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.

Just because you aren't thinking about the implications of your decisions doesn't make the consequences any less real.

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?

Equating government contracts to service at a bagel shop is naive at best.

You're right - they affect the livelihoods of far more people.

Sure, that's one difference.

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".