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There's an interesting asymmetry between the liberal and conservative sides that isn't captured just by left/right: the liberals generally have some active change they want to make, and the conservatives don't - they just want to "conserve" what's currently being done. That means that if a company just takes the default position on things, it's already siding with the conservatives. So it's unsurprising, in that sense, that the liberals are more vocal: there's no real point in a conservative organizing a protest for "We should not extend our anti-discrimination provisions beyond what is legally required" or "We should be willing to sell to all customers that we can legally sell to" or whatever. One example of that latter bit: Google rank-and-file protested against the executives' plan to run censored search in China, even though if you listen to the media, Google is "left" and it's the "right" who's worried about China and their authoritarianism and censorship and all that. The more elucidating explanation is that the disagreement was between the people who wanted to make money wherever legally permitted vs. the people who felt a sense of broader social responsibility regarding what they worked on, which is why you see the same fault lines (rank-and-file vs. execs) protesting against Google selling cloud services to ICE, even though that's a concern of the "left." More generally, about which side finds itself being vocal, I recently ran across this passage from a Wikipedia article about a video game released in 2013: > Following the announcement of a worldwide release, controversy arose concerning the impossibility of same-sex relationships. Nintendo stated, "The ability for same-sex relationships to occur in the game was not part of the original game that launched in Japan, and that game is made up of the same code that was used to localise it for other regions outside Japan." [...] Despite various campaigns from users, Nintendo stated that it would not be possible to add same-sex relationships to the game, as they "never intended to make any form of social commentary with the launch of the game", and because it would require significant development alterations which would not be able to be released as a post-game patch. This game (Tomodachi Life) is in the same approximate genre as The Sims, i.e., the complaint wasn't about pre-programed characters with stories, it was that user-generated characters couldn't be in same-sex relationships. If a game like that launched today - in Japan or anywhere else - it would certainly not manage to avoid "any form of social commentary" by not having an option for same-sex relationships. It's just that at the time, that genuinely was the default, conservative option. If you were a conservative in Nintendo at the time, you hardly had to argue for this position. It only became controversial because public opinion had just started to shift. (And there are much fewer conservatives / right-leaning folks today who would feel the need to argue the same position against the new status quo.) So I don't think it's true that companies "take the liberal position or no position at all." They start out taking the conservative position, and it's only through specific action - either the desire of management, or pressure from either the product's market or the labor market - that they end up with the liberal one. |