DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

Read it.

Totalitarianism advances in America.

Yesterday, after nearly a year of searching, the Mozilla Foundation announced the hiring of longtime CTO Brendan Eich as its new CEO. The internal hire looks like Mozilla opted for a technological leader to head up the front office as opposed to a business school expert, though at this point, Eich’s coding chops (inventing JavaScript, co-founding Mozilla) have possibly been outpaced by his past nine years of Mozilla leadership work.

But much of the public reaction to his promotion skipped past that “can a coder run a company” question, focusing squarely on another financial issue. In 2008, Eich donated $1,000 in support of California’s Proposition 8, the ballot initiative that sought to ban gay marriage in the state. So shortly after the announcement of Eich’s hiring, the reaction came swiftly. In particular, developers came forward with a mix of boycotts and reluctant acceptance.

App developer Rarebit ignited the conversation by announcing that it pulled its apps from the Firefox Marketplace. In a statement, Rarebit CEO Hampton Catlin recalled the story of his own gay marriage experience in California, which allowed him to marry Rarebit co-founder Michael Catlin. Catlin called Eich out for both his Prop 8 donation and his choice not to apologize.

“We morally cannot support a foundation that would not only leave someone with hateful views in power but will give them a promotion and put them in charge of the entire organization,” he wrote.

It is certainly (in a properly-ordered world) the right of anyone to refuse to use a product for whatever reason they think best, but this tendency of the supposed proponents of tolerance to characterize legitimate differences of opinion as ‘hateful views’ is the sort of thing that, in the modern era of Identity Politics, eventually gets turned into legislation, regulations, and prosecutions.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 26th, 2014 at 04:34 and is filed under Dystopia Watch. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.