Lesley Carhart 
Just a warning, I am immediately blocking, and sometimes server blocking on, "stop posting about politics if you're a insert profession here" takes. Technology is politics. Education is politics. Security is politics. The people who work in these fields, and more, are intimately impacted by politics. Some peoples' lives, families, and livelihoods are in danger. It's all politics, stop content and tone policing if you're one of the few people who's currently insanely fortunate to be relatively unimpacted. It's asinine.
Eric McCorkle@hacks4pancakes Take, maybe hot, maybe not: scientists, engineers, and experts generally have a responsibility to consider the political implications of our work and be involved in policy. Because technology is in most cases, neutral, it falls to humans to guide it in the right directions.
Jacob Kramer-Duffield@emc2 @hacks4pancakes agree with everything except the last part - technology is never neutral! There are always politics embedded in a technology, up to and including the fact of the technology itself.
@jaykaydee @hacks4pancakes That's a fair assessment. I was deliberately flipping a common trope on its head to argue in the opposite direction.
femaven@emc2 @jaykaydee @hacks4pancakes I’d say technology itself is indifferent and can be used or misused like any other tool.
@femaven @jaykaydee @hacks4pancakes This is why the responsibility to use it to the right ends cannot and should not be abdicated. The techbro line of "tech is neutral, so I don't have to care about politics" is logically incoherent.
New Goliath@jaykaydee @emc2 @femaven @hacks4pancakes
How are ICBMs, torture prisons, strip mining equipment, and gas chambers technologies ever used for good?
@NewGoliath @jaykaydee @femaven @hacks4pancakes Hence my specific use of the phrase "in most cases".
Also, some of those are examples of negative uses of more fundamental technologies.
@NewGoliath @emc2 @femaven @hacks4pancakes right. Their politics are embedded in their very being. As with all technology!