With Israel's relentless bombing of civilians and civilian infrastructure in Gaza and Israel committing genocide in Gaze: should companies be more political and for example inform their users or block users or make users to accept certain terms?
What are your thoughts?
Also where to start if neutrality is not an option?
the whole NATO is messed up, idk where to even start, it's really obvious they are trying to win political support for an all out aggressive military attack on russia, and the hostilities towards Syria, Lebanon, Iran are all connected to Russian support of these countries to not become vassal states of NATO, and they are of course trying to bundle all the *stans and India into the basket of "axis of evil" in this narrative
i think unless your business pertains to speech, say nothing about it in business communications, and if it does pertain to enabling speech, then seriously be careful where you put your corporate footprint because a lot of places now are increasingly dangerous for people even if they are in good faith acting purely as communications carriers and not publishers (like the "social media")
Tough questions. I think blocking users is almost never a great solution, especially on BTC/LN products (even though as a company you can do it, opposed to the otherwise censorship resistent nature of the protocols). You also would have collateral damage by blocking people not in support of what's happening. Plus it's a little like the US weaponizing the dollar and the longterm consequences of it (loss of trust)
Informing people is a softer way, but that's more up to how political one wants to get as a company.
you might like this piece by Noam Chomsky on BDS movement (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) with regards to Palestine
https://chomsky.info/20140702/
And another piece which is an interview with him :
No. Companies need to remain neutral as much as possible. After all, there are two sides to pretty much any debate and there's no reason a company needs to start taking opinionated sides on things that are totally unrelated to their business.
that is mostly my stand, but also companies are a group of people coming together for a cause - which they think is important - serving others.
For example maybe we should tell people more about the importance of open source or privacy?
The least companies can do is block access to settlers in illegally occupied territories, but that is difficult to do without blocking Palestinians.
I mean I also don't like blocking in general.
but as we have open source license for example I was wondering if values of a project should be more actively shown to the user and users required to accept them (like the ToS).
Blocking users has collateral damage to the innocents. Making your software as useful as possible for the oppressed people is the best way forward.
What terms are you suggesting to make users accept?
i think you are aware nostr:npub1xv8mzscll8vvy5rsdw7dcqtd2j268a6yupr6gzqh86f2ulhy9kkqmclk3x is a dev at Alby and their Hub system is a really nice interface for managing a lightning node, this is the kind of thing they can do that helps these people without getting in the sights of the oppressors
the nostr related key management is a bit more fuzzy, i think for that as part of their charitable works they need to make it easier for people to independently deploy the account/key management system, but that's probably the least impactful part of their work, they just should try to avoid being forced to log the identities of their users beyond their email addresses, i think
I very much agree and this is kinda what excited me about the internet and what got me into programming.
but is this enough?
every good company does things with a purpose to solve problems and improve lives and the world - what the company considers important.
every company is also a platform for their customers.
I am thinking of terms like whatever the company values.
The declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
The universal declaration of human rights
Rejecting crimes against humanity
Rejecting all those privacy eroding laws
Support for cases like the Assange
...
That sounds like the greatest terms of service agreement ever. I think that would be beautiful. 10/10 would sign. Also I'm extremely glad to know Alby is in good hands with alignment to those particular ideas.
