The Core Mission

Our society is suffering from a strange new virus: a mutation of the XY Problem. Here’s how the symptoms tend to manifest: a "visionary" founder knows that their company is causing a problem for society—or perhaps just for that company's customers—and therefore the company needs to do “Y” in order to address this problem. It would be an inconvenience to do “Y”, but the company would get a bad reputation if it were known that they refused to do “Y”. So the founder decides to do “X”, instead, to distract from the fact that they have refused to do “Y”.

The founder calls their publicist and goes on a press tour talking about how they are proud to be doing “X”, and about how it is their moral duty. And when people criticise the founder for not doing “Y”, the founder screams back at them “You’re evil! You hate [insert group here]! You don’t want them to have X!” And the brainwashed crowd applauds the douchebag founder and boos the concerned critics.

Divide By None does not engage in this garbage tactic. We cannot speak on behalf of any of the companies or organisations that we may choose to partner with. But we hope that they too will share this belief and conviction.

Every place on earth has its own problems, and when people refuse to address the unique problems within their own space, they are potentially throwing massive numbers of people under the bus and offering up some (usually performative) token gesture as a consolation prize.

We will never be a perfect company, but it is our mission to strive to be the best we can, by finding holistic solutions to the problems that are in our lane, in the industries that we have decided to operate within. And not by pretending to be an advocate of whatever the issue-of-the-current-year is according to the mainstream media.

We are guided by the “Categorical Imperative”, as described by the philosopher Immanuel Kant, which I personally paraphrase as: “Only engage in actions that you would be willing to commit to as general rules throughout your life and work.”

Or in other words, if you would be too ashamed to refuse to do “Y” under one set of circumstances, but you arbitrarily decide that its ok to refuse to do “Y” in another circumstance which shares similar intrinsic characteristics as to what made you too ashamed to refuse in a previous situation, then your refusal in this second context, is morally wrong, and you ought to be ashamed of it in both contexts. You can't just switch your moral obligations on and off when it is convenient to you.

What this all boils down to, is that Divide By None has a core mission to help you to create amazing software and/or content. We do not pick and choose when to stand true to our beliefs, as is so common in our society. And we are not particularly interested in being distracted from our mission by having us stray down various side quests. Sure, it would be great to see all sorts of positive outcomes in the world, but we must not attempt to cheat our way to that outcome by becoming false activists. Instead, we will be happy enough to make small improvements to our industries, one small victory at a time: by improving the quality of our products and services, and by acting with the utmost integrity and authenticity in all of our dealings with our clients, customers and the general public. And I hopefully this course of actions will result in making your experience more fair and meritocratic.