Recent searches
Search options
Sometimes junior software people ask me what relevance studying political science has on technology work. I would just show them hachyderm admins' doc, which is infra and politics and surveillance and opsec https://community.hachyderm.io/blog/2024/11/29/ensuring-hachyderms-future-improving-safety-resilience-through-strategic-placement-of-infrastructure/
EVERYTHING is politics
Your code doesn't live in a vacuum. Where are the computers hosted? What policies does the country hosting the data center have on data sovereignty and privacy? Some countries say you cannot host their citizens' data on foreign servers. Is the country at risk of war, of having a large neighbor cutting undersea cables that provide access? Which major actors in international geopolitics can have a spat that will cause supply chain issues in hardware overnight? It's all politics
This decoupling of politics and technology leads to a lack of understanding between two of the most important (to me) global forces. This also leads to people on one side not knowing much about the other. Lawmakers not knowing enough about technology to effectively regulate. Tech people believing the tech they build is neutral, but that is thoroughly imbued with *their* values in every meaningful way, who then are unable or unwilling to examine the impact that the two have, together, on society.