Yesterday, I opted into taking our business site down for yesterday’s SOPA/PIPA strike, a decidedly political move. It’s not like outofajam.net being down is going to affect anyone or anything. I mean, the Google bot might be miffed as it crawls the web, but that’s about it.
For me (who wields no political power whatsoever), it boiled down to this: while it’s a political move, it’s not one of party affiliation. I’m not taking a stance on something liberal, or conservative, or communist, or freecoffeeist (free the beans!). It’s one of affiliation to our stated goal: to make technology work for you. The foundation of the internet is the free flow of information, and the fact that we have that today is one of the more staggering achievements in human history. It has changed your life already, and can do so in even more ways that haven’t been imagined yet. Curtailing and censoring that information at will is the equivalent of turning the river by your house into a kiddie pool. Safer, and stupid. The reality is, what those bills would have ended up doing is crippling the very things I work so hard to provide for my clients.
I have strong political views. Actually, scratch that – I have strong views. Shocking, I know, you do too! On everything – politics, religion, restaurants, didgeridoo performances, the list goes on and on. And further, I believe pretty strongly that a healthy society lets many different views be voiced all the time.
All that being said, I work hard to keep my views to myself while working, and Out of a Jam as apolitical as it can be. The reason has less to do with not trying to offend people than it does with my firm belief that that’s how things need to be if I’m to do my job well at all.
People trust me. And not just me – all IT people, everywhere, are invested daily with an insane amount of trust. Credit card numbers, passwords, private information, the list goes on and on.
Amazingly, most people never ask me anything about this, but I have a strict set of rules anyway. I don’t write down passwords (unless it’s part of a pre-agreed service between the client and me), I never touch any portion of the computer I absolutely don’t have to to fulfill the job, and so on. But part of that is also a desire to let my clients know that I will provide them with high quality service regardless of their beliefs or personality quirks. If I believe that technology can make your life better (and so help me, I do), and it’s my mission to bring that to fruition in your life, then I don’t want you worrying that I’m going to make off with some compromising political information. Doctors have a code, Priests have a code, and IT should have one too.
Outside of the fact that IT people often don’t (I’ve talked to more than one person who’s worked in a computer shop that bragged of the dirt they’ve uncovered), there’s also the consideration that this needs to extend to more than just privacy (although I gotta tell ya, that one time that a man pulled out a giant wad of cash, waved it under my nose and suggested we go to Vegas for the weekend, I had to wonder what he and his friends were up to in that trailer), but how we do the rest of our job.
We should make it more useful.
Not ‘better’ – far too often, people in my position get caught up in insisting that someone use a piece of software that’s the ‘best.’ Or, man, you really should have THIS installed. No no, configure it this way. Oh, let me just set up you up with this account real quick.
If the net result is that things are no different, then it was a waste of time. If it makes things less productive for the user, then it was worse than a waste of time.
And for me, this applies to how safe people feel in bringing me their problems. It’s important that they know that regardless of their lifestyle, political affiliations, or even my personal views on them, I will give them the best, most useful, advice that I can.
And in this case, my advice is this: if you like the internet, or see it as useful, laws like SOPA and PIPA will make it less useful, not more.