When Fear Becomes Ordinary

When companies change their flags for Pride, I usually have mixed feelings. Do they really mean it, or is it just performative?

That question matters because intolerance often does not arrive looking dramatic. It does not always come with uniforms, banners, or a clear villain. Sometimes it appears as a few signs in a small town. Sometimes as a rumour repeated by concerned neighbours. Sometimes as ordinary people convincing themselves that cruelty is responsibility.

A while ago, there was talk of a refugee shelter in a village nearby. Some villagers protested. That is allowed. They hung signs everywhere. Ugly little things full of fear. I thought they should come down, so I went there and started removing them. The original account of this incident is here: https://mas.to/@iwein/116431673959279406

At first people only argued. Then they started surrounding me.

Angry men walked toward me with the special kind of courage groups sometimes produce. I stayed calm and explained that I was not there to fight anybody. Some calmed down. Others became louder. One woman predicted I would be lynched. A young girl told me she was afraid refugees would rape her if the shelter came. She seemed genuinely scared. I told her that if she ever felt unsafe she could call me and I would come help her. Suddenly everybody wanted my phone number.

That was the strange part. The crowd moved constantly between fear and aggression. Between “protecting women” and threatening people. One man warned me there would be trouble if he saw my face there again. Another told me I was welcome to help in the local food forest, but not welcome to remove signs. People spoke about safety while creating danger. They spoke about order while trying to intimidate someone in the street.

What struck me afterwards was not the extremity of it. History is full of extremity. What struck me was how ordinary it all felt. Small town streets. Concerned parents. Casual threats. Rumours. Men becoming brave together. Fear turning into hatred and threats of violence almost mechanically.

And all of it over desperate human beings needing shelter.

This is why public signals matter. Not because a flag fixes anything by itself. It does not. But because silence also sends a signal. When fear becomes normal, when cruelty is described as common sense, when vulnerable people are turned into a threat, somebody has to make the opposite position visible.

What Turing Still Teaches Us

Alan Turing is often remembered in technology for the Turing test: a thought experiment about whether a machine can convincingly imitate human intelligence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test

But the more urgent lesson in Turing’s life is not about machines. It is about society’s failure to recognize the humanity of a person whose work helped change history.

Turing did several mind-bogglingly innovative things, including helping defeat the Enigma code used by the Nazis. Books were written about his work. A movie was made about him. He was, in many ways, a real-life superhero. He also happened to be gay, which should not have mattered. But it did, because the society around him made it matter.

During Turing’s life, homosexuality was a criminal offence in the UK. In 1952, he was convicted of “Gross Indecency” and was forced to choose between imprisonment and probation on the condition that he underwent chemical castration. He died two years later. The UK government later apologized for this treatment and described the cruelty plainly: https://educationhub.blog.gov.uk/2021/02/lgbt-history-month-alan-turing-and-his-enduring-legacy/

This is not ancient history. The formal pardon came only decades later. The wider lesson is still current: societies can celebrate someone’s genius while destroying the person. They can benefit from someone’s work while denying their dignity. Technology does not protect us from that contradiction. Sometimes it helps hide it behind progress stories.

Why Pride Is Still Necessary

I want to live in a world where all living beings are safe, healthy, happy, and loved; a world where people can be themselves just as they are. Because in that world, the friends we make, the strangers we meet, the people we love, and we ourselves do not have to carry unnecessary fear.

Great innovation happens when people are safe, healthy, happy, and educated. It happens in the space created by tolerance and wisdom. Every so often, a creative scientific mind changes history so profoundly that a whole branch of science has to expand around their genius. But those minds do not exist outside society. They live in families, offices, classrooms, streets, and teams. They are shaped by whether the people around them make life safer or more dangerous.

That is why Pride is still necessary. Not as decoration. Not as marketing. Not as a temporary logo change. Pride is necessary because the social conditions that harmed people like Turing did not disappear. They changed shape.

As recently as this decade, it was still necessary for European countries to ban conversion therapy. That should be shocking. We do not need modern laws banning witch burning or quartering because those practices are already outside the boundary of acceptable public life. Conversion therapy needs to be banned because some people still think it is acceptable to subject others to it.

So yes, Pride still matters. Especially for people who are not directly affected by those forms of exclusion. Allyship is not only about agreeing privately. It is about making safety visible publicly.

Responsibility In Everyday Work

The danger is not only hatred. Hatred is easy to spot. The greater danger is ordinary conversation shaped by fear, ignorance, and the desire to force human beings into neat little categories so reality feels easier to control.

These ideas do not live only in parliaments or online mobs. They sit casually at dinner tables. They walk into meetings. They write software. They train language models. They shape policy. They become “common sense” unless somebody pushes back.

A conversation about trans people and toilets can sound casual to the person speaking, like discussing weather. But for people who hear those opinions every day, the message is not casual. It is another reminder that the world may consider them unwanted. Some people break under that pressure.

This is where technology companies have a responsibility. We build tools, teams, products, and systems that affect how people work and live. Our culture is not separate from our output. If our workplaces tolerate casual bigotry, that will show up in our decisions. If our teams are afraid to challenge ignorance, that will show up in our products. If our public values are only decorative, people will notice.

We do not need to perform purity. We do not need to put ourselves at the centre of someone else’s struggle. But we do need enough courage to say, clearly and consistently: this person exists. Leave them alone. Let them be.

The Buck Stops Here

We are the wall of human decency that must hold the line. All of us, including white, cisgender, heterosexual men with social privilege. Our opinions matter less than where we choose to put our bodies, but opinions still matter, and we must pick a side publicly for the safety of others and, indirectly, the safety of ourselves.

If this is our call to action, we are already late. The walls have been breached in many places, and resistance is often on the back foot. But the next action does not have to be big. Put up a flag. Add a sticker. Offer someone support at Pride. Look around and see whether someone needs to hear that they are loved and welcome. Say it.

In our business, we must call out transphobic, homophobic, racist, and other bigoted bullshit. Maybe there are too many things we can do. But let us do at least one, right now. We are all shaped by the systems around us, but we can make the buck stop here.

Sources:

• https://mas.to/@iwein/116431673959279406 

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test 

• https://educationhub.blog.gov.uk/2021/02/lgbt-history-month-alan-turing-and-his-enduring-legacy/ 

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yann_LeCun