The TL;DR
This goes to the question of “can the art be separated from the artist?” I would consider the software to be art or creative work that is written by people who each have their own inherent and subconscious biases, opinions, and worldviews which will color, in some way, the software that is produced. Sometimes those biases remain hidden for a long time or won’t ever matter but when they are suddenly exposed, we’re right back to the question at hand: at what point must the art be discarded specifically because of the biases or actions of the person(s) that created it?
Therefore, I submit every software program is “political” in some way because it can affect many groups of people and other tools the more popular it gets; it’s just a question of when those inherent politics actually matter enough to enough people to result in this dissonance taking center stage and causing a ruckus.
There is no such thing as apolitical software, just software with heretofore unexposed biases on the part of the creator(s).
The Long-Winded Version
The primary definition of “politics” according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary is
the art or science of government
while the 5th definition/example is given as
5(a): the total complex of relations between people living in society 5(b): relations or conduct in a particular area of experience especially as seen or dealt with from a political point of view
In the tech world (and also in many other arenas), one hears the term “governance” so for the purposes of this discussion I’m going to use that 5th definition of what politics is in a more general sense, as applied to all arenas of societal interactions (whether official “government” or just “managing groups of people”). I use this definition because that’s what most software becomes: a group project to build or maintain a tool that requires governing different people, sometimes with vastly different points of view. Most of these projects get to the point where they are “like herding cats”, to borrow a popular turn of phrase.
Focusing on software, when a person sets out to build a new software tool by themselves, they’re usually doing it to fill a need for themselves in the way that they want to see it filled. They carry with them all of their current biases, opinions, and experiences either consciously or sub-consciously as they make the various decisions on where to take the project. They build the tool to satisfy their own goals, and the best engineers with the best intentions will try to build tools that satisfy other people’s goals as well.
We often use terms like “opinionated”, “focused”, “proprietary”, or “flavored” in the tech industry to describe software. All of these words are euphemisms for “political”.
You might be thinking, a tool is just a tool — there’s nothing inherently political about the tool itself and you might be right. But I’ll wager to say that you’re also one of those people that say, guns don’t kill people, people kill people. That’s also a true statement, but it’s disingenuous; the tool itself was designed to be used in a specific way, but we all know that there are many ways and reasons — both good and bad — to use a tool to craft our own tools, projects, what-have-you. There is a reason that the author created the tool in the first place — but that reason might be hidden or perhaps wasn’t considered “problematic” at the time of the tool’s creation.
But those biases are still there.
Now consider what happens in a software project when that original author adds additional people to the project to help develop and maintain it, and that group keeps growing. Maybe they make it open-source so that anyone can contribute to it. Maybe that tool becomes popular and gets used in other projects as a core component. And let’s say that the original author is still with the project and is still leading the project, trying to keep the original direction intact and keep everyone else that contributes to its design or maintenance moving in that same general direction.
[Update notes: 09-AUG-2026] As with so many of my thoughts, I kind of got on a tear and then ran out of time/gas before I finished it and never posted it. So, in keeping with the idea of a digital garden, I’m gonna go ahead and post it and maybe someday in the future I’ll get back around to finishing whatever it was that I was intending to say. I figure that most folks will only mainly read the tl;dr anyway, which I fortunately had the foresight to add in before now. Such is the trials and tribulations of us long-winded people that like to shout at clouds into the void from high atop our various soapboxes.
