We get a lot of people requesting to learn more about our projects, and most of them return with the inevitable question: why place such an emphasis on minority rights? Why the Kurds? The Baha’is? Why invite atheists? Why migrant workers? It goes on.

I can tell you why from my own perspective – and why most of my time is devoted to acknowledging and acting upon the many human rights abuses facing various minorities throughout the region.

Ugly design

The first thing I do when people ask me this question (aside from stating the obvious, which is that these minorities are simply humans and equally deserving of any rights) – is ask them back, if you ran a website, would you be okay if its design was incredibly ugly? If loading it up every morning makes you cringe, why would you keep doing it?

Would you be successful if you had a failing, tasteless, poorly coded website that was only compatible with the world’s most hated browser: Internet Explorer? A website that doesn’t compliment your content, no matter how strongly you felt about it? People weren’t reading it. They weren’t tweeting it. They weren’t talking about it. You didn’t make the news. People think you’re a loser with bad design. You are on no one’s recommended reading list.

This design is what tyranny looks like.

It is empty. Oppressive. Dull. Hopeless. And seemingly without a decent future.

Exceptional design

Now imagine you ran a website with an exceptional design – something that represents you. Something that other people visited and thought, “hm, this is unique, I’d like to visit this page again. It is refreshing. I may learn something here.” You no longer have to worry about traffic. People rave about your site’s functionality and design. They are therefore interested in what you have to offer. You are taken seriously.

This design is what a tolerant society looks like.

It is complete. It is pleasant to look at. It is colorful. It is encouraging you to participate.

Why? Because this design is not oppressively empty. You can tell that it’s a creative collection of many thoughts and elements. It’s exciting.

More importantly, it soon becomes obvious that this design is a result of a million little codes working alongside each other. Dozens of languages. Tons of colors. Lots of experimentations. Some codes may not be compatible at first – like two versions of JavaScripts, but you make it work. It’s a frustrating and painful process, but you commit yourself to these details, because you want to succeed.

Eventually, your site is much faster and user-friendly. You suddenly have 500,000 users signed up overnight. You did it! But not entirely yourself. The platform you relied on was Open Source, for people like you to take advantage of – some of your code was available free online, your design was an effort by CSS experts and world-class illustrators, you implemented dozens of features flawlessly. You relied on a mountain of other people’s efforts to build your own variation of what is now a powerful, useful and unique service. People love it – and they love you.

This is what a tolerant society would be like. It’s exceptional design. It’s colorful, it’s respectful, it’s compatible with all the modern (browsers.) It’s the future. This is where I want to be.

Minorities in my society make my life more colorful, functionable and “user-friendly.” I learn more, I do more and I simply AM more because of it. Great development and design encourages you to innovate. The result is often a fantastic service used and constantly enhanced by millions of relatively comfortable people. You may come across bad codes and dysfunctional plugins, but you correct it and improve it, then re-release it with all the bugs fixed for others to download.

I cannot imagine what the Internet would be like if we had to pay for visiting every website. I cannot imagine what our societies throughout the region would be like if we continued to oppress and belittle the existence of those who merely wish to coexist with the rest.

What we do with websites, it’s what societies should do – focusing on the details (the injustices that are often ignored.) A misplaced pixel in a logo ruins the entire thing. So if we gave rights to everyone and denied them to the Kurds, it’s still ugly. It’s missing a piece.

This doesn’t mean accepting each other’s beliefs and practices as our own, or replacing our traditions. It simply means you lack the insistence to dominate and oppress. Just like those codes that don’t work well together, you tweak it, and suddenly there are no further errors. They learn to coexist.

Of course, there is no perfect site (society), so I do find this argument to be completely realistic. There will always be flaws. Just like websites, which break the moment you upgrade to a different platform or host, our societies will break regardless of any unity. Politics are constantly changing, as is the world and power shifts around us. But you pick the pieces up. You re-code. Once you achieve that, you’re now on a much powerful platform and hosting service, that not even a DDoS attack can bring you down. You survived it and simply grew stronger as a result.

In other words, societies would become stronger if its minorities were embraced and treated like the equal citizens that they are. Diversity is to be celebrated – just like amazing websites are. But they certainly wouldn’t be amazing if every detail wasn’t accounted for.

To put it simply: Abusing minorities, censoring them, disrespecting their rights is exactly like running an ugly design and refusing anyone’s help to improve it. Perhaps you’re too proud – this is something you ALONE built and no one should mess with it, these are your values, your religion, your traditions, your culture and history, and no one can alter that opinion. So you stay on this design. This ugly design that looks like rancid toenails. But it doesn’t mean that your visitors wouldn’t find that site to be filthy, making you ultimately unhappy with everyone around you dissatisfied. Anyone can be proud of a less-than-average achievement, too stubborn to improve it, but who is that person kidding?

The ugly site – No one wants it at the end of the day. If we deny it’s ugly and outdated, someone will prove us wrong. It’ll get hacked. And maybe then you would realize the issue, but it would be too late by then. Your content is all gone. Everything you built has been destroyed. Not improved and built upon. Just gone.

For me, I cannot fight for my rights when there are tons of ethnic, religious, intellectual etc minorities who have many less rights than myself. I don’t consider myself to be free, but at the very least, I do feel my pixel is in place. I’m already in the logo. They aren’t – and this is why it’s ugly. We refuse their help and support and even deny them the very right to exist. But they are equal to us and we cannot innovate and move forward until they are on board.

We aren’t purely doing them a favor. We’re doing ourselves one.

They are ready to get on board with the rest of us and build and advance and move forward.

So let us not push them away – or else we’ll get hacked.

And if we continue moving towards the path we’re still heading for, we WILL get hacked. Because where we live is still incredibly ugly. And I can’t sit back and accept that.

We need to fix that ugly design.