500k last year, and another 950k this year. https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/sw-border-migration
I'm not arguing in their favor. I would like nothing more than for us to have strong border control and a functional immigration system that isn't overloaded with false asylum claims so that the real ones can get through. We definitely need to overhaul things like the H1B programs as well.
My argument here is that no country's immigration system could handle this type of steady influx of 100k+ people per month [1] exploiting the asylum claims. Many of which only claim such after they illegally cross (yes i know you can technically claim whenever, but that's mighty convenient after crossing illegally).
The systems were not built for this kind of thing. Basically under current law you have the choice to detain people until their asylum case is heard or release them on their own recognizance inside the country and hope they return for court. The family separation thing has happened because of a court ruling saying that kids and adults couldn't be detained together because of abuse concerns. If the same thing happened to Canada their systems would be in shambles just like ours. There needs to be a mixture of border security and fixes to immigration law to remedy this problem but none of that can happen while Congress sits on it's hands playing politics.
Source? Last I checked the system was still drastically in need of border patrol, immigration judges, case workers, beds to house people, etc. Those things can't just spin up in a week and be effective.
The system was already desperately in need of resources before Trump added this strain. We could go back to an Obama-era level of need, but instead we've chosen to ramp up the problem and force this outcome.
The former did not work and was infamous as the "catch and release" policy. Detainment could work in principal but the overflow of the system has caused long wait times, overcrowded facilities and not enough staff to handle the cases. If you suddenly switched back to catch and release we would most likely have a greater influx of people coming in who have no valid claim to asylum and would not show up to their court date. It's a shitty problem all around.
And pretending that an overcrowded detention system is a concentration camp is disingenuous at best. If that was the case then California's prison system has been a network of concentration camps for years as they have dealt with constant overcrowding and problems.
One of these means is lengthening the asylum-seeking process and requirements. Another is reducing the allowed number of successful asylum seekers through informal quotas.
The current administration has done both. They are intentionally gumming up the asylum system in order to make good on their campaign promises.
"It's the fault of invalid economic migrants" is a talking point.
HN loves to rail against the corrupt H1-B system, but apparently actually getting asylum seekers is amoral.
What would be more honest is to say “I don’t like cheap tech labor, so therefore clamping down on H1-Bs is good.” And “I don’t like the Trump administration and I want an open immigration system, so what Trump is doing to asylum seekers is bad.”
It’s all politics.
Also, claiming asylum because of local criminal elements (non-state actors) is an automatic no-go for an asylum claim.
(Note, Obama's DOJ fucked this one up by letting an immigration judge (unlawfully) grant an asylum claim because of local non-state criminal threats.) Hence, the flood gates opened and people began sending women and children first, rather than adults to sneak in and find work.
It is lengthening the process no matter how I or anyone "sees" it. It's comparative, I didn't give a value judgement.
It is all politics. Part of the current administration's campaign promises was to let in less immigrants. They now take political moves to do so, including lengthening the asylum process.
There are other reasons besides not liking cheap tech labor to not like H1-B visas. Because they are tied to employers, workers that hold them are easier to abuse, as they have few other options. Other people don't like that it is based on a lottery system, and so companies that request the most H1B visas will get the most H1B visas.
It is not dissonant to believe that H1B should be reduced or removed in its entirety but other visas and legal immigration avenues should be also be opened up.
Edit: arguing about the legality of the asylum seekers is also missing the point.
People who cross national borders, without documentation, and not at designated points of entry, are NOT "immigrants". They are illegal aliens. People need to stop conflating the two.
[1]https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-48548031
[2]https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/as-trump-t...
It's easy to pretend you're fellow Americans are monsters, but they're not.
No, they are people fleeing violence in Central America through Mexico, in large part.
That violence, incidentally, is in substantial part resulting from the US training nonviolent drug war criminals into extremely violent criminals in its original and then deporting then to Central America what they have no substantial roots.
If you are passing through one country because you desire to get to a specific destination, you are basically asylum shopping.
Even nativist politicians making incorrect claims about the law here tend to claim it requires efforts to seek asylum in the first safe country, which even if true would, in fact, fully take into account the problem of an intervening country that shared the same problem being fled from in the country of nationality or habitual residence. See, e.g., referring to this claim:
https://fullfact.org/immigration/refugees-first-safe-country...
> These aren't people fleeing genocide.
https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/traveladvisories/...
You as an American should not go there, but them fleeing here is problematic?
https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/asylum-or-refugee-st...
They call it “cancel culture” when it is their ox getting gored, but it is not as if no one told them what the harvest is like when you sow the wind...
But I think a fair point of view is that it would be GREAT if the employees of Xerox and Canon and Lenovo and Apple and Ford and the airlines and even the farmers all took the same stance as GH employees.
If that actually happened, ICE would cease to be able to function incredibly quickly.
Which would be good. This is basically the point of these protests.
If you had said "ICE would be forced to reconsider its inhumane methods which have lead to its terrible reputation" - a lot more people would agree with you. There have been a number of polls done over the past year or two which show that only about 25% support abolishing ICE, the majority oppose. I think almost everyone would agree that they need to do their job with a lot more empathy and humanity, so protests are good, but the goal should be to get them to clean up their act, it would be a mistake (and not supported by the people) to try to get rid of the immigrations and customs enforcement function entirely.
Whether that happens because the organization reforms or because the organization ceases to exists is a secondary concern.
Government programs NEVER just end, and certainly not do to simple supply disruptions. So they won't STOP doing bad things, they'll just continue to do bad things with even less resources, making the net effects even worse. Eventually you might end up with ICE detention centers that would make a FOB in Iraq look like a palace. All you need is triple-strand concertina wire, some 55-gal drums cut in half (for burning human waste), and a bunch of plywood.
Law of unintended consequences....
In addition, "Government programs NEVER just end" is also obviously incorrect. Our government once had a program of segregating black people from large swaths of society. This program, thankfully, no longer exists.
And about one of every 10 agents in Homeland Security’s investigative section — which deals with all kinds of threats, including terrorism — is now assigned to child sexual exploitation cases.
Sources:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/28/us/child-sex-...
It is, apparently, the judgement of a large swatch of GH employees that whatever good ICE does, it is not outweighed by the bad. Given that, I believe their actions make sense.
When an organization is doing some good things, and some bad things, is the best course of action to prevent the organization from doing both good and bad things? In the case of ICE, would it not be more effective to pursue a strategy of more targeted reforms that address the unethical immigration enforcement actions without stopping the other divisions pursuing investigations into human rights violations and child exploitation cases?
My concern here is that empathy for children being negatively impacted by immigration policies, while valid, doesn't imply we should act out indiscriminately against the entire ICE organization. Balancing the needs of victims of bad immigration policies against the needs of victims of criminal activity shouldn't be a zero-sum game, and making gains for one group shouldn't come at the expense of the other.
This is fine, because employees are not in principle slaves. They do have a right to tell their employers to go fuck themselves "at will", just as the opposite is true. Anybody who takes a stand like this is exercising a privilege that not everybody enjoys, sure, but you're running with that in a suppressive direction (why should Github employees get to be special if not everyone can be special, and by the way (gasp) what if they aren't perfectly logical and fair in their activism?) while I'd go the other way: in an ideal world everybody would enjoy this privilege, and any workers who can take a stand for what they believe in certainly should.
The alternative is that corporate leaders alone are responsible for imposing ethics on the markets they play in, and we all know the sorts of decisions such people tend to make.
Because those companies aren't based in the woke-wasteland of San Francisco bay area.
also, quite wrong. microsoft [1], amazon [2], not bay area companies.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/we-did-not-sign-devel... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/22/business/dealbook/amazon-...
Well if a business fostered a culture where it's deemed acceptable to question who the business should or shouldn't be working with, nobody can blame the employees for doing exactly what they were incentivized to do.
Plenty of businesses would fired a rebellious employee on the spot without a second thought, or at the very least ask him to resign if he dares question managements on a matter that is neither legally questionable or related to the employee's work conditions, for instance, a group of employees that would be asking management to boycott a certain country.
Seems it is a different culture at GitHub,Google or Facebook where apparently questioning management is a virtue.
I see nothing wrong with that. It's their own doing.
The counter question is how much should a person turn a blind eye (and so implicitly endorse) the uses of your product?
In this case at least, there was a donation made that would not have happened otherwise.
The moment salaried employee start sabotaging his job and putting his views against his job description - it's clearly time for him to reconsider employment at a place that better matches his priorities.
Win-win for all, no struggle needed.
Shareholder I am - but lets get realistic.
Lol, there is a small difference between few shares and few $billion worth of shares. Latter' voice is easier to be heard.
I'm not under the impression that gitlab employees are complaining about the first (surely ICE employees and contractors can make use of the myriads of repositories gitlab makes available to the world at large). They are reacting negatively to specific contracts gitlab has with ICE.
Also for people who draw comparison with discrimination against individuals: Companies, agencies and organizations aren’t “discriminated” against in the same sense as individuals. I am not aware of any legislation where it’s considered wrongly discriminatory to decline B2B contracts.
Is ICE the only thing on GitHub that is morally questionable?
I would venture to guess NO. I would venture to guess that all sorts of things on GitHub are used in illicit, illegal, or morally repressible ways.
Why do you ask question in such a biased frame?
Why don't you ask instead:
Why don't other companies have moral standards?
Aside from the compensation, anything you have implied beyond this is just augmentation derived from capitalism and acceptance of the status quo. Saying "I don't like what you are doing with the thing I am producing for you, so I may stop offering you services" is just...basic human communication. I really can't see how there is any more to this?
You speak with such absolute authority ("You have to let certain control go after a point."). However, this story (and others like it) are proof that this is untrue. Your assertion is false.
Just because somebody is an employee, it does not mean they lose all bargaining power / agency. If you are exchanging goods or services with someone else in a scenario where the power dynamic is not entirely one-sided, there is always room for negotiation. This is all that's happening.
Just because you don't care about how your stuff is used, doesn't mean that it applies to everyone.
I like the way you have framed the argument.
It says more about your own morals that you think it is.
Xerox or Canon (or whoever) probably makes copiers that ICE uses to make copies. Lenovo or Apple probably makes hardware that they use also to further their functions. Ford/GM probably supply ICE with vehicles. Farmers grow crops that get into their the meals that ICE personnel eat. Pilots and flight attendants probably have knowingly transported ICE employees.
Why don't the employees at all these other companies object like Github employees? Why do Github employees get a special right to withhold consent for their product to be used in a setting they might object to? Why is ICE the only company that they object to? Why do some causes get their favor and not others?
Where do we start? Where do we stop?