Some years back, I went to Ottawa to attend the wedding of a colleague. I had a splendid time, and met some wonderful people. One of them was Brendan Eich.
Flash forward to today, and I find that he has been named Mozilla’s CEO. I am delighted to offer him and Mozilla my congratulations. I like him, I admire him, and I think the world is a better place with him in it.
There has been heat surrounding his choice two years ago to support something that I consider wrong. I empathize with people asking questions about this, as I come down on the socially progressive side of this issue. Let me put it more strongly: We come down on the right side of this issue, and history is on our side.
Nevertheless, I still like Brendan and think the world is a better place with him in it, and I think that Mozilla is a better place with him at the helm. And furthermore, I don’t have to write an essay explaining my reasoning. My opinion, I’m entitled to it. You may have a different opinion. I empathize with what you’re feeling even though I ended up making a different decision.
People are entitled to think I’m wrong about Mozilla even if they agree with my feelings about equality of marriage. Hell, I may even be wrong about Mozilla, it happens. Ask me in a decade, maybe I’ll have some new life experiences that lead me to a different point of view. We’ll see.
“I’m not young enough to know everything.”–Oscar Wilde
why I’m writing this essay
I hope that Brendan knows what I think without needing an essay, and I hope the people of Mozilla that know me are confident that I’m delighted for them and for Mozilla. And I hope the people that have a different point of view are comfortable that I’m not telling them what to think or how to feel about things.
As it happens, I’m not happy with something else, and that something is the way we in the tech community respond to people speaking out. Some people have expressed their unhappiness with Mozilla’s choice in this matter. They don’t want to develop for FirefoxOS, or they want to uninstall Firefox, or maybe they just want to speak their mind and try to get the world to listen for a moment and see things from their point of view.
People speaking their mind seems like a good thing to me. We in tech spend all of our time building things to help people communicate. So we want to talk amongst ourselves, right?
Nope, we do not want to actually talk amongst ourselves. When people speak up, we pile on them. We say they’re having a temper tantrum. Or we tell them they’re “blackmailing” companies. In short, we are very unpleasant with people who do not toe the line. We make it clear that they are not being reasonable, that they are bad people.
Our logic is this: If you donate money to remove someone’s choices in life, you’re making a personal choice. But if you choose to align your choices with your principles… It’s blackmail.
I’m not speaking to any one person, but in aggregate we are awful hypocrites. We ought to be totally consistent in this. Either every personal belief is totally on the table, or we need to put a wall around our politics and say that the only thing that matters is what we say and do on the job.
I’m socially progressive, I favour that people’s work should be judged by their work. Discriminatory or harassing behaviour in the workplace? That’s on the table. Writing an essay like this on my own time under my own name? Off the table.
People love to muddy the debate and say that someone’s political or social views make them unfit for work in tech. I say this sword has two very unpleasant edges: If I declare that so-and-so should not work in tech because their personal views are not sufficiently inclusive, I grant the world the right to say that I cannot work in tech because my views are insufficiently exclusive!
If I can ask Terry’s company to fire them for espousing views that alienate 10-25% of people in tech, why can’t Terry ask my company to fire me for writing this essay espousing views that alienate 25-50% of people in tech?
I know that what I’m advocating is logically consistent, and I know that many people individually make this argument. The trouble is, we as an industry are statistically inconsistent with this stuff. We’re too quick to say that women who speak out should never work in tech again, but men who hold offensive views are exercising their freedom of speech.
What I want us to do is get our act together and get both kinds of consistency right: Let’s be logically consistent and apply one single clear standard to the question of people’s personal beliefs. And then let’s be statistically consistent about how we apply that standard to people in our industry, especially with respect to marginalized people calling the industry out.
I’m not telling you how to feel about anybody’s personal choices, including my own. I won’t tell you what choices to make when you face a moral quandary. But I am telling you that I personally value the wall between personal and employment life. And I am asking you to consider that without that wall, I would not be able to write essays like this.
And I am declaring that we as an industry and we as a culture are not logically or statistically consistent on this issue. And I am agitating for us in aggregate to get it together and become consistent.
That, I think, is something we can and must fix.
