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

Published on Aug 21, 2025, filed under misc, advocacy (feed). (Share this on Mastodon or Bluesky?)

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.

For us as consumers, social media participants, and website owners, here are some options we can take on any country and 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 these countries or substantially supporting these countries and therefore their wars and/or genocides. For Israel’s systematic murder of Palestinians, for example, the U.N. published a report on the companies benefiting from occupation and genocide.

• Cancel subscriptions or purchases from these countries.

• Cancel cooperations with anyone from these countries.

• Don’t buy products and services from anyone linked to these countries. (There are useful apps for this purpose, like Boycott X.)

• Don’t sell or offer services to these countries, either.

• Unfollow anyone linked to these countries on social and professional networks.

• Remove links to anyone from these countries, link to archived versions instead (using e.g. the Wayback Machine or archive.today), or at least add rel=nofollow to such links.

• Avoid visiting—block—sites from these countries. (I built a Chromium browser extension for this, 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.)

• Ask others to do the same.

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 use cases for a cancel culture.

Go all-out.

The individual impact of these steps may be small and then largely symbolic, but, with a large audience, it may already be noticeable and effective. With more and more people joining, however, 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 a__holes. No matter that there aren’t that many—given how much damage they cause, we need all hands on deck.

About Me

I’m Jens (long: Jens Oliver Meiert), and I’m a web developer, manager, and author. I’ve been working as a technical lead and engineering manager for companies you’ve never heard of and companies you use every day, 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 in other areas like philosophy. Here on meiert.com I share some of my experiences and views. (I value you being critical, interpreting charitably, and giving feedback.)