Should software developers be activists?

Our society has many problems. People want change, and protests occur regularly (Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wallstreet), but very little change happens as a result. We've just experienced the worst financial crash since The Great Depression. There are world-wide protests demanding racial equality. In the U.S., we are on the verge of a wave of evictions, and people are disenfranchised with the political system. Whether it fails to create meaningful change or whether it's even intended to is not irrelevant but effectively the same.

What does all this mean for software developers? We program and oil the industrial complex, the system that is jeopardizing our very survival. Software engineers have brought tremendous efficiency gains resulting in profit gains that as we know are not fairly distributed, and we continue to automate and increase unemployment while our society, in the U.S., lacks essentials like food security and good public housing. That being said, we are also in a unique position at this point in history. The world and our economy have become dependent on software. Should software developers use the economy's dependence on software as an opportunity to demand socioeconomic change? Recently I've seen some open source projects using their landing page to bring awareness to the Black Lives Matter movement. I think that's great, but can we do more? Could an association of developers help to create change, and what might that look like?