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.
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 think it depends on whether you work on actual defense systems rather than assault systems.
Anti missile systems for example.
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The article reads like the inner monologue of every six figure tech neoliberal.
I’m only the SS’s IT guy, I don’t do that stuff. I’m still a good person. They’re gonna pay for my college.
“I’m just a willing cog in the machine that produces death and destruction, for my own personal benefit.”
“I’m just doing what I have to do to get by.”
I very much hope you are joking / doing this as a bit, because if you are serious, you are a hypocrite and a coward.
The state of discourse is so dire I’m gonna have to workshop a way to make the “Schutzstaffel IT Guy” bit more obvious.
Yeah I mean, at this point, I can very easily see someone saying that either very genuienly, or very sarcastically.
Hence why I asked / phrased it as a two pronged response.
Glad to know you were indeed doing a bit, but uh yeah, I’m autistic enough that I just ask, because I have encountered a large number of people who would just ssy things like that, entirely seriously.
I don’t know of anyone who isn’t in some way contributing some way or form to some rather dystopian practices, intentionally or not. This is not a justification, just an observation. Just by being part of many societies and filing your taxes, people can be “working for evil”.
The real crux of the matter is what you consider acceptable evil. The people who tell themselves they don’t accept any are usually the most intolerant. AI is a buzzword, but engineered intelligent systems are inevitable. We decide whether we want to let it be part of our society or whether we allow it to topple it. Either way, at the end of the day to most of us it won’t really matter if at the top is a silicon mind or a meat one.
Oh look, its literally everyone who works in HR and Marketing, tech industry or not!
HR: You gaslight workers.
Marketing: You gaslight consumers.
“I was just following orders”.
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You are a good person unless it financially benefits you not to be therefore not a good person.
So do we really think that everyone who works at Google or Microsoft is a bad person? Let me remind you that Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has given billions to charity. He’s probably not a saint, but is he a net positive or a net negative to the world?
Net positive and net negative… there are 8 billion people and that in and of itself is a problem. Should we fault every human on the planet for being part of the problem? “I was just following orders,” someone in the comments said. Biological directives to mate and reproduce and raise a family. Two people having more than two children between them are increasing the population. If you have three kids, and you’re the father, if there are two different mothers, it’s the same equation. Three adults replaced by three children (after so many years). But population is increasing, not decreasing. We’re all part of the problem. Are we all evil?
That’s not the way I see it. I don’t think it’s fair to judge the individual by the group. I think a person can still be a good person even if they’re part of something that is not good. If you agree with me on overpopulation but not the company in OP’s post, do you draw the line at being able to help it? Like if you’re one of 12 kids you can’t help that, so maybe you adopt when you’re ready to have kids, instead of actually bringing more into the world? So most people can’t help where they work on account of your hopes and wishes won’t pay their bills. You can will them to do the right thing, but you’re not the one responsible for paying their bills, and if they get their lights shut off, their car taken, or evicted, you can draw the shades and say “that’s not my problem.” So why should you get a say? Are you willing to support their families? No, you are not.
But at the same time, I also recognise that some organisations are evil, some governments are evil, and those who enable them do own some responsibility for that. I just don’t think it’s the final say in who a person is.
Bill Gates is a bad example. That motherfucker was the most evil corporate asshole in the 90’s. He has rehabilitated his image, but net positive is a bridge too far.
As for the rest, I appreciate the nuance. But Bill Gates can go fuck himself. It’s easy to be generous with money stolen from somewhere else.
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Started off fine for roughly a dozen words, then you jump right into Bill Gates.
Bill Gates who was great friends with Jeffrey Epstein, a monopolist, and most recently, worked tirelessly to prevent the sharing of the covid vaccine technology, during the pandemic, because it would harm the profits of his friends in big pharma.
I think your world view needs adjusting.
I think their world view just needs more information. Bill Gates is a horrible person, who has had an excellent PR team whitewashing his name for at least a decade. And unlike Elon Musk, he doesn’t step out from behind the PR team’s cover.
We just need to keep bringing it to people’s attention.
Bill Gates is a horrible person, he is a criminal.
Microsoft’s oligopoly (officially sanctioned and enabled by US society) has cost the world hundreds of billions of dollars if not more.
Not to mention his committed support for the current oligarch regime and global corporate criminality more broadly.
That being said, I don’t think everyone at Microsoft or Google is evil, but a far larger percent of their employees are evil than one would think (i.e. it’s not only the senior executives).
Microsoft’s oligopoly (officially sanctioned and enabled by US society) has cost the world hundreds of billions of dollars if not more.
It has cost everything the tech industry made since then and everything it could have made if MS and its helpers hadn’t killed most of the interesting companies, from DEC to Nokia. I’m not naming Sun, because honestly they are seen through rosy glasses by many today, they were the dotcom bubble locomotive and in general had that weird authoritarian vision of future tech which is similar to what we are getting, but without cool industrial design of Sun. They were not the corporation of good.
Microsoft’s oligopoly is a device of fate for the world similar to what tech monopolies were for Japan, leading it into recession, or to China’s isolation policies that led to its 200 years old catastrophes. It’s not something that will be hidden by bigger events or undone. It has defined our world for many decades.
Perhaps it will be named in the future as one of the main reasons for WWIII.
That being said, I don’t think everyone at Microsoft or Google is evil, but a far larger percent of their employees are evil than one would think (i.e. it’s not only the senior executives).
Not even evil, just spineless apes who shouldn’t have civil rights (it’s not a dog whistle, I mean independently of race, such people actually tend to be racist when they can get away with it).
I literally quit Microsoft in large part because I could not morally myself justify working for such a manipulative, lying, exploitative company.
And that was a decade ago.
Yeah, yeah if you work MSFT, you have less moral character than I do, you are certainly aiding and abetting evil; even if you’re not directly doing the super evil shit, you’re helping the gears keep grinding along.
Most of the big tech companies have enough stuff going on that there are non-evil groups within it doing non-evil and it’s a judgment call for each person. I worked at an Amazon contractor for a little while and it didn’t feel right to me so I moved on pretty quickly.
Places like flock and palantir though? Yes, almost certainly.
The landscapers and cleaning staff are probably fine people.
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…depressed 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]”
The sad reality is, name a company that isn’t evil to someone and a blessing to someone else.
People love shopping at that shithole Walmart, the convenience and costs, the company’s business practices are fucking ruthless.
there are companies that just provide a good service/product/app without much controversy. unless you’re one of those “capitalism is inherently evil” people.
Capitalism is inherently evil… it’s built on exploiting workers through economic coercion by rich capital owners who don’t, the labor is not rewarded as much as the hoarding of capital.
Still, we live in a capitalist society, and businesses can be not objectively evil, and we have to support those business and boycott objectively evil ones.
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There are specialized niche services/domains in B2B professional services and engineering where it’s honestly difficult to be evil due to the nature of the domain and because it’s B2B.
One could argue you are are still enabling evil companies, which is fair, but at least you’re not really harming anyone.
New manga title dropped.
“…in another world” is missing.
Sorry, but if you know your company is evil and you still work there, you’re evil too.
Once worked at a very major German donation-based organization as an it-admin. Wanted to do something valuable with my sparetime. What I learned there made me never donate a single cent again to any organization ever. I left on the spot, knowing they would never dare to sue because they fear the truth could come out. People could literally just not show up for weeks without explanation and wouldn’t even get a slap on the wrist. Before that I donated like 50k a year to many.
Could I work there and still call myself “a good people”? Absolutely not.
There’s exceptions, but almost every company harms at least someone, or some thing through their existence. Maybe not the world as a whole, maybe just a small portion of it, but considering the nature of doing business itself, it’s a difficult problem to get around.
Ok, “evil” surely isn’t black/white. Capitalism in its roots borders around evil, that’s true. But it’s still a difference of selling crap to idiots who won’t question their purchases and ripping e.g. people off of their stuff or just…well, selling arms, munition, addictive drugs (knowing there would be non-addictive versions), making/selling alcohol/nicotine and whatnot…
This.
I worked for one evil company and I left fairly quickly. They added features that were basically designed to funnel money from gambling addicts and people were even joking about it internally. It felt so gross. I just couldn’t in good conscience stay around.
Sounds exactly like the kind of evil to leave. Well done! “Gross” nearly fits. It’s disgusting. Preying on the weakest amongst us is plain disgusting.
Correct.
A person who knows about evil and continues to participate in perpetuating it?
That is the definition of complicit.
You either quit, become a hypocrite and coward, or embrace and justify the evil.
Left, liberal, conservative.
Thats pretty much how USAmerican terminology for politics/society works.
I agree and I know it’s hard to swallow, but that’s enabling.
Yes, life is hard and it’s not easy or possible for everyone to change jobs. Still.
Everyone has a choice. It might be harder for some, but it’s still a choice. Work for the evil company or not. Noone forces me at gunpoint to go to work. I’d argue it’s possible to change. Maybe not easy or fun, but possible. There may be exceptions in uncivilized countries where it’s “work or die” where it’s “me or them”.
I, personally, just couldn’t. Working for someone that’s clearly against my ethics or moral code? I would probably prefer welfare over that. Couldn’t enjoy anything I would buy from that salary. Better be poor but proud than rich and ashamed of myself.
Agreed but at some point I am forced to work “at gunpoint” because I have a wife and kids who need a house and food and cars. I’m jealous of anyone in a position to simply quit.
I work for a company that works for another company in the hospitality industry. The software system is being updated (in part of a much broader system change) to no longer allow non-binary or unspecified gender. We aren’t writing that part, but have to support it. I consider it a shortsighted and cruel change. But I’ve also spent a 7 of the last 30 months looking for work. I’m over fifty and I’m currently trying to build my retirement savings back up from zero after that.
I’m not walking away just because of this change. Instead I’m making sure our software is easy to change back when world is ready for that once again. That’s the best I can do, and I’ve worked for companies engaged in much greater evil.
When I got hired on a contract for Uline I’d never heard of them. Then I found out that are huge contributors to the Republican Party and I was glad when they decided to replace me on that contract, but I couldn’t just walk away. That was the most morally conflicted I’ve ever been at a job. But it gave my family the means to thrive, and that is my first goal.
Yes basically capitalism is rigged and at some point we are forced. Hence wage slaves.
That’s why we need to slow down the bastards and be as incompetent as possible in these positions.
It’s fair to acknowledge the reality that it’s not easy or even instant and the market sucks at the moment. I’d say even looking for work would be better than nothing. You have to do what you have to do.
I don’t think the gender thing is being evil. You’re literally required to support that and you’re doing your best. That’s not really in your or your companies control.
Who’s in this pic and doesn’t like it? Not me, of course, because I don’t work for an evil company directly, I just help their operations through a middle man. So I work for several evil companies, but only a tiny little bit for each, which in the grand scheme of evil is nearly nothing!
Me too!
I don’t think my company is evil, but it’s definitely not my favorite industry.
