Software is not political, it’s just code executing on a machine and doesn’t care what you believe.
There is a lot of politics surrounding software.
Politics is the tool we use, as a society, to decide how we’re going to run said society. There will be areas of politics where different factions will adopt different attitudes about different bits of software. So, some software will be politicized. But, the software itself is only political in so far as we are having political discussions around it, the software itself doesn’t care.
Software inherently establishes an assumed level of control between the user and other entities. That baked in relationship can be influenced by politics.
It feels awfully political when I know my job is supporting a company that donates heavily to causes and people I despise. Fortunately, I’m not in that position currently (but I have been), but I’m looking hard for jobs and one of the companies I applied at asked if I’ve ever previously been employed by Koch or its affiliates and I have to say it’s a hard fucking choice between putting food on my family’s table vs. supporting fucking Koch. Not that most of them don’t donate to bad people but those fucking guys?
Software meant to enrich its creator often isn’t because of the pervasive captialist fear of alienating someone by expressing an opinion on one side of an issue. However, formally verified, thoroughly-vetted, open source software (most of which doesn’t exist because of pushback from corrupt governments and their corporate overlords) tasked with upholding the anonymity and objectivity of democracy would be undeniably political.
For example, they might call it apolitical to say “Israel has a right to defend itself” in the US right now. But that is the SUPER political, absolutely disgusting, reprehensible statement that finally made me lose all respect for Bernie Sanders once and for all. It’s just that this statement lies on the other side of the AIPAC’s widespread propaganda campaign to make their genocide legal.