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The function of a system is its output.
If you have dog grooming machine that sometimes smashes puppies and you keep running it, you're in the dog smashing business.
If you work for a mass surveillance company that keeps enabling genocide and undermining democracy...
If you have dog grooming machine that sometimes smashes puppies and you keep running it, you're in the dog smashing business.
If you work for a mass surveillance company that keeps enabling genocide and undermining democracy...
But my job isn't in the puppy smashing team!-The complexity of your puppy-smashing system isn't absolution. Your employer is creating artificial distance to shelter you from the outcome of what you're doing.
I don't want to think/talk about puppy smashing, I come to work to focus on my work.-You work at a puppy smashing factory, being asked to examine what you build isn't an attack, it's the lowest bar of ethical engagement with your own actions.
PuppySmashCo treats me really well.-I mean, ok? Outside all the puppy smashing they're nice to a small subset of people who help them smash puppies. That's...not great.
But PuppySmashCo pays me to work on open source!-What the fuck is wrong with you?
I'm going to change the company from the inside.-Firstly, no you're not. You know you're not. You're not a child.
-And while you're writing memos or emails or forming internal pressure groups, you're still doing FT dogsmashing work.
There's no purely ethical work in tech, so many tools and systems feed into dogsmashing I might as well work here.-Yes we live in a complex world. But that's not an excuse to throw up your hands and head to work doing the most damage you can.
I just need to do get some dogsmashing on my CV so I can go do other things.-Ok, we can spread the blame around on this one. Employers should be viewing work at dogsmashing orgs positively.
I genuinely need this dogsmashing job because of my personal circumstances.-There are absolutely edge cases where someone could need a job, or even this job right now. But the fancier and better established you are, the less viable this excuse gets.
You can't judge me!-I'm a tired lady online nudging you into spending the smallest fraction of time and energy to consider the ethics of your work and who you want to be.
-But also, ofc people are going to judge you for your actions.
If I don't take the job, someone else will. I might as well get paid!-This isn't even a real rationalization. Other people who are willing to do bad things doesn't magically absolve you when you pick up a pugmallet.
You can't fault me for working here, puppysmashing is legal.-But it obviously shouldn't be. If your ethical bar is *really* at the level of: if cops won't stop me it's ok, I don't know what to say here.
I've had people from three different companies message to ask if I'm attacking them personally and this feels like Schrodinger's take on self knowledge.
It's offensive that you would compare my work to smashing puppies, this not how you should engage in ethics discourse.-Puppysmashing is a fictional proxy for nonfictional tech work output destroying democracies and facilitating genocides, you get that these are worse? Right?
You're also bad in ways and don't have the ideological purity needed to ask me to reflect on my choices.-I suck in lots of ways and I can't make you do anything. But part of being an adult is responsibility for our choices. You should be doing this on your own already.
Out of fear of regulation, PuppySmashCo has made small, non-structural changes that they promise will fix everything!-You're a rational, intelligent adult and you've heard this before. There's no exculpatory value in pretending you believe it.
