Software is political

Software is political. Software has never been “just technical” and the act of distributing software, whether done commercially or non-commercially, is never “just business” either. Unfortunately, the belief that software is technical, not political, has been pervasive for long enough that a lot of quite political things have managed to happen under the guise of boring technical decisions, or boring procurement decisions.

I mean things like this: a university which used to handle email provision for staff and students in-house, with its own employees and infrastructure, gets convinced that outsourcing email to Microsoft or Google will not only result in less complexity for the organization, but will even lead to the easy integration of all kinds of additional services that the organization is currently sourcing in other ways. It seems like a decision about what services can be provided for what cost, and in such a logic, it seems very convenient. Instead of having a couple people taking care of mailservers, why not let one of the biggest email hosts handle it for you? It could seem like a practical technical decision in terms of the usability of the service, or the reliability of the servers, or any number of other metrics the procurer might be looking at. It may seem nice, if you’re into that kind of thing, to not need to employ people in-house to do tasks that can instead be done elsewhere. If hosting networked services isn’t your core activity, why not outsource it to a specialist?

Or: A community decides that the best way to organize itself is on Discord. The decision is made partially because some of the people in the group are already using this platform, but mostly because it offers features the community’s organizers think they’re going to need. Everyone gets to join for free, and the group is able to organize itself in a way that the members mostly find convenient. Some features require age verification, and the community is locked into a platform that it doesn’t ultimately control, but these are both common enough issues on free-to-use communication platforms, so no one in the group gives them much thought.

Platforms are not apolitical

Neither email hosting nor a souped-up message board seem like particularly political or controversial issues. These choices do not engage directly in “politics” as many people think of the concept. Instead, they are seen as platforms, as carriers of information made by the people using them, as neutral tools that allow their users to achieve their own ends. But for something to be political does not necessitate that it engages directly in electoral or party politics. We know this one already, living in a climate where basic human rights are increasingly being turned into political statements. Politics are embedded in everything, whether it’s the way a question is asked on a survey, the choice to support a certain initiative, or the provenance of a banana. (In case you’re curious, those cryptic examples could be, but are not restricted to being: a question which makes it easier to give one answer than another, a wildlife preservation initiative organized by the gun lobby, a banana with a fair trade certification.) Politics are not restricted to the political arena, and are instead ever-present.

In the case of software procurement and use, what looks on the surface like a financial, organizational, or technical decision is, of course, also a political decision. We’re now all increasingly familiar with arguments about digital sovereignty, and that’s certainly one of the things that’s political about a decision to outsource a technical function. We can ask geopolitical questions like “Are US-based companies trustworthy partners for storage and processing of data?” and come out with answers like “Probably not, all things considered.” But the current focus on data sovereignty is only one manifestation of the political nature of software, and it obscures other, potentially even more important issues.

All goods and services are political, eventually

In one sense, software is political in the same way that just about any choice we make during our lives can be political (remember the survey question, preservation initiative, and banana from earlier). The political nature of our basic life choices (and also things we don’t have the power to choose) can become apparent in situations like consumer boycotts. Canadians may refuse to drink whiskey from Kentucky because they object to the political climate south of the border, or to punitive tariffs, or to becoming the 51st state. A previously-enthusiastic SodaStream user may decide not to buy refills for their machine because they object to what’s happening in Gaza. Consumer boycotts of all stripes, regardless of their trigger, are an attempt to use consumption choices as a way of transmitting a message. In this sense, we already know that there is politics embedded in all forms of consumption.

Beyond the idea of “voting with your money” in an organized boycott, our consumption choices are political anyway. Someone might decide to only buy local vegetables, whether for environmental reasons or because of an investment in supporting local farmers. An electric car may be not just a commitment to reducing consumption of fossil fuels, but also a portable demonstration that the owner cares about the state of the world. Our consumption choices can be based on negative politics, like jingoism or xenophobia, and they can be based on positive/desired politics, like worker rights or supporting one’s local economy. Because it’s nigh on impossible to achieve total moral consistency, we may pick our battles. Those local vegetables may come from a family owned farm we want to support, while the clothes still come from H&M or Shein. We can be doing what we consider politically, morally, and ethically correct in one part of our lives, while making concessions – or not even being aware of the political, moral, or ethical considerations – in other areas.

But what does this have to do with software? For one, we can take the argument that all consumption is political and apply it to our digital lives. If consumption is all political, then digital consumption should be no different. There may not be a local social network farmer to support, but discussions about labour rights, environmental impacts and geopolitics, exploitation, and all the other things we considered when making choices about whiskey or vegetables or clothes still apply to the creation and provision of the digital services and goods we use. The large language model may be refined using the labour of people being paid measly wages to look at harmful content. The new data centre streaming your videos may be polluting, heating, destroying habitat, or pushing local electricity prices up. The arguments we make about the ethics of other areas of consumer spending and day-to-day life apply just as nicely to our digital consumption choices. Digital goods and services also have a weight on the world, even if they may seem intangible in the ways we use them.

Software has greater political capacity

Believe it or not, though, that’s not the argument I want to make. Yes, we can apply the normal logics of consumption-as-politics to our digital lives. And yes, we can apply those usual logics to the different levels of consumption. This is already a good start. If we chose software and digital services on the same basis as bananas, whiskey, or soda cartridges, we might already live in a better world. We could ask ourselves basic questions like “Is this made in a way that I find ethical?” or “Do I want to support this company?” These questions feel so incredibly simple, but thanks to the sheer scale of the companies providing many of our digital services and the opacity of what goes into their provision, the answers are opaque and uncomfortable more often than not. Realistically, the decision to use a service from Google, Amazon, Microsoft, or heaven forbid, any of Elon Musk’s companies, is not a positive decision any more – it is instead a decision based on inertia or the feeling of not having real alternatives. You likely don’t have a Prime subscription because you specifically want to give Jeff Bezos more money, but because it provides a service that putatively improves your life, whether that’s fast delivery or an exclusive TV show you want to see. The Prime subscription can come to feel necessary because it provides things you’d rather not live without, and that real-life inconvenience outweighs news stories you may read about poor labour conditions for Amazon workers. This calculation, not removing a service from your life because doing without it feels worse than any harms that may be happening in order for you to have it, is the same level of scrutiny we apply to all kinds of consumption decisions. This is paying more for the fair trade banana, or drinking Crown Royal instead of Maker’s Mark (if you’re a member of the whiskey boycott group from a few paragraphs ago).

Any of the goods or commodities I’ve mentioned up to this point are embedded in complex systems of production and distribution which are, on one level or another, political. Our fair trade bananas exist to address the problem of unethical labour practices, and to provide an easy way for consumers to feel that they’re making a better choice. They are embedded in systems of agriculture, labour, colonial history, transportation, and a whole host of other considerations. The banana itself may not at first glance be an inherently political object, but because of how it is produced, branded, and distributed, its politics become much more apparent. Software and digital goods are also embedded in complex systems of production and distribution and are susceptible to the associated political issues. But in addition, as a complex system in and of itself, software carries the opportunity to more deeply embed politics.

Embedded politics

The embedding of politics into digital systems may also not seem immediately apparent. Values like parsimony or efficiency, which have long been popular in software development, may appear to be technical instead of political. An efficient tool, which requires fewer resources to run, appears to be a goal based on an objective measure. But as we see with bloated codebases and vibe-coded software, efficiency and parsimony are not universal values. Instead, they are values which fit within a system prizing low resource use, and which suddenly become less valued when quicker iteration or a simple desire to automate tasks at any cost becomes the dominant paradigm. In that world, parsimony becomes a political statement in and of itself. And the politics of efficiency is only one apparently technical concept that turns out to be political. There are myriad other embeddings of political values into software, carried out both subtly and overtly. The harvesting of data, what will be reported back and what will not be, and any number of concerns about accessibility or language, are all political concerns masquerading under the guise of features.

The idea that software use and purchasing decisions are purely technical or functional hides the reality that software is loaded with politics, even when chosen for non-political reasons. Software has political consequences which are hidden and overshadowed by the practical factors for which a particular tool may be chosen. While all consumption decisions are also political, software has a greater capacity to carry and implement political assumptions. Software not only has its own politics, but also acquires extra politics from the other systems it’s embedded in. For this reason, it is essential to attend to the politics of software when making choices about its use. As systems designed to execute rules, digital tools of all kinds are vectors for the embedding of politics.