an attempt at redemption

GO.

Topher tapes paper to the walls throughout.

These days, I’m a dirtbag artist, but there was a time when I worked at Airbnb. I joined them because Couchsurfing changed my life, and I thought Airbnb had the best shot at making that kind of hospitality exchange mainstream. It did, but it also messed up the housing market in a lot of cities. Don’t get me wrong, it’s far from the biggest factor here in San Francisco, but it’s totally messed up Barcelona, and it might have messed up Amsterdam and Berlin too if not for those cities passing some important regulations.

A couple years in, I started to feel like I wasn’t entirely comfortable with the company’s attitude towards regulation. But I thought maybe there was something I wasn’t understanding. I figured the government relations team had reasons for what it was doing. I was just a software engineer, so I kept my head down, and eventually I left without doing anything.

Beat.

Last week, Seth Vargo did something. Vargo found out that his previous company Chef, which makes software for managing servers, has a contract with ICE. He asked them for a statement, but they didn’t respond. He was still in charge of one of the open source libraries used by the company, so three days later, he unpublished those libraries from the internet and replaced them with a note saying, “I have a moral and ethical obligation to prevent my [code] from being used for evil.”

His action took down the systems of many of Chef’s customers that day. ICE wasn’t one of them, but the incident sparked conversations within the company, and this week the CEO announced that they will not be renewing their contract with ICE when it expires next year.

Topher finishes taping and faces audience.

This is a list of tech companies that have contracts with ICE. Come up after the show and see if your company is on it, or somewhere your friend works. Maybe there’s something you can do.

CURTAIN.

List sourced from https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/7/30/20728147/tech-company-ice-contracts-foia-microsoft-palantir-concur-dell.

Originally performed on September 27, 2019 as part of The Infinite Wrench and produced by the San Francisco Neo-Futurists.