Thanks to Samantha Cole at 404 Media, we are now aware that Automattic plans to sell user data from Tumblr and WordPress.com (which is the host for my blog) for “AI” products. In respon…
While the tone of the comment is dismissive, they have a point.
It’s not the engineers that are the problem, or even limited to the tech industry. Dark patterns are top-down business decisions, motivated by money.
It’s not that the “tech industry doesn’t understand consent,” but rather that greedy people do evil things. And software is just a low hanging fruit for that kind of business.
Software engineering has no culture - shared or otherwise. It’s just a job, you clock in, you clock out, it’s the same prison as anything else but with the comfort of WFH. The only maybe cultural aspect is that people refuse to unionize, but that’s a different issue and a result of material pressures (far too much demand for jobs gives uneven bargaining power).
Bezos, musk, gates et al were never seen as heroes by those who don’t idolize capitalists and corpos to begin with, and are still seen that way by the rest.
The future is indeed tech solutions and always has been, not an-prim nonsense and tech will indeed save us (and already has from every problem tackled thus far in humanity’s history, every disease etc.), but those tech solutions have to be aligned with humanity’s interests, and to do that you need to remove the exploitation incentive and the way you do that is by changing economic systems to communism or anarchism.
Idk I don’t find it very frustrating, it’s very clean cut in my opinion.
Are you a moron? Because you sound like one. Are you really equating wageslaves working for Google instead of facilitating the sale of gazillions of far more unethical products at their local Walmart by being an associate customer success checkout wagie or smth to soldiers committing attrocities? Do you not even realize the “you hate prison, yet you participate in it - curious” levels of bullshit that view entails?
Because if you did that you’d be a moron. You are a moron.
We have limited options in what we can do to get money. I currently have a job where I’m proud of what I do, but it took decades of working for assholes to get there. Even now I’m not comfortable with everything I’m asked to do. I push back when it’s unethical, and sometimes that changes things. Sometimes it doesn’t and I just have to do as I’m told. What’s your life like?
I directly tell my managers that what they are asking for is illegal, and then I refuse to do it. So far, I’ve yet to be forced to “do as I’m told,” and I doubt that this will ever be a problem for me as I don’t intend to sign up for the military or any other organization that can actually force people to follow orders.
But you do sometimes get asked to do “unethical” things, and you’re “proud of what [you] do” even though “sometimes … [you] just have to do as [you’re] told.” Why? It sounds like you’ve chosen a compromised position “to get money.”
Because we’re all human beings and we all think slightly differently to each other. If I wanted to only work with people who exactly agreed with me about everything, then I would only be able to work alone.
I’m not talking about things that are red lines for me, just preferences. If it were something that caused me dissonance I’d move on again, I promise you.
I’m lucky enough to have the background and the aptitude to get a new job whenever I want. Most people aren’t that lucky.
While the tone of the comment is dismissive, they have a point.
It’s not the engineers that are the problem, or even limited to the tech industry. Dark patterns are top-down business decisions, motivated by money.
It’s not that the “tech industry doesn’t understand consent,” but rather that greedy people do evil things. And software is just a low hanging fruit for that kind of business.
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Software engineering has no culture - shared or otherwise. It’s just a job, you clock in, you clock out, it’s the same prison as anything else but with the comfort of WFH. The only maybe cultural aspect is that people refuse to unionize, but that’s a different issue and a result of material pressures (far too much demand for jobs gives uneven bargaining power).
Bezos, musk, gates et al were never seen as heroes by those who don’t idolize capitalists and corpos to begin with, and are still seen that way by the rest.
The future is indeed tech solutions and always has been, not an-prim nonsense and tech will indeed save us (and already has from every problem tackled thus far in humanity’s history, every disease etc.), but those tech solutions have to be aligned with humanity’s interests, and to do that you need to remove the exploitation incentive and the way you do that is by changing economic systems to communism or anarchism.
Idk I don’t find it very frustrating, it’s very clean cut in my opinion.
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Too much :(
There are absolutely the problem, that’s actually the difference between a programmer and an engineer: the liability.
Just following orders, right?
Come on, that’s not how morality works.
Are you a moron? Because you sound like one. Are you really equating wageslaves working for Google instead of facilitating the sale of gazillions of far more unethical products at their local Walmart by being an associate customer success checkout wagie or smth to soldiers committing attrocities? Do you not even realize the “you hate prison, yet you participate in it - curious” levels of bullshit that view entails?
Because if you did that you’d be a moron. You are a moron.
Are you seriously suggesting knowledge workers have no responsibility for how their work is used?
We have limited options in what we can do to get money. I currently have a job where I’m proud of what I do, but it took decades of working for assholes to get there. Even now I’m not comfortable with everything I’m asked to do. I push back when it’s unethical, and sometimes that changes things. Sometimes it doesn’t and I just have to do as I’m told. What’s your life like?
I directly tell my managers that what they are asking for is illegal, and then I refuse to do it. So far, I’ve yet to be forced to “do as I’m told,” and I doubt that this will ever be a problem for me as I don’t intend to sign up for the military or any other organization that can actually force people to follow orders.
I don’t get asked to do illegal things fortunately.
But you do sometimes get asked to do “unethical” things, and you’re “proud of what [you] do” even though “sometimes … [you] just have to do as [you’re] told.” Why? It sounds like you’ve chosen a compromised position “to get money.”
Because we’re all human beings and we all think slightly differently to each other. If I wanted to only work with people who exactly agreed with me about everything, then I would only be able to work alone.
I’m not talking about things that are red lines for me, just preferences. If it were something that caused me dissonance I’d move on again, I promise you.
I’m lucky enough to have the background and the aptitude to get a new job whenever I want. Most people aren’t that lucky.