The Case for Apolitical Tech Spaces
minor.gripe
minor.gripe
I agree with the author that it can take up too much space, but the argument here seems to be that because of that failure mode we must throw the baby out with the bathwater and implicitly assume the politics you infer of your boss.
The context is specifically about online sites like HN and the well known phenomenon where the technical usefulness of the site is inversely proportional to how many participants are trying to bring their preferred politics into it.
If you are able to have productive discussions about tech & politics with your coworkers, that might be because you are exceptional humans, or because you were in person rather than online, or because you already shared your co-workers political opinions. None of those apply to an online space like HN.
I think it’s ridiculous to pretend there isn’t massive overlap between political discussion and tech. Obviously there can be too much of a thing, obviously there are uncurious partisans, but I don’t think that is particularly different from the other kinds of flame wars HN guidelines already discourage.
Political activism still seems to be most effective in democracies when folks go in person and try to talk about why they think their positions are good and useful ("canvasing") or when individuals talk to their representatives about issues. IMO many of the problems of democracy right now originate because too many people think that emoting online about politics is a substitute for building consensus in focused groups that have the power to change the issue at hand.
/s
Exactly. Strange how the author just says this and immediately moves to pretending it isn’t true.
The main issue is that it's just a stupid definition. Politics in this sense is just one kind of violence. Most of the things we'd consider colloquially "political" don't meet this definition. Worse, many of the arguments that follow partially dispense with the given definition and unintentionally incorporate the author's implicit idea of "politics" (a separate thing), which makes it a bit confusing to read as a precise argument.
Apolitical tech, if it is to succeed, must eliminate the human features, like art, emotion and stories. It can be done on a technical level, but it's an open question as to whether it could avoid the problem of users voting with their feet and staying in the "politics".
True. Segregated in such a way that you can ignore it as you so choose by just not reading anything in that space.
At HN we have more interactive mechanisms, vote and flag.
On the one hand I appreciate the objections of people who wish political discourse was not present in this space.
And on the other hand, I like to see what percolates through this sieve.
Same with books, entertainments, specialties of engineering and science, and, sadly, the extreme actions of the present US government overturning the table and sending everyone running for cover.
I just want to hear about technology and enjoy myself.
That said, I don't think technology should be either political or apolitical. If there's a need to use a technology to solve a political problem, then do so. Once done, one should just revert to the natural state of enjoying or abandoning the thing for what it is.
I make a space. I make it for me and my friends. It grows. And then people like this come knocking at my door, make a huge mess, and then whine when they get excluded. Many such cases, a tale as old as time. Ask me how I know.
For context, I think what many people (including probably the OP, and definitely Kling) consider political is skewed in favor of the status quo, and their own comfort, and that some amount of explicitly shared values in a space can improve it; but at the same time I've seen the kind of horrible never ending purity spirals and toxicity that happens when you really take "everything is political and we need to be fighting over it all the time" to its logical conclusion. See also: Mastodon.
Then after that, Drew DeVult decided to go after him, digging up and hyperbolically misinterpreting his every tweet to make him look like an, in Drew's words, outright fascist — for instance, confusing objections to affirmative action with belief in White Replacement Theory.
Same here. There's politics you can freely discuss - Canada being a "police state" and "mistreating" "protestors", European hate speech laws etc. Perfectly fine and apolitical! Talk about something a little too uncomfortable for Americans and all of sudden, hey! Keep those politics out!
I mean, even if not everything is political, almost everything tech spaces deal with is political. Usually, removing politics is the cop out, to try and bend compliance to whatever the null hypothesis political ramifications are of any particular technology. "Dont make this political" when discussing like, the ability to monitor office workers, is just an appeal to the politics of the people who gain from monitoring office workers. Therfore "“But everything is political” is a cop-out" is a cop-out
Is the problem that some people are like that, or is the problem that they refuse to go along when you tell them that they have to be interested in it?
What's the fundamental difference between this something more obviously political like advocating for privacy by building platforms to track bills, or submit letters to elected officials? Seems to me that the main difference is whether others are likely to be offended by your views and/or actions.
In other words, politics is fine, just don't be a dick. This is the rule many tech spaces enforce, HN included. It's challenging to scale this to large communities because the scope of what might be offensive expands, but that's a very different discussion.
If you could magically make HN "apolitical" it's not that tech political discussion would vanish, it's just that different people with different interests would end up in different spaces. And as you have experienced, many people will move between those spaces at different points in their lives.
I am very interested in tech & politics and I am not interested in trying to prevent either. All I ask for is one site where I can go to nerd out without having to wade my way through 400 treatises about why Marx was actually right when I just want to learn more about hierarchical caching or whatever.
I think it's very telling that the issue at hand isn't a bunch of nerds brigading /r/marxWasRight demanding that political nerds include tech considerations in every post.
I hate the political discussion around AI. I think there's a lot of wrongheadedness on every side. But I am not stupid enough to imagine that its because AI is apolitical.
>force people like your former self to have the same interests as your current self.
Theres no force lmao. You can just skip certain comments.
>I am very interested in tech & politics
Ah but you are interested.
>All I ask for is one site where I can go to nerd out without having to wade my way through 400 treatises about why Marx was actually right
Yeah sorry, doesnt wash. Seems like you want to use force to push this community in a direction you approve of. IE, you are engaging in politics. Stop shitting up the website with your politics. Please leave it exactly where it is right now, which is apolitical.
They also declared themselves free of politics.
Their usage numbers dropped sharply after 2022, people fled.
The sad truth is you don’t get to choose what will be considered political and what won’t. Trying to be distanced from politics instead of engaged and aware just makes it easier for bad actors to manipulate you.