This article asserts a lot without backing it up. I've been convinced to take political actions as the result of thoughtful discussions with coworkers over lunch for example; even if that's rare acting like it's impossible ignores that work is a large part of our lives and political discussion matters.
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.
I don't think the author is asserting that you can't talk politics with your coworkers?
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’ve also changed my mind because of HN and other technical forum discussions. I brought up the counter example at the workplace because it is a case the article mentions without argument.
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.
I'd argue that a large, international forum is the kind of place where this kind of conversation adds much more noise than signal. There are too many people of too many age ranges who live in too many different places for political conversation to meaningfully result in situations where, on balance, the space agitates for change moreso than collapses into a negative-sum bash fest.
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.
> If everything is political the label of “political” has no power for discernment, no ability to meaningfully partition the semantic space. It’s logically bunk, mathematically superfluous.
Exactly. Strange how the author just says this and immediately moves to pretending it isn’t true.
The author then has a lot of evidence to overturn that social interaction is not political, and then must go even further to define what they thing politics is.
They do define what they think politics is. The article defines politics as exerting your will on others without consent. Thus, it's trivially zero-sum and we would probably all agree that it's not conducive to enjoyable spaces.
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, is the goal we give machines that gets rid of humanity. That's the only way you make anything apolitical. Where there are two people, there is a struggle for a balance of power.
Where any two people are reasonable, I would posit that you have classical anarchy. Only a combination of unwillingness to cooperate and open hostility results in a power struggle. In my experience, the absence of preexisting tribal prejudice tends to generally have people start off favorably since people like to be liked.
I feel the reason why Hacker news needs to stay apolitical is simply that politics is everywhere. If I wanted to hear about politics I would just goto CNN or Fox News or CNBC.
I just want to hear about technology and enjoy myself.
You don't get it, do you. Technology is only political for brief periods. When introduced, they are apolitical, existing to solve a specific problem. They become political based on usage. Then, the technology either becomes obsolete or so ubiquitous as to make any politics largely irrelevant.
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.
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.
> Many technical spaces have become extremely partisan, and this has lowered their utility for all parties.
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.
And then you have what happened to Andreas Kling: make an apolitical space for people like him to make something needed and useful. And then people came knocking on his door, making a huge mess, and whining about how he ran the place without contributing. See also Contributor Covenant stuff. Talw as old as time.
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.
He used default-male pronouns in his documentation for Ladybird, and didn't want to change it when some random person made a drive by PR to do so, so a huge Github thread — where a bunch of leftists flew in from left field, who had never cared or known about the project before, let alone contributed to it — started to harass him over it, although those comments seem to have been deleted now.
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.
In defence of the claim that everything is political: fish live their whole lives with water. If fish could have discourse with each other, they'd have a great controversy over whether everything is wet. Everything humans live with is political.
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".
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
From experience, it seems that "don't make this political" can typically be translated to "I don't want opposition". It's much more likely someone hasn't reflected deeply on the political nature of their opinions than it is that a topic is "apolitical".
I think this is reaching. Plenty of humans are passionate about <x> and completely uninterested in how <x> applies to some current political concern.
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?
It’s hard to align the two groups. As someone who used to prefer apolitical discussion I now find it very hollow to talk about <x> without including the societal implications of <x>. Like it’s possible to be interested in nuclear physics without ever considering how nuclear physics impacts politics but it just doesn’t feel complete. As Dr Ian Malcom so eloquently stated: “your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.”
You have intentionally chosen aa area of interest that is easy to be politicized. Is it possible to be interested in vector graphics without ever considering how vector graphics impact politics?
Surely you're interested in vector graphics for a reason? Maybe you think it's superior to raster graphics because X, Y, and Z. Yet you look around and see that society overwhelmingly prefers raster. So you write neat programs that clearly demonstrate how superior vector graphics are. You help others with their problems by reaching into your toolkit of vector graphics knowledge and show them the light. You submit upstream patches to improve vector support. Etc.
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.
And there's nothing wrong with that. The question is whether or not it's ok for people like your current self to try to force people like your former self to have the same interests as your current self.
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.
>And there's nothing wrong with that. The question is whether or not it's ok for people like your current self to try to force people like your former self to have the same interests as your current self.
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.
"apolitical" simply means "the boss's politics", nothing more. When a CEO tells you to keep politics out of the workplace, he means do not disagree with him. A worker talking about his kids being bullied for being nerds is not political, a worker talking about his kids being bullied because of gender issues... Keep those politics out of the workplace.
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!
Oh, I know one. There was a HN-like site but with all the bells and whistles called habr.ru. They had an elaborate karma system, heavy moderation and, most importantly, a vibrant community.
They also declared themselves free of politics.
Their usage numbers dropped sharply after 2022, people fled.
This is terrible.
This is nerds having a tantrum because they can’t just play with their tech toys without having to behave like adults.
That ship has sailed. Your nerdy toys are not just the pure intellectual pursuits, and puzzles, and enigmas devoid of effects on reality you would like them to be.
If you don’t recognize that your penchant for solving software and hardware problems is used by the owner class to promote concentration of wealth and gain power, then you will stay forever a useful
idiot to their cause.
Demanding that tech discussion should stay apolitical nowadays only serves the purpose of the powerful billionaires that control you.
Didn’t the sugar industry spend decades funding research designed to push the blame for obesity onto fat and carbs instead of sugar? That is politics, and opposing it is ALSO politics.
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.
Do you research that for any big tech company? Are the system you research key to some AI development by Anthropic, OpenAI or similar? Etc.
Also you are more of a scientist in this case so that applies to an extent.
What we’re talking about here is people that would just want to discuss blockchain and bitcoin and request that those should stay apolitical
Cop out.
Your contribution to big tech is not apolitical. Go be a monk if apolitical is what you want (and even then, that wouldn’t be fully apolitical).
Men are political animals. If you say you want to be apolitical, you are already making a political choice, i.e. deferring your choices to established power.
Doing the ostrich is a political choice.
This article asserts a lot without backing it up. I've been convinced to take political actions as the result of thoughtful discussions with coworkers over lunch for example; even if that's rare acting like it's impossible ignores that work is a large part of our lives and political discussion matters.
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.
I don't think the author is asserting that you can't talk politics with your coworkers?
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’ve also changed my mind because of HN and other technical forum discussions. I brought up the counter example at the workplace because it is a case the article mentions without argument.
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.
I'd argue that a large, international forum is the kind of place where this kind of conversation adds much more noise than signal. There are too many people of too many age ranges who live in too many different places for political conversation to meaningfully result in situations where, on balance, the space agitates for change moreso than collapses into a negative-sum bash fest.
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.
basic human rights are not preferred politics.
ah, see, there you go "bringing" politics into a "purely technical" discussion
/s
> If everything is political the label of “political” has no power for discernment, no ability to meaningfully partition the semantic space. It’s logically bunk, mathematically superfluous.
Exactly. Strange how the author just says this and immediately moves to pretending it isn’t true.
Presumably the author does not agree with the premise that everything is political.
The author then has a lot of evidence to overturn that social interaction is not political, and then must go even further to define what they thing politics is.
They do define what they think politics is. The article defines politics as exerting your will on others without consent. Thus, it's trivially zero-sum and we would probably all agree that it's not conducive to enjoyable spaces.
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, is the goal we give machines that gets rid of humanity. That's the only way you make anything apolitical. Where there are two people, there is a struggle for a balance of power.
Where any two people are reasonable, I would posit that you have classical anarchy. Only a combination of unwillingness to cooperate and open hostility results in a power struggle. In my experience, the absence of preexisting tribal prejudice tends to generally have people start off favorably since people like to be liked.
I feel the reason why Hacker news needs to stay apolitical is simply that politics is everywhere. If I wanted to hear about politics I would just goto CNN or Fox News or CNBC.
I just want to hear about technology and enjoy myself.
That's a childish take that avoids reality. The tech you like is instrumental to terrible political decisions, whether you like it or not.
Great. Discuss those decisions elsewhere and let us discuss the technology.
You don't get it do you. You can't decouple the technology from the use that people that control you make of it.
You don't get it, do you. Technology is only political for brief periods. When introduced, they are apolitical, existing to solve a specific problem. They become political based on usage. Then, the technology either becomes obsolete or so ubiquitous as to make any politics largely irrelevant.
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.
A long time ago, there were discussion boards, and there was a section "off-topic" on those boards.
> ‘"off-topic" on those boards.’
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.
> Many technical spaces have become extremely partisan, and this has lowered their utility for all parties.
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.
And then you have what happened to Andreas Kling: make an apolitical space for people like him to make something needed and useful. And then people came knocking on his door, making a huge mess, and whining about how he ran the place without contributing. See also Contributor Covenant stuff. Talw as old as time.
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.
What happened to Andreas Kling?
He used default-male pronouns in his documentation for Ladybird, and didn't want to change it when some random person made a drive by PR to do so, so a huge Github thread — where a bunch of leftists flew in from left field, who had never cared or known about the project before, let alone contributed to it — started to harass him over it, although those comments seem to have been deleted now.
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.
Totally missed that. Thank you!
I love OSS drama so I found some links:
https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/6814
https://x.com/LundukeJournal/status/1970907449499484266
Lunduke is not a very reliable source...
In defence of the claim that everything is political: fish live their whole lives with water. If fish could have discourse with each other, they'd have a great controversy over whether everything is wet. Everything humans live with is political.
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".
>“But everything is political” is a cop-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
From experience, it seems that "don't make this political" can typically be translated to "I don't want opposition". It's much more likely someone hasn't reflected deeply on the political nature of their opinions than it is that a topic is "apolitical".
I think this is reaching. Plenty of humans are passionate about <x> and completely uninterested in how <x> applies to some current political concern.
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?
It’s hard to align the two groups. As someone who used to prefer apolitical discussion I now find it very hollow to talk about <x> without including the societal implications of <x>. Like it’s possible to be interested in nuclear physics without ever considering how nuclear physics impacts politics but it just doesn’t feel complete. As Dr Ian Malcom so eloquently stated: “your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.”
You have intentionally chosen aa area of interest that is easy to be politicized. Is it possible to be interested in vector graphics without ever considering how vector graphics impact politics?
Surely you're interested in vector graphics for a reason? Maybe you think it's superior to raster graphics because X, Y, and Z. Yet you look around and see that society overwhelmingly prefers raster. So you write neat programs that clearly demonstrate how superior vector graphics are. You help others with their problems by reaching into your toolkit of vector graphics knowledge and show them the light. You submit upstream patches to improve vector support. Etc.
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.
Vector graphics, sure. I don't think it's possible to be interested in AI (i.e. half the front page) without considering its impact on politics.
Well, then how about a tech discussion forum without politics and without AI?
I think that’s basically lobste.rs. (AI is tagged and you can filter it out.)
And there's nothing wrong with that. The question is whether or not it's ok for people like your current self to try to force people like your former self to have the same interests as your current self.
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.
>And there's nothing wrong with that. The question is whether or not it's ok for people like your current self to try to force people like your former self to have the same interests as your current self.
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.
"apolitical" simply means "the boss's politics", nothing more. When a CEO tells you to keep politics out of the workplace, he means do not disagree with him. A worker talking about his kids being bullied for being nerds is not political, a worker talking about his kids being bullied because of gender issues... Keep those politics out of the workplace.
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!
[dead]
Lets just make this nuke apolitical, please
These are our non political fighter jets, engaging non political targets in non political airspace.
I've launched these non-political ICBM to ensure I better understand your POV.
Oh, I know one. There was a HN-like site but with all the bells and whistles called habr.ru. They had an elaborate karma system, heavy moderation and, most importantly, a vibrant community.
They also declared themselves free of politics.
Their usage numbers dropped sharply after 2022, people fled.
Why?
Apolitical guillotines ftw
The uh uh uh Case ase ase ase for or or or Apolitical al al al Tech ech ech ech Space ase ase ase
This is terrible. This is nerds having a tantrum because they can’t just play with their tech toys without having to behave like adults. That ship has sailed. Your nerdy toys are not just the pure intellectual pursuits, and puzzles, and enigmas devoid of effects on reality you would like them to be. If you don’t recognize that your penchant for solving software and hardware problems is used by the owner class to promote concentration of wealth and gain power, then you will stay forever a useful idiot to their cause. Demanding that tech discussion should stay apolitical nowadays only serves the purpose of the powerful billionaires that control you.
I research numeration systems. How exactly is my research used to “promote concentration of wealth and gain power”?
Didn’t the sugar industry spend decades funding research designed to push the blame for obesity onto fat and carbs instead of sugar? That is politics, and opposing it is ALSO politics.
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.
How do you pay for your food and home?
I’m still a student, so I’m partially supported by parents, but I get money for teaching.
Do you research that for any big tech company? Are the system you research key to some AI development by Anthropic, OpenAI or similar? Etc. Also you are more of a scientist in this case so that applies to an extent. What we’re talking about here is people that would just want to discuss blockchain and bitcoin and request that those should stay apolitical
lol the author literally described you:
> If you’re taking political action seriously, you cannot abide fence-sitters. Anybody not on your side is just a laggard enemy.
Cop out. Your contribution to big tech is not apolitical. Go be a monk if apolitical is what you want (and even then, that wouldn’t be fully apolitical). Men are political animals. If you say you want to be apolitical, you are already making a political choice, i.e. deferring your choices to established power. Doing the ostrich is a political choice.
lol the author literally described you:
> If you’re taking political action seriously, you cannot abide fence-sitters. Anybody not on your side is just a laggard enemy.
[flagged]
A fool said a foolish thing! Gottem!