If you buy apple products, work for the company or own its stock then you are financially facilitating this. I don't know who you are and I don't care, I am just saying this is the basic cause and effect.
Things cannot improve unless stakeholders use their levers to change or abandon the company.
I do 2/3 of those things and have no problem with what Apple is doing. There is no universal right side in this. This being a top comment here doesn't make it true.
FWIW, if you have no problem with what Apple is doing--and a lot of people might not: they might even actively cheer Apple on if they went out of their way to help ICE... not my jam, but a lot of people want to simultaneously be anti-ICE or anti-Trump and pro-Apple--then I don't think my comment becomes "untrue": the point simply would have no serious effect on you, as I guess you are simply OK being "complicit"... today <- which is key, as it isn't like this is the first or last time Apple has become a patsy to governments around the world, restricting access or removing content and software that challenge authoritarian control. I gave an entire talk in 2017 at the Mozilla Privacy Lab on how this happens to centralized systems all the time called "That's How You Get a Dystopia", though Apple is only one segment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsazo-Gs7ms.
The thing is these are all your opinions and you have a right to them... but you are choosing these words (my guess is they are chosen for you based on your source material) words like "complicit", "patsy", "authoritarian control". Using these words doesn't make them true.
I give you credit for speaking up for what you believe in publicly.
My opinion is that it is pretty self evident that a large or small company would remove an app at the request of the US Government that actively tracks federal agents that are attempting to enforce the law.
Ah, OK, so, that isn't actually the issue I am pointing at directly, which might be the confusion! I am not saying that--if you believe that such apps being pulled is, itself, a bad thing (and, a lot of people do, as they want to claim they are anti-ICE or anti/Trump), the reason that happens at all is not because Apple didn't fight back hard enough today (somehow): it is because Apple didn't make the correct choices years ago, and now they have no choice. Apple is only in a position to do this at all and be asked to remove stuff due to the government's wishes because they set themselves up to have no choice in the matter.
In fact, it is because of just how obviously "self evident" it is that the point can even be made in the first place: if you construct a giant centralized bottleneck on the distribution of software and information, you will end up being asked to use that bottleneck to filter content by governments... not just in the United States, but around the world. If that is truly "self evident" to you, you do not build the centralized bottleneck unless you like the idea of the eventual possible results of such.
And, in that analysis, if you like the result, then you can argue with the tone of the wording, but I don't think the point is "untrue". Apple doesn't really have any choice in the matter, so they are a patsy here. And if you argued to help Apple obtain their centralized position, you are complicit in said result. You might be proud to be complicit, or you might be happy that Apple is a patsy, but that doesn't change the truth of the situation.
So like, great: you say that is self-evident... did you like what happened today? If not, do you like it when Apple does the same thing for counties all over the world--when I said "authoritarian control" it was me talking about other countries, such as China, where I think you would be hard-pressed to argue otherwise--and pulls apps like VPNs and protest coordination tools? If so, again, very not my jam... but it certainly makes sense for you to be happy Apple has no choice and proud of any prior involvement you have with such...
...but, if you ever think Apple is doing stuff that makes your stomach lurch because they have no choice but to follow the edict of a government, the question is: what does that imply for moral product development in this world? Do you build--and then advocate for, or defend on forums--a centralized App Store and deny the ability for third-party software? Or do you, as a principled stance... not do that?
To refrain one more time: we are in intense and powerful agreement that "it is pretty self evident that a large or small company would remove an app at the request of the US Government that actively tracks federal agents that are attempting to enforce the law". That isn't only "your" opinion: that is "our"
opinion! ;P
As the moment of agency then happens well before this moment today, we then can't shy away from the real question: do you like Trump and how he's running ICE, and the result it has on families? If you do, again: not my jam ;P, but I totally get why you'd be happy about the result today or confused as to why you should feel differently about it.
However, it isn't obvious to me you do, as you want to hide behind the action today being "self evident", as if that obviates the need to even verify someone's (I want to say "yours" but you might technically be arguing on behalf of an anonymous third party, and I don't want to leave opening to pivot the discussion into whether or not you personally ever advocated for Apple) opinion on ICE: in fact, that is why that political opinion matters so very very much!
In a world where we decide one company has a bottleneck on information and freedom strong enough to quickly remove access to content and tools from a large percentage of the population, suddenly we must care deeply about how that tool will get used. If you don't like how that tool gets used, you really have to be advocating for that tool to not exist.
> If you buy apple products, work for the company or own its stock then you are financially facilitating this.
I don't know that saying to someone: "hey, you're complicit in fascism because you bought an iPhone" is a reasonable stance.
Imagine you're a factory worker who builds a component for Apple products. Is it fair to shout to that person you're enabling the US government's clampdown on peaceful resistance?
Do you think it makes sense to say to the tens of millions of Americans (and foreign investors) who hold positions in S&P 500 that they are complicity in fascism because Apple decided to remove apps?
I can appreciate your passion and conviction, but I don't know that the world is that black and white.
Everyone in this forum seems to be obsessed with personal guilt and blame because the idea that they are responsible for their actions hurts their feelings. I am just talking about the cause and effect here.
The cause is that you are supporting a company that thinks it has the right to control what its users do on their devices, and the effect is that this relationship is easily hijacked by the government. It actually is very straightforward.
If you want to stop the company, you have to convince the stakeholders to change/abandon the company or disempower the stakeholders themselves directly. This is why I make the case here: I can either convince you or oppose you directly.
>I don't know that saying to someone: "hey, you're complicit in fascism because you bought an iPhone" is a reasonable stance.
Don't worry, I do know that it is a reasonable stance. There are a ton of phones on the market that don't enable this type of control, and they are more affordable and useful than iphones. The barrier to entry is slight inconvenience.
>Imagine you're a factory worker who builds a component for Apple products. Is it fair to shout to that person you're enabling the US government's clampdown on peaceful resistance?
Factory workers are probably living in some third world country where they have very little leverage in negotiating the terms of the company, and they are probably too poor to afford iphones and don't care about US politics, but they still have some leverage. So you could shout that to the factory worker but they probably wouldn't care. It would be futile
>Do you think it makes sense to say to the tens of millions of Americans (and foreign investors) who hold positions in S&P 500 that they are complicity in fascism because Apple decided to remove apps?
I don't use this language of fascism because it has because been overused by the left. But my answer is simply yes. Shareholders are responsible for the actions of their companies.
You are just playing this game of deferring responsibility to some non-existent person. The consumer defers blame onto the company. The worker defers blame onto the management. Management defers blame onto the shareholders. The shareholders can pass the blame onto management. At the end of the game we can all shrug and say "well there was nothing I could have done".
The reality is that all stakeholders are to blame. Everyone has some leverage over the company, and many stakeholders have pivotal positions.
If you can buy individual stocks, then you absolutely do have access to the Dow in the form of a myriad of ETFs [1][2][3]. There are also numerous standard mutual funds which consist of all the companies in the DJIA. This is what I thought you were referring to when you said you'd invest in the Dow, hence my comment.
Things cannot improve unless stakeholders use their levers to change or abandon the company.