Tech Is Political: Take More Action Against Countries and Organizations Engaged in Wars, Genocides, and Misanthropy

Published on Aug 21, 2025 (updated Oct 2, 2025), filed under development, politics. (Share this post, e.g., on Mastodon or on Bluesky.)

This is one of 180 articles that you can also read in an ebook: On Web Development II.

Our governments don’t do enough—some not even anything—to force an end on wars, genocides, and misanthropic (e.g., xenophobic and homophobic) conduct of state actors.

Instead, you can argue, by their inaction and by allowing international institutions like the United Nations and the International Criminal Court to be weakened (e.g., by ignoring arrest warrants), they even make things worse.

However, we can each set up our own personal policy where we draw what line, and there are many non-violent ways to take action.

Consider

For us as consumers, social media participants, and website owners, here are some options to respond to any country or organization linked with crimes against minorities or humanity itself.

• First, confirm what countries are engaging in (or starting) armed conflicts as well as genocides. Wikipedia isn’t perfect, but it seems pretty reliable in establishing these facts.

  • Also research major companies either from such countries or substantially supporting such countries and therefore their wars and/or genocides. For Israel’s killing of Palestinians, for example, the UN published a report on the companies benefiting from occupation and genocide.

• Consider canceling subscriptions or purchases from such countries.

• Consider canceling cooperations with anyone from such countries.

• Consider not buying products and services from anyone linked to such countries. (There are useful apps for this purpose, like Boycott X.)

• Consider not selling or offering services to such countries, either.

• Consider unfollowing anyone linked to such countries on social and professional networks.

• Consider removing links to anyone from such countries, linking to archived versions (using, for example, the Wayback Machine or archive.today), or adding rel=nofollow to the respective links.

• Consider restricting traffic from such countries to your website(s). (For shared hosting on Apache, there are scripts that make blocking traffic easy.)

• Consider not visiting—and blocking—sites from such countries. (I built a Chromium browser extension that can be used for this purpose, AWAGAM—anti-war, anti-genocide, anti-misanthropy. It’s a community project that already surfaced Russia and Israel starter blocklists, lists you can customize and extend per your own policies.)

• Support—e.g., donate to—the people affected by war, genocide, and misanthropy.

• Ask others to consider the same options.

If you are rightfully doubtful after seeing how much cancel culture backfired, leading to strengthening the Right, then I’d argue that wars, genocides, and misanthropy are actually appropriate exceptions.

The individual impact of these steps may be small and then largely symbolic, but, with a large audience, it may also be noticeable and effective. With more and more people joining, then, the cumulative effect is going to be more than symbolic—it will be substantial.

We can all contribute to positive, constructive change. And there’s no way around dealing with the absolute assholes. No matter that there aren’t that many—given how much damage they cause, we need more hands on deck.

About Me

I’m Jens (long: Jens Oliver Meiert), and I’m an engineering lead, guerrilla philosopher, and indie publisher. I’ve worked as a technical lead and engineering manager for companies you use every day (like Google) and companies you’ve never heard of, I’m an occasional contributor to web standards (like HTML, CSS, WCAG), and I write and review books for O’Reilly and Frontend Dogma.

I love trying things, not only in web development and engineering management, but also with respect to politics and philosophy. Here on meiert.com I talk about some of my experiences and perspectives. (Please share feedback: Interpret charitably, but do be critical.)