Is criticizing tech on political grounds valid?

I think most people on HN would agree with the thrust of the article in its original context of software development. Transparency, user control, and freedom are recognized as goals in and of themselves, and not just a means to produce widgets faster.

If the same idea is applied more generally, the conclusion would seem to be that publicly run and accountable institutions should be prefered to privatization. In the software context it's obvious that it isn't productive to pay people to secretly reinvent the wheel over and over for profit, yet this is exactly what we do when it comes to many government functions.

Just because a company releases something as open source, doesn't mean the software is free to use, or that your privacy won't get compromised, and it doesn't mean that they are not - by design and 100% on purpose - simply using the open source community as free labor. Often a company releases something as open source, but at the same time they have a proprietary version of the product as well, in which the open source is barely usable, all the while the only product that actually runs on real hardware is the proprietary version, just so they "look good". It's like saying, "Oh look, we made this amazing product open source and we share it freely with the world!", yet it's useless without the proprietary part. This is IMHO what Google has done with Android and partly with Chrome.

I think they mean valid as in ~useful or ~worthwhile or ~good, because otherwise, as far as I understand it, that would depend on the arguments. And if so, that’s up to the person.

Would this be a useful physical example?: evaluating a car by the material of its nuts and bolts is not a full evaluation. You have evaluated a car by the material of its nuts and bolts. Therefore you have not fully evaluated the car.

That seems valid doesn’t it?

Otoh, only considering the “cool factor” of a car is not a full evaluation of the car…

On another hand: given my priorities and information, I find it’s generally unimportant/more important/somewhat-important to consider/ignore the “cool factor” of a car in favour of focussing on the nuts and bolts.

Last one isn’t valid I don’t think and it’s not trying to be, since it’s an inference of best estimate for the purpose of decision support. Right?