This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
That was me. Had a nice career, benefits, 401k etc. I quit in part because the company is eviI. Now I'm in debt, my body aches from my new low-paying physically demanding job. But I don't have the bIood of chiIdren on my hands so I'll manage.
I think a good step would be if people could admit the companies they work for are making the world worse. I've met some people who work for Google who do some backflips about how no the company is good and definitely they're good people and it's not the $300k salary talking.
Seriously for all the protests and walkouts over Gaza last year, my main thought was "didn't you know MSFT/Google/Meta is literally evil?"
I can't blame anyone for wanting a stable income, but you might as well be working for Lockheed Martin. There's a reason why these megacorps stay in an oligopoly at the top, and it has nothing to do with talent or quality solutions.
15 years ago Google was a cool tech company that open sourced a lot of their projects.
That was no longer the case long before Gaza though
I don’t work for Google, and you’re not wrong, but I am not sure they’re totally wrong either. I honestly believe that a majority of companies around today are making the world worse, at least, for most companies there’s an argument that can be made. I’m having some difficulty thinking of an exception right now.
I'm sure there are companies that are at least more good than bad. Teachers pay teachers. Meetup. Bandcamp before they sold. That's all I have off the top of my head. But even so capitalism invites cruelty, and the best intentions can easily wither under the pressure to make more money.
I work for a very large company involved in medicine. They make machines to do like blood work. That's fine. People need that. But they treat many of their workers like trash. I don't get paid for holidays and get the legal minimum sick leave per year. Their mission isn't especially evil , but their behavior sucks.
I’m really only familiar with Meetup from that list, and yea, I agree. I think they inherently aren’t intending to do harm as a company, but what if domestic terrorists / cultists were to use meetup to find other likeminded individuals? Meetup may be in part responsible for getting harmful people together and they may never be aware of it. Sure, it’s a hypothetical, but not entirely outside the realm of possibility.
IMO, mistreating and underpaying people does make the world worse. It’s not the company mission, but yea… the whole capitalist machine thing. It’s hard to escape the output, which tends to harm at least someone.
Everything is relative to your prospective.
I worked 10 years for a major EU defense contractor. Mostly on civilian projects, but not exclusively. For many years, I hid my employer from acquaintances & friends - when asked, I would just say "I work in software". After I left that company, one of the anti-tank missile systems I had a very (very) small part developing started to tear the fuck up Russian tanks across Ukrainian farm lands.
I don't hide that history today.
This is just moral luck. My opinion is that your work was very unethical from the get-go and you just happened to be happy with the outcome. It's like saying you are ashamed of speeding in your car, until some day, when you crashed into Elon Musk.
You rather made my point - everything about morality is relative. There are no moral absolutes - it is up to your (and my) prospective. For the record, I do wrestle with my employment there . . . yes, we did stop many, many Russian tanks. But I also suspect other systems have been used in Gaza by the IDF.
As for speeding and taking out Musk - 100%, sign me up for that moral tradeoff right now!!!
I do not adhere to moral relativity at all. It is, I think, an untenable position that makes pedophiles and genocides as valid as charity work and kids' hospitals.
Also, how can you believe absolutely that there are no moral absolutes? It was pointed as illogical more than a couple millennia ago.
It appears you are confusing moral absolutism with moral universalism. I stand by what I wrote.
Ok sure, then what is the source of this moral authority which defines all morality?
Morality is a social construct, not an immutable part of the universe, and there are many societies on Earth so what is 'moral' completely depends on where you are.
I'm talking about normative ethics, not descriptive.
My opinion is that your work was very unethical from the get-go
Calling any form of military "unethical" is the absolute peak level of clueless wishful thinking.
I didn't say that, and yeah, almost all forms of military is just a waste, sorry.
I agree in principle. But in reality, as long as someone has military, everybody has to have it too.
I think it depends on whether you work on actual defense systems rather than assault systems.
Anti missile systems for example.
The article reads like the inner monologue of every six figure tech neoliberal.
Oh look, its literally everyone who works in HR and Marketing, tech industry or not!
HR: You gaslight workers.
Marketing: You gaslight consumers.
I used to work in long-tailed litigated liability insurance claims. Think asbestos, lead paint, toxic exposures, etc. Insurance comes into play for defending companies against lawsuits made by people suffering from those exposures. I rationalized it to myself for a year and a half (if we don’t pay for the company’s defense attorneys, we couldn’t pay the claimants their settlements; we’re just following the contract; at this point, the big players are bankrupt, so the claimants are just going after easy targets; etc.), but it makes the world worse and I eventually quit.
I looked at other aspects of the industry, but there really wasn’t a role that I could feel totally comfortable with. At best, I felt like I I worked for the organization which gave earth “adequate notice” for the hyperspace bypass in hitchhikers guide.
I went back to school and now I teach new immigrants the local language. It took a lot of work and I make less money, but holy shit was it worth it.
we are gonna get so many more of these types of movies when this everything bubble pops...depressing, yeah
No.
We won't.
We will get movies designed as either patriotic/honorable, wildly unrealistic, aspirational lifestyle glamorization ... pure cope/hopium, saccharine, hero/success fantasies for adult children to live vicariously through... and warrior hero stories where the plot is incited by external or seditious threats.
That's very roughly what happened to German cinema when the Nazis took over.
We will just have machines making the slop, instead of demented sycophants.
... there won't be any money for things that cause people to maybe actually think!
You want to program compliance and shame into people, not curiosity, not disobedience.
Fight Club was not an initial success, and it largely tricked people via its marketing, into making people think it was going to be something closer to Rocky, but edgier... than a psycho-social critique of basically all of society.
Fight Club is an anomaly.
Fight Club was Chuck saying fuck you to publishers for rejecting his work was too edgy etc. So he went all out, and not only becomes a published book, but a movie.
"Under Spanbauer's influence, Palahniuk produced an early draft of what would later become his novel Invisible Monsters (1999), but it was rejected by all publishers he submitted it to. Palahniuk then wrote a second novel, expanding on his short story, "Fight Club".[9] Initially, Fight Club was published as a seven-page short story in the compilation Pursuit of Happiness (1995),[10] but Palahniuk expanded it to novel length (in which the original short story became chapter six); Fight Club: A Novel was published in 1996.[11]"
