Politics is inseparable from technology in a very similar sense as it's inseparable from woodworking

This is the point where your opinion and mine diverge, and much of my anger at the "detox" is due simply to the inability of HN and the broader tech community as a whole to realize the scope of "politics". I know that you get this, so I'm unsure why you chose to phrase it that way, but I'll consolidate my thoughts here.

Tech is doing amazing things right now and has the potential to do many more amazing things. But there is an almost wilful blindness to the consequences that's unbearably frustrating.

People are developing machine-learning tools that can do lots of cool stuff. But those tools can just as easily "learn" the prejudices baked into our culture, and begin reinforcing them. This is how you get systems which mysteriously decide that people of certain races shouldn't get bail when arrested, or should face much harsher sentencing, or shouldn't get a prime-rate mortgage or shouldn't get a business loan or shouldn't be hired into certain jobs:

https://www.propublica.org/article/what-algorithmic-injustic...

People are experimenting with new ways to develop software and new methodologies to make development more efficient. Which is great until the software accidentally issues instructions to arrest people who shouldn't be arrested, or tells people convicted of drug crimes to register as sex offenders, because somebody screwed up the categorization check.

That actually happened: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/12/court-software-gl...

But try to suggest some rules about being careful, checking and testing everything, getting feedback before a deploy, etc. and you'll be told it's burdensome regulation in need of "disruption". Try to tell people to think up-front about the consequences, and you're yelled at: "why do you always have to bring politics into everything?"

And that's just the obvious stuff. Going deeper: companies are interviewing and hiring based not on reliable metrics, but on a bundle of cargo culting, prejudice and in-group nepotism. VCs are funding based on this crap. Entire large market segments don't get anything which meets their needs because the biases prevented hiring or funding anyone who'd know the needs first-hand, and doing some research would violate "move fast and break things".

But don't dare try to talk to tech people about this, least of all on HN. Don't suggest that people examine their biases or how their lives have benefited from being sheltered from many economic or social ills. Don't ask them to think through the consequences, or to ask not just "how could this be used" but "who could this be used against". Because that's "bringing politics into it", and is bad.

But the politics was already there, in plain sight, for anyone to see who was willing to look. It cannot be separated out or isolated or made into something that we pretend isn't there. When I went through and flagged almost 50 stories yesterday I pointed out why each one of them had politics or political implications built-in. That was considered vandalism, which should tell you what you need to know to diagnose HN's "politics" problem.

The attitude that bringing up these consequences and implications is somehow unrelated or off-topic is not a problem of HN commenters being "shrill" or "nasty", it's a problem of the unspoken and unquestioned set of values experiences and ways of looking at the world that are baked into not just the majority of HN's users but also the people who run it. And I've tried my damnedest to explain this to people, but they either don't listen or don't get it.

"Detox" delenda est.