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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> American politics has long since ceased being about policy and idea's, it is now a contest of identity

We have confused being politically active with being partisan.

Even this article conflates the two. Yet there is a world of difference between taking a policy stance and promoting a candidate or a party.

Companies have a legitimate stake in policy that commercially affects them. Nobody reasonably holds Uber and Lyft and DoorDash’s recent politicking in California against them. One may disagree, but it’s coherent. (Hobby Lobby taking a stance on gay rights, on the other hand, is incoherent.)

Companies must be politically active because nothing is apolitical. But companies shouldn’t be partisan. And when you are doing your work, the partisan affiliations of those around you should not matter.

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> Nobody reasonably holds Uber and Lyft and DoorDash’s recent politicking in California against them.

What? I absolutely hold it against them, given how much of it was pure and unpunished chicanery like tricking drivers into agreeing to 'petitions' then used in published advertising.

You're conflating the rationale for their actions with the execution.

It was logical for those companies to take political action in those instances in order to maintain their business models. How they did so may have been unsavoury, but that's orthogonal to the justification.

The entire business model is unsavory. The basic theory is about atomizing the workforce until they have no power whatsoever, and more profits can flow upwards.

Abusing the app to force drivers to click "yes, i support this" under fear of a "no" click being recorded and held against them is just one small instance of the overall phenomenon.

To my mind, any business which is generating value which didn't exist previously and captures a portion thereof is a savory business.

Uber therefore qualifies.

Uber didn't invent the car or the mobile phone, or cabs or food delivery.

What they invented was a business model that empowers capital and disempowers (some classes of) labor.

I hear their microservice architecture employs a lot of SWEs, though, so they've got that going.

No, Uber combined all those things together in a way that made them more efficient and more appealing to both drivers and riders.

If driving for Uber is worse than being a cab driver, why didn’t the vast majority of Uber drivers drive cabs before?

You don’t need to create completely innovative greenfield technologies in order to generate value.

Remind me again, how much power does a regular taxi driver Joe have under the previous system, where he has to rent a medallion from its rich owner?

>Nobody reasonably holds Uber and Lyft and DoorDash’s recent politicking in California against them.

Just as a customer, I hold it against a business when they too aggressively tell me how to vote. Campaign for whatever, but don't make me sit captive to it in order to do business with you.

> nothing is apolitical

If nothing was apolitical then we wouldn't have a word for it.

If unicorns weren't real we wouldn't have a word for them.

And yet we do because it's a real and useful concept, just like "apolitical".

Sure, I don't disagree.

> And yet we do because it's a real and useful concept, just like "apolitical".

Both unicorns and apolitical actions are unreal fantasies.

The only things that seem apolitical are the things that are so widely agreed on that their true political nature is hard to discern. Once you have disagreement, especially widespread disagreement, the political nature becomes clear. For instance, take the idea of marriage only being between a man and a woman and go back 100 years. Back then, it would have gone without saying, but now it's "political" because many people have other ideas. Nothing changed, except the level of consensus.

Nonsense, most things are apolitical. The people who deny that are trying to produce political action on their pet issues and think we can be coerced into supporting it if they claim, as George W. Bush did, that "you are either with us, or you are with the terrorists." It wasn't true then, and it isn't true now.

> The only things that seem apolitical are the things that are so widely agreed on that their true political nature is hard to discern

The disagreement is what makes things political. There isn't an inherent "political" quality sitting in things. Existentialist's motto was: life is meaningless until you give it meaning. By analogy, most things in the world are apolitical until quarrelsome people with pet issues show up and make them political.

> The disagreement is what makes things political. There isn't an inherent "political" quality sitting in things.

That's true in a sense (e.g. plate tectonics is not political), but it's false you start dealing with things that intersect with human society. For instance: anything to do with power over others, the makeup of society, or the kind of actions people are allowed, encouraged, or forbidden to do is inherently political.

> By analogy, most things in the world are apolitical until quarrelsome people with pet issues show up and make them political.

Not really, and that's just a pretty typical (political!) ad hominem argument made by people who want to maintain the status quo, whatever that is. Stated another way, you're saying the people who want change are troublemakers who should know their place.

> Stated another way, you're saying the people who want change are troublemakers who should know their place.

First, that's only the case if you assume that by "political" I mean bad. But "political" isn't necessarily bad.

Secondly, and more importantly, to make something political is often to imagine some unjust status quo to be overturned. But imagination has power of reifying fantasies to actual events. In other words, to make something political is often to exercise power at the expense of others and to justify it by portraying your action as serving to overturn a status quo. Even status quo can use this to further their power! Freedom isn't always the net outcome of politics.

>>> By analogy, most things in the world are apolitical until quarrelsome people with pet issues show up and make them political.

>> Stated another way, you're saying the people who want change are troublemakers who should know their place.

> First, that's only the case if you assume that by "political" I mean bad. But "political" isn't necessarily bad.

No, I assume that by "quarrelsome people with pet issues" you mean bad. I thought that was pretty obvious.

> In other words, to make something political is often to exercise power at the expense of others and to justify it by portraying your action as serving to overturn a status quo.

This is "speech is violence" level nonsense.

If someone challenges a status quo that you like ("makes something political" in your parlance), then actually defend that status quo. Don't gripe about how those quarrelsome people ruined your nice "apolitical day."

> If someone challenges a status quo that you like ("makes something political" in your parlance), then actually defend that status quo

Incidentally, that right there is a good illustration of how being apolitical is different from supporting the status quo.

Going to a protest to defend the status quo from change is defending the status quo. Not having an opinion about some particular detail of how society operates is being apolitical.

>> If someone challenges a status quo that you like ("makes something political" in your parlance), then actually defend that status quo. Don't gripe about how those quarrelsome people ruined your nice "apolitical day."

> Incidentally, that right there is a good illustration of how being apolitical is different from supporting the status quo.

> Going to a protest to defend the status quo from change is defending the status quo. Not having an opinion about some particular detail of how society operates is being apolitical.

Not really. You're trying to restrict "doing politics" to certain overt political rituals ("going to a protest"), which I think is false restriction.

However, you missed my point in your incomplete quote: the act of griping that things should be kept "apolitical" is itself a kind of protest for the status quo, just a disguised one.

Now you might have a point that someone's ignorance of an issue could make them in some sense "apolitical" in relation to it. However, once the issue has been articulated to them in a way they understand, they're no longer ignorant and have taken some position, even if that's tacit approval of the status quo.

The fundamentalist faith that is evangelical progressivism allows nothing and no one to fall outside its purview. Every aspect of everyone's life must submit to its edicts.

The fact that nobody holds it against Uber/Lyft/Doordash while competing to posture about Who Can Care More About Black Lives is exactly the problem.

You've got black and brown lives right there, they're getting screwed. What, are we saving our powder?

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