I Don’t Think I Can Stay in Tech

I came across a blog post today that hit me harder than expected. It’s nominally about one specific action and person—companies and people giving money to David Heinemeier Hansson’s “Omacom Foundation,” despite DHH’s well-publicized turn toward fascist ideology—but it’s also about, well, everything.

Brennan Kenneth Brown writes in “Normalized Fascism in Open Source: $12 Million Given to DHH”,

Much of the world has become far too complacent and complicit with people (and their companies) who proclaim and hold far-right, fascist ideology. These are not image boards residing in the fringe corners of an anonymous Internet made up of people who have slipped through the cracks. No, these are wealthy people in power who are blatant and shameless in their support for those who continuously beat the drum of bigotry, xenophobia, transphobia, and cynical accelerationist hatred.

He details DHH’s supremacist writing, going on to list people and companies donating millions of dollars to “bankroll [DHH]’s Linux distribution, Omarchy, which is nothing more than a few vibecoded scripts on top of Arch Linux.” The people include the CEOs of Shopify, Stripe, Dell (yes, Michael Dell himself), Block/Square, Cloudflare, Dropbox, Coinbase (of fucking course), and the creator of OpenClaw; the companies are 1Password and 37signals. The latter company is one DHH founded, known for Basecamp and for banning talk of “politics” in April 2021. The former company is, well, 1Password.

I’ve interviewed at several of those companies, and genuinely wanted to work for two of them. Several of them were already falling in my estimation—Stripe’s prudishness in what they accept payments for is a problem given that they and the equally moralistic PayPal constitute an effective duopoly on online payment processing; Dropbox and Block have been enshittifying for years, while Dell and Coinbase started enshittified—but this is a new low.

Brown again:

A dozen of the most powerful executives in tech looked at a man who wrote that a British march calling for the deportation of non-white citizens was “heartwarming,” and decided he was the person they wanted to hand a multimillion-dollar foundation to.

He goes on to describe other open source developers who’ve declared themselves “apolitical,” from Ladybird’s Andreas Kling “treating the mere existence of trans contributors as more ‘political’ than excluding them” and posting in support of Charlie Kirk to conservative homophobe Brendan Eich of Brave—a browser often recommended as a private alternative to Chrome—giving targeted harassment forum Kiwi Farms a helping hand in payment processing.

We have been watching the fragile fury of white masculinity and hate metastasize and fester over the years, from Gamergate’s harassment campaigns through years of anti-SJW cringe compilation content mills, the marking of Antifa as the enemy, the tantrum-throwing #AllLivesMatter movement, and the manufactured panic over DEI and “wokeism.”

You may be in a position where the specific harms and rhetoric being spewed are not aimed at you, and you may have been coaxed into viewing what I’m saying here as overreaction, or as a rabid, self-righteous screed. Millions of dollars have been spent to ensure this, and it could not be further from the truth.

I think this post walloped me because it plainly states truths I’ve been grappling with—sometimes openly, more often internally. Who am I comfortable working for, and what am I comfortable doing? I’ve surely worked for people with politics wildly divergent from mine in the past; is it really that much of a bigger deal now?

Yeah, but in the past, those people weren’t multimillionaires and billionaires actively courting fascism.

I know much bigger bloggers than I who probably do see this as an overreaction, but we’ve been tut-tutting at those who’ve been raising the alarm on this for over a decade, and the alarm-raisers have been right. When watching Senator Welch confront Joe McCarthy, the proper reaction is not to think Welch was being too darn mean.

Where you want to draw your personal lines is your business. My personal lines don’t extend to refusing to use the new Siri AI for personal tasks such as telling me when my next flight leaves or making a note of where I parked. I’m not going to ruthlessly prune my life of all software I suspect of having AI-generated code; I have thirty years experience reviewing 100% human-generated source code, and if you think AI invented “slop”, I have sad news for you about every program you depend on right now. (Having said that, I absolutely want to minimize the amount of AI-generated code I’m exposed to; way too much enters production with little to no human review. There’s going to be real catastrophic shit happening in the next eighteen months, in both big name software and the indie app world.)

But my personal lines definitely extend to don’t give money to people who enable fascism and don’t create value for them, either. The latter one covers recommending them, linking to them, or creating content for their services.

And it sure as hell covers working for them.

I don’t know the politics of the AI-focused companies that have given me otherwise welcome nibbles. But whether we like it or not, generative AI has a political valence at this moment in time, and that valence is largely in opposition to my values.

So am I getting out of tech entirely? Frankly, that depends less on me than it does on tech. If I can find a company looking for a tech writer that isn’t an AI startup, LLM-pilled enterprise business, or run by a white supremacy funder, I’m open to a conversation. Otherwise, I don’t know. Freelance editing. Website design. Laying out flyers and zines. Assuming I can find anyone who wants those services who doesn’t want to just ask ChatGPT to do it.

Otherwise, maybe it’s not too late to learn woodworking.