It's up to us, as tech workers to push back against this. I quit my job at Microsoft due to their complicity with Israeli war crimes and oppression (and certainly the US government was involved too). It's tough to leave a high paying job, but I feel good about it every single day. We don't have to be cogs in the MIC machine and we don't have to build systems that terrorize people.
There are allegation that Microsoft changed Skype architecture (after buying Skype for $8.5 billion) to make wiretapping easier.
"
In July last year, nine months after Microsoft bought Skype, the NSA boasted that a new capability had tripled the amount of Skype video calls being collected through Prism;
"
It’s genuinely amusing to see how and why people posture, as though working for MS prior to 2023 was somehow ethical. Your post arguably only scratches the surface too.
I’ve concluded that most people care far more about appealing to the crowd than actually thinking by anything through.
If you shame people for acting now rather than earlier, you discourage them from acting at all.
Sometimes people aren't in a position to be secure enough to act. Sometimes different issues are more effective at resonating enough to break through previously cached unconsidered patterns of thought. Sometimes people don't know all the things that are going on, and act once they've learned about them. Whatever the reason, if your reaction is "took you long enough" rather than "welcome", you discourage people from acting.
Don't punish the behavior you want to see more of.
I’m not interested in shaming people or crediting them for superficial performances. The entire premise is ridiculous, as if the companies people are working for are somehow ethical.
You’re making money from venture capitalists and tech firms, MS, Meta, X, Google, etc… which of them is any better than MS? They’re all awful in different ways.
You are dismissing people as superficial or performative when they are taking action according to their ethics. Have you considered the possibility that people are not, in fact, performing, and are just trying to be ethical?
I can't tell if your actual goal here is to be dismissive of the entire concept of people caring about ethics, or if you don't think that quitting is an effective means of acting in concert with those ethics. If it's the latter, then I'd suggest that it's a start, not everyone is in the position to do even that much, and some people who do so will be able to go further. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good, particularly if someone is taking a step in the right direction.
A lesson I've had to learn is that, for some people, ethics is a paycheck. It can be incomprehensible to imagine someone acting against their own paycheck as a result.
You don’t have to repeat yourself, I understood your point originally, I simply disagree with both your premise and conclusions. I don’t have the same respect for people who preach “anti-Zionism” at every turn online, I’m not that gullible.
Oh God I realized the issue here, I didn't make myself clear:
Talking about doing something on a 4 month old account is not the same as doing it. I give credit to people for doing things, not claiming to do them in an anonymous forum they just joined. Cynical? Perhaps, but maybe if people were just a bit more cynical about believing any text on the internet just because it feels better to believe it, we'd be better off.
You don't have to believe me, but I made my account after I quit. I wanted to be able to talk about what happened without doxxing myself and my old account was tied to my actual work.
That's fair; when all is said and done, more is said than done. That is much, much better than the more common thing that leads to comments like yours; I think some comments and downvotes come from the assumption that your comments come from a place of "I don't like it when people make decisions based on their ethics, because I don't like their ethics". That is, unfortunately, very common.
Well it's good you just left on your own accord, basically you fired yourself rather than wasting their time having to do it. There's an interesting dynamic with this in that the Chinese and Indian (and other foreign born/first gen immigrant) workers at big tech companies don't care about these things at all. There are some very intense ideological dynamics within big tech companies among the employee base but I always found it interesting that the foreign born employees did not care at all, they were just there to work.
whatever the motherland's ideology/propaganda had been telling, the first gen gets to firsthand witness/experience that it were lies. After that you become were critical/unbelieving to whatever propaganda and ideology, even if it is the right ideology and propaganda this time, is being fed to you.
> even if it is the right ideology and propaganda this time,
this is legit hilarious.
As a first-gen immigrant I can say that what I witness is that yes, a lot of what I've been told about America were lies. But a quite few things actually weren't. I made a choice where to live so I accept the whole package, and on the balance it's a much better deal than pretty much anywhere else.
> the foreign born employees did not care at all, they were just there to work.
There's survivor bias in that observation. There are plenty of "foreign born employees" who choose not to work for companies that explicitly violate their values by choice. (I phrase it that way because of the whole "no ethical consumption under capitalism" issue.) I know because I'm one, and I have friends with the same mindset.
Europeans have a pretty different culture than East and Southeast Asians. Generally in my experience Russians and Eastern Europeans are very apolitical, focused just on work and similar to East/Southeast Asians in that regard in terms of professional conduct.
If you want to get into parsing out who is “white” or not you can do that but it’s really something better done on 4chan and also not even sensible as a concept or relevant to this discussion.
>There's an interesting dynamic with this in that the Chinese and Indian (and other foreign born/first gen immigrant) workers at big tech companies don't care about these things at all.
Why do you think the elite business owning class wants to replace you with desperate and malleable foreign workers from countries where morals and human rights are suggestions at best?
The other thing is, you built your nest egg taking Microsoft's "blood money" for a few years giving you the luxury to quit on a dime, but there's a lot of people on the planet or even in your country, wishing to do as you did.
You can't just pull the ladder after you and expect everyone make the same sacrifice as you except without their own nest egg. If you want to start a moral and egalitarian society then what about a higher tax on the wealth of tech bros, to finance the lives of the non-tech bros to accept humane jobs?
Putting energy into your family is generally the opposite of psychopathy, it's actually a good thing to do. On the other hand you can actually find a lot of psychopaths who find their outlet in political activism
"The Dark Triad traits predict authoritarian political correctness and alt-right attitudes"
The psychopathic tell is dismissing political activism as "trying to derive meaning." It's right up there with the idea that moral or ethical claims are "performative".
These kinds of claims generally come from people who don't feel any moral or ethical impulses. These people are most commonly malignant narcissists and psychopaths. A great example is Elon Musk who described empathy as a "bug".
Morality is a fundamental feature for most humans. The people who make the kinds of claims above constitute a small, single digit percentage of the population. They tend to have an outsize influence though, because they exploit the trust of others to rise to positions of power, where their lack of compunction can be an advantage.
People like Trump, Musk, and Thiel are canonical examples of this. Eventually, when their actions make things bad enough for everyone else, people tend to take action. We may be approaching a time like that. You acknowledged this yourself in earlier comments.
There are many things I consider to be deeply immoral that I nevertheless cannot change. My political activism is merely performative.
Power and wealth are already so entrenched I think we have little chance of effecting any lasting change without violence. So either I become a literal terrorist, or I enable Daniel Plainview mode. It seems to me like the rational move is to try to get rich by any means necessary so I can fuck off to somewhere isolated and never have to deal with the rotten society I hate ever again.
Most of what people call morality is just their own feelings or interest or some attempt to protect their ego, it's basically just an expression of narcissism.
The cultivation of a sense of actual morality requires a lot of study and humility and quieting your own feelings and ego. This is very difficult and most people can't do it, ideally in a healthy society the elites you have are people who can and do do this.
Ironically Thiel in particular is precisely one of these people. He's very thoughtful and well read and displays a lot of humility in his speech and conduct.
People with morals are moral. People often confuse morality with just their own feelings, interests, ego. If you don't understand this then likely you are not actually moral.
This is a very childlike understanding of how people engage with politics across the US. Fitting that immigrant tech workers wouldn't understand the culture then cry foul when rightfully called out on it.
This is exactly how most people engage with politics across the US (and all over the world) and I am not an immigrant tech worker. Both of my grandfathers served in WW2 in the US military.
Don't really believe you, looking at past comments you don't really come across as someone raised in America while also being completely unaware of what local politics looks like or how US citizens engage with politics.
Not too mention the completely sociopathic comments made above.
I was born and raised and lived in America up until my mid 30s. I am just very clearpilled or perhaps blackpilled on the nature of things in the US. I am completely aware of how people engage in politics and I’ve lived all around the US, things just get worse and worse. Fortunately I am no longer subject to the insanity and I don’t really care anymore.
> Most of what people call morality is just their own feelings or interest or some attempt to protect their ego, it's basically just an expression of narcissism.
Oh good grief. Hot take of the month right there. All you're doing is demonstrating how uninformed you are on the subject. Can you name anything you've ever read about this?
> [Thiel] displays a lot of humility in his speech and conduct.
You can't be serious. Where in this does the talk of the "Antichrist" fit?
What kind of humility are you talking about? Because if it means intellectual modesty, willingness to acknowledge one's own fallibility, or reluctance to cast one's own political/intellectual beliefs as uniquely farsighted, Thiel's public record is not consist with "displaying a lot of humility."
The reason you call Thiel immoral or psychopathic is because he's wealthy and this evokes jealousy in you, it's a threat to your ego and your own sense of self worth.
It's really that simple and this is a good illustration of what I'm talking about.
No, Thiel is immoral because he is funding a panopticon and wants to get rid of democracy in favor of authoritarianism. It's really that simple, and your blindness to his cartoonish level of villainy is a good illustration of what everyone who is pushing back against you is talking about.
People who say they are against panopticons and for democracy are universally fine with subjecting their political enemies to panopticons and only for democracy when their side wins.
On Democracy and Freedom: "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible"
On Competition: "Competition is for losers"
On Technology and Control: "One of the things I like about technology is that when technology is unregulated, you can change the world without getting approval from other people. At its best, it's not subject to democratic control and not subject to the majority, which I think is often hostile to change"
On Reputation: "I'd rather be seen as evil than incompetent"
Just because these ideas are heterodox relative to prevailing norms which makes you uncomfortable, it doesn’t make them immoral ideas.
I wouldn’t say these statements even have moral judgments in them either way. For example, this doesn’t even ascribe moral weight to “freedom” or “democracy” just that they are at odds.
This is why these types of things are better left to elite minded people who are capable of these types of discussions. You’re just responding essentially to the valence of these terms.
“Democracy = good feeling, freedom = good feeling, how can good feeling != good feeling?” This is the level at which you’re engaging.
> these types of things are better left to elite minded people who are capable of these types of discussions
In a world of eye-poppingly hot takes, I commend your ability to somehow raise the bar
Bonus points for dismissing things like "you can change the world without getting approval from other people" (you could hardly ask for a more substantive topic to debate in moral philosophy than one's freedom to affect other people) as mere valence-level "how can good feeling != good feeling" sophistry
>Because they're intelligent, work hard and have strong family ties.
So when imported workers are having strong conservative values prioritizing their family over progressive values = good, but when western locals are having strong conservative values prioritizing their family over progressive values = bad?
>But these things dissipate within a few generations of living in the US
Have you heard of the amish? Or the ultra orthodox jews? Or other such groups with strong conservative values. You underestimate the stubbornness of certain cultures to adopt american/western progressive liberal values. They can stay conservative longer than you can stay alive.
And also, given their significantly higher birth rates of their culture and religion, they'll also be able to outvote liberals who have catastrophically low birth rates, within a few generations. What do you think happens then with liberals and their values in a democracy?
>hence the need for more and more foreign workers.
The elites in the West don't actually have an understanding of what they're doing. If your point is that it would be better if they promoted traditional values and invested in the native population, yes it would be, but that requires a whole metaphysical framework which elites in the West don't have.
> Have you heard of the amish? Or the ultra orthodox jews?
Yes and Western elites do not think like the Amish or like Orthodox Jews, they do not spend their time studying the Bible or care about that at all (they don't even study the Western classics).
> Even when the locals are struggling to find jobs?
They don't care about this, again this requires a whole metaphysical framework, at most they care about their own families and you'd probably be surprised at how dysfunctional these people are in their own private lives
Good on you. I left my post-university defense job after a year and a half. Of all career decisions, that's one I don't regret, and rather the regret I harbor was for joining in the first place (albeit did so under a combination of limited information & naivete).
I just want to say that I don't think I was brave at all. I actually feel a lot of shame because I knew that Microsoft wasn't compatible with my values when I joined. I didn't know the exact details that came out later, but I took a very high paying job for a company that I thought at best didn't align with my values. I had to live with a growing cognitive dissonance about the choices I made. I also didn't exit tech fully, I still work for a company that seems ethical and nice, but has VCs that are probably involved in the MIC post we're discussing.
I've debated exiting tech fully but I do have people to support. I think that's kind of an excuse though. I also tell myself that anywhere I go, if you follow the money far enough up the chain, it will be unethical. That's also kind of an excuse.
I'm not brave, but I do feel trapped. I think we need some sort of reckoning as an industry, a country and possibly a planet. I don't know what will happen but I'm trying to balance living in 2026 with making choices that I can live with in the future.
So, did you stay long enough to accumulate FU money and then quit?
Because that's a bit easier than quitting or turning down a job when you need the income.
Since you say you're still working and have people to support I am guessing it was more the latter, but maybe the "very high paying job" gave you the runway needed to make that choice? I quit a high paying software job under different circumstances. The company wasn't doing anything unethical (that I know of) but I was just sick of how they managed people and projects. It had reached the point where I sat in my car for 15 minutes (or longer) every morning just trying to summon the willpower to get out and walk into the office. So I finally just quit. But it was easier as I had stashed away enough money to give me time to find a new job without having to jump on the first offer. I ended up freelancing a bit to extend the runway even longer.
I don't have FU money but I'm financially in a good spot, so definitely privileged compared to someone who would be out on the street with a few missed paychecks.
Congrats on getting out of a toxic situation btw, that's hard to do too if you're getting paid well. In a way I was similar, every morning started to be a real struggle for me.
Well there's definitely a global reckoning happening, people are not having children in developed countries due to very serious social ills (every developed country except for Israel of course).
Diminishing birth rates doesn’t actually correlate with what you call socials ills. The strongest correlation I’m aware of is with the education level. It’s a worldwide phenomenon, not something that only impacts developed countries
If people are not having children then the society is dying. That indicates there are social ills, by definition.
“Education level” is probably also an indication of social ills and a social ill itself given that most people are not suited for higher education. Most “higher education” in the US is abject slop and partying for 4 years. College used to be restricted to the aristocracy and particularly promising students.
If you take a young person who is already not of an elite quality and subject them to slop and partying, campus meal plans, basically unproductive day care for 4 years that also fills their heads with nonsense that is obviously going to do a lot of damage to them, especially young women who are especially impressionable.
It’s also worth noting that while Israel does have universities, as a societal intuition they function very differently. Young people serve in the army first for 2-3 years or they do university with a deferral and then serve in specialized roles in the army based on their degree. It’s not slop and partying for 4 years starting at 18. And it’s normal to not go to university at all.
Do you support the status quo of millions of H1Bs? Those people I doubt can or will take such a principled stance, making collective action by tech workers impossible.
Why do people always assume that people on H1Bs _want_ a citizenship?
There's tons of things you can do to make people on visas more empowered to push back at work without them become citizens; and in many cases cutting ties to their original countries.
When you're drafting policy, you get to be choosy about who you want in your country. I think that's more or less standard practice.
We should want people who want to stay here long term, because then they have a stake, an incentive to stand up to bosses that want to wreck the place.
As sympathetic as I am to the desires of somebody who wants to come for a while and then leave, I think a better policy would deprioritize such candidates.
Absolutely, there’s a reason as well why the VC’s funding these defense tech startups are so pro H1B. It guarantees them a compliant workforce who can’t easily quit, ask for higher wages, or complain about things like genocide.
You can comfortably go back to your home country. It might feel that you wasted your time in the US, but it was hard to foresee Trump ruining the US so fast and there's little to do about it as an immigrant.
> It's up to us, as tech workers to push back against this.
Sadly in my experience a lot of tech workers just don't even care about the issue, let alone have the courage to push back against it.
I certainly care about it and I have immense respect for your decision, but I've worked with numerous "typical tech/dev" types in the past who later went on to work at places like Shield AI and Anduril with seemingly no compunction about the imperialistic baby-killing aspects of working directly within the military-industrial complex as long as the pay is good.
Yeah, relying on someone’s conscious won’t really cut it, greed and current economy will always win. The best solution imo is crowdsourcing, there should be a site or platform that aggregates all the people who works in these companies, categorize the company as grey or black list based on how they are engaged in shady practices. If someone chose to do something morally questionable, it’s up to them, but it’s also transparent that other people get to know that, could be colleagues, employers, or investors. I think it’s fair that whoever is building surveillance systems and tracking to be surveilled, whoever is making weapons to be known, they can be a public danger given that they sell their morals to highest bidder.
You know, if enough tech workers at Microsoft felt strongly about these ethical issues, they could influence Microsoft's decisions internally which is probably the most effective position to be in to do so.
But all well, glad you can feel good about yourself by leaving so that someone with less concern about these ethical issues can fill the void and assert their own influence on the company instead.
Have you ever worked at a large company? This is simply not how things are done. Speaking up about something like this is almost a guaranteed fast track to getting laid off in the next round of reduction in force, and if you do somehow have the pull individually or collectively to make a meaningful difference here, coordinating all those levers in a way that satisfies the board/shareholders and effects meaningful change is pretty much an impossibility. And we're dealing with nation states who are going to have their own levers to push (and internally too). For an individual contributor or hell, someone who's not on the board/C suite, quitting and letting management know they're losing talent because of their stance on certain issues is probably the most effective thing someone can do in that spot.
Following your line of thinking, why don't you join microsoft and effect such change? I guess it's easier to leave a moralizing snarky comment and feel good about yourself.
> if enough tech workers at Microsoft felt strongly about these ethical issues, they could influence Microsoft's decisions internally
This isn't how companies work or are structured. If you have the CEO's ear, potentially. If you don't, the only ethical thing to do is to quit. (I don't personally have an issue with the military per se. I have other issues with several tech companies which would make taking a job there something I couldn't do.)
If something bad is going on and you don't agree and you quit, that is just absolving you of your guilt. I mean think two steps ahead. Is M$ going to go "gee, Jimbo quit, maybe the project is just no good and we ought to stop." Hell no. They will fill your position with someone who will be thankful for the opportunity. And I think ultimately you know it, but a bit of cognitive dissonance makes you think you did something.
Why are so many people supposedly principled but not militant about it? A principled militant would use their role in m$ as an opportunity to be an anchor to the efficiency of the operation that they do not agree with. They will fight to keep their position such that a more effective less moral person might not take it over and get the project moving.
One has to wonder how many projects in the world are in such a holding pattern, protected by people who had the foresight to think two steps ahead, attempting to keep their body holding that door shut as they possibly can.
> They will fill your position with someone who will be thankful for the opportunity
But you won't be doing it. Companies are run top-down. If you're within the organisation you're advancing the goals of those at the top. You aren't going to change that by complaining internally (unless you have a direct line to the CEO).
It's fine to disagree with something and just not contribute to it. If you want to be principled and militant, staying is hypocritical. In that case, you should whistleblow.
> attempting to keep their body holding that door shut as they possibly can
Unless you're conducting sabotage, which within this context seems like a gross overreaction, you aren't holding any door shut. (Again, assuming you don't have a line to the CEO.)
I am saying you should conduct sabotage if you feel the work is immoral and against your principles to such an extent. It would be immoral not to in a lot of ways, saying you'd rather wash your hands of it and pretend it weren't happening than to try and think of what you might do about it.
I think you do have a point but, at least for me, I found it wasn't so cut and dry. Nothing I was working on related to the ethical issues I had. I did find other like-minded people in Microsoft and that felt like we were at least creating a pocket of people who cared, yet none of us had direct power to change anything. There were people who protested directly and got fired for it. I had to balance my IRL responsibilities outside of work with my ability to change things and my need for employment in the future. I made compromises across the board and like I mention up thread, I don't think I was brave at all. In fact I think I did the bare minimum I could, but at least I'm no longer complicit.
There are people far braver than me, but they were indeed fired. There are probably people covertly fighting the system from within but I didn't work close enough to any of these projects to know them.
So ideally people would do what you say and/or just be very open about their objections, but it's also worth recognizing the risk of industry blacklisting and how things like employer provided health insurance raise the stakes.
"You know, if enough tech workers at Microsoft felt strongly about these ethical issues, they could influence Microsoft's decisions internally which is probably the most effective position to be in to do so."
The workers can't even influence things like office setup and floor plans. They certainly can't influence business decision to any meaningful degree.
I feel like tech has lost its way recently. It's a huge, huge field, so there have always been people working on 'bad' things, but IDK, I just don't have the same feeling of optimism about things that I used to and I wish there was some kind of movement bringing that back.
Yeah, people trying to get rich quick are maybe not great, but that's a side of humanity that has always been with us and always will be and you can kind of discount it. I'm talking about the people who run things lurching towards some pretty ugly stuff.
I think many people share this feeling. I sure do.
I don't see how it could have gone any other way. The internet became too pervasive, too embedded into too many people's lives, for it to not be weaponized by governments and large companies.
I don’t know I think it’s really rich to see people who’ve spent a generation hooking the world on dopamine machines and making society full of hate suddenly act like those who work in the MIC are “going to far.”
People working at big tech are complicit in the destruction of communities and the mass depression and suicide of our youth, compared to that wanting your country to have the best military tech is altruistic. Military tech isn’t the problem foreign policy is, you can’t say the same about slop factory builders.
A few days ago I recall you taking the position that Israel should not exist and that anyone who disagree is a Zionist (correct definition) that you would not associate with.
The implication of your idea is what? The desire for a destruction of a state of 10 million people and another exhile of the Jews? That's the stance you deem moral - or am inferring unfairly (I hope I am actually)
If I am following correctly - you left Microsoft because it doesn't share this genocidal desire? I guess that's consistent and I admire that part, but the underlying perspective is horrifying when you just casually drop it in like that
Israel should not exist because it's a state built by ethnic cleansing the Palestinians. I believe in the right of return and sovereignty for Palestine. I also don't think Nazi Germany or apartheid South Africa should exist, and they no longer do. I think it's up to the Zionists on what this inevitable dissolution looks like. They should work toward peaceful reparations and land return for the Palestinians.
At the risk of being downvoted to oblivion. Threads like this always have lots of people agreeing to people quitting the jobs, not even ones that are directly working on that but even ones just associated with the company at hand.
This is an honest question, how do you decide what is Ok? A job with a company that was involved in this is not Ok, fair enough. What about working with a company that does business with Microsoft or uses Microsoft products? What about owning Microsoft stock and benefiting off it? what about owning Microsoft stock via index funds? Don't mean to be pedantic, but can I use Microsoft products, can I use outlook? can I use an xbox? What are my other realistic options, considering it feels like every industry (not just tech) has big 2-3 realistic options and they all likely have something bad headlines, even if I don't know about it. How much time can I realistically invest digging and fact checking this? I want to be good, but these threads generally leave me feeling judged.
I understand everyone has their moral compass, and they act accordingly. But, I find it hard to not ask myself, if this is not OK, why is this other related thing Ok? how do I decide what's Ok and seems when you ask the question you get downvotes and lots of judgement instead of answers.
I think you answered it. Everyone has their own moral compass and act accordingly.
The concept of “No Ethical Consumption Under Capitalism” and the moral framing of later seasons of The Good Place give good representations of how.
Ultimately each person makes a mark of what they can and cannot care about, and caring about literally everything is a fast-track to total impotence.
Some situations are (relatively) easy:
* Harry Potter is a relatively isolated (though formative for many)
franchise.
Some situations are way harder.
* Nestle creates a HUGE amount of the food we eat.
* Amazon powers half the internet
* Microsoft is the backbone of a huge number of corporate sites.
Excel makes the world go round.
Unfortunately, this is all up to you, and there are individual scales of “harm to the world by participating” vs “harm to you by abstaining” you have to personally weigh. There is no global answer.
I think a way-out exists if we accept that "shopping isn't politics" [0]. In a nutshell:
* Bad news: "Voting with your wallet" is actually pretty ineffective. Big companies know it, diversify around it, and they're happy when consumers are neutralized and busy infighting with one-another over consumptive purity, instead of...
* Good news: Organizing politically does work, and is so much more-effective that you can arguably redeem any evil taint on your shopping list by engaging in it.
I agree that these are good questions to be asking and I asked myself many of them. It's a slippery slope imho, and it's easy to convince yourself that what you're doing is ok. At the end of the day, I was getting physically sick and I felt terrible about myself. I mentioned it up thread, I don't think I was brave, I was just forced to confront reality through increasingly difficult to dismiss cognitive dissonance.
Also thank you for your bravery, it is not easy leaving well paid jobs. If you haven't already, I'd start donating some time with your local mutual aid groups. It's very therapeutic to spend time with people that believe similar things while helping others.
I was a 68 working on consumer products, but it was still too much for me. Especially the revelation that Satya worked with the IDF to capture all Palestinian phone conversations and host them on Azure. Every day I woke up to go to work after I found that out, I was sick to my stomach. I eventually couldn't take it any more. I took a pay cut and I'm still in the tech industry working for a startup, and still facing ethical dilemmas (with our investors) but at least I'm not on the front-lines of human rights abuse.
> Especially the revelation that Satya worked with the IDF to capture all Palestinian phone conversations and host them on Azure.
man imagine when you learn about what MS did to all Americans phone conversations, emails, meta data, and basically all digital communications flowing in and out of the US for the NSA.
TIL an intelligence agency spying on a foreign adversary is human rights abuse. I would be super upset if my country of residence did the same to a neighbor sending rockets my way, would make me sick to my stomach
Little slip of the mask here where we seamlessly transition from the perspective of an American working for an American tech company to someone living in a country neighbouring Palestine.
I don't think the tens of thousands of innocent people, including a huge number of children, were "privileged". Same with the hundreds of thousands removed from their home during the Nakba ethnic cleansing.
Israel is not the US and Palestinian civilians are not a "foreign adversary".
> a neighbor sending rockets my way, would make me sick to my stomach
Israel has been murdering Palestinians since Nakba. They literally eliminated whole cities in Gaza. I think that makes most people in the world sick to their stomach.
> TIL an intelligence agency spying on a foreign adversary is human rights abuse.
It is when it's an intelligence agency for a country that's actively committing genocide.
Answer a question for me: is the lesson you took from the Holocaust something like "if there are going to be holocausts anyway, I want to be the one committing them"?
What is the obsession with equating the Holocaust with a war whose death toll is roughly 1/100th of the Holocaust (and that only if you include combatant deaths, which the Holocaust numbers do not?)
The point is not the body count. The point is the attempted perpetration of genocide, by people who have been the target of genocide in recent history.
As I said, it's mystifying that the conclusion from being targeted for genocide is "...therefore we must commit genocide against others." I suppose it is consistent with biblical commandments, though.
Citation needed that people are thinking "therefore we must commit genocide against others"
Attempted genocide better describes Hamas, who slaughtered a 1/4 of the civilians in the first villages they got their hands on, before being pushed back.
I don't see them conflating Zionism and Judaism. 100% of Zionists will reference the Holocaust as one of the justifications for committing genocide against the Palestinians. I think the parent is pointing that out.
I disagree, but you could be right. however, if so, then they should have pointed out this distinction themselves.
also, there was conflict between Jewish Palestinians and Muslim Palestinians long before the Holocaust. Zionists were trying to take over in the late days of the Ottoman Empire.
I've always figured big tech workers were so compartmentalized that they wouldn't know their new analytic feature was also going to the defense skunks initiative, but that could be conspiratorial thinking.
Guess it doesn't matter now when they have full on defense orgs.
You spoke to my heart, comrade! Already sending Microsoft my resignation letter so I can join you on skid row fighting against the evil capitalist empire!
On the contrary, you will do exactly as you're told if you expect to cash those sweet MSFT paychecks, which I assume you did prior to this epiphany, otherwise you would have returned all the money.
Has this level of obtuseness infected the software industry because this is not the first time I've heard this; usually someone will take a job at a missile factory then later realize "Wait, we build war machines AND sell them to countries I don't like? I had no idea!"
This isn't an employee-owned grocery store where your opinions matter.
You're at the point in Goodfellas where he tells the babysitter "do you understand what we're involved in here?"
I bet your opinion of effective altruism is essentially the same as mine: the idea that you can do the worst things in the world to make enough money to solve all the worlds problems is a delusions on par with "prosperity gospel". Humans are just excellent as crafting a philosophy that suits what they've already chosen to do.
Nothing is ever enough, all the top tech companies, it's not enough that the conquered the global market, not enough that they dominated commerce, media, automotive, cloud, space ...
it's not enough that they have the largest headcounts on the planet (outside India / China).
they always need to do more and bigger the next quarter.
no morals, no core market, no other guideline, simply more, and I have to do it because else someone else will.
I really hope the Chinese keep killing everything that gets too big to fail.
endless growth is the same as cancer. unnatural destructive.
Perhaps the world gets a new hegemon that isn't going to spend the next century bombing other countries, installing dictatorships and destroying democracies? Doesn't sound too bad!
I'm not saying China is perfect, but its not unreasonable to entertain the possibility that it might be better than what we've suffered for the last century.
Okay, Taiwan. They are the losing side from the Chinese civil war from over half a century ago and proclaim themselves as the true Chinese government. I'm not saying China has the right to crush them, but the tension is at least understandable.
A comparison with the democracies and lives destroyed by US FP is ridiculous. If Taiwan would like a word with China, well, half the world would like a word with the US.
Presently Xi is focused on growing China and doing a great job of it. But what happens when Xi is gone? Once China reaches its goal and is the worlds manufacturing source, how will it use its influence to obtain resources?
We already see China deploying debt traps and surveillance technology to developing nations. They are building surveillance states which feed back into China. With that, I feel that we have yet to see how China is going to exert its power.
We don't know. Only years in the future, with the benefit of hindsight, will we be able to conclude something.
What we do know right now is that the US has been a poor hegemony, inflicting a century of suffering around the world, and China has not. They might end up being worse, but given the last hundred years of history, I find that unlikely.
I'll take the risk of surveillance and debt traps a thousand times over something like Operação Condor.
> It's up to us, as tech workers to push back against this.
This appears to me to be unrealistic or performative, except if you mean pushing back in the sense that anyone could, as a voter for example. Boycott of defense work won't work; attempting to claim some special authority in debate won't work either.
The opposite of performative action is even worse: nihilism or even active support of atrocities.
Too many nihilists in the tech industry with the attitude “if I don’t do it someone else will”, and here we are as a professional class actively making the world an objectively shittier place. The VCs can’t do it without us.
This is exactly the problem: Software developers are not a professional class, we are hired goons with no professional organization nor a code of professional ethics.
This is one of my personal bugbears. I keep making this point on HN but devs want to LARP as professionals so they usually don't want to hear that they have more in common with retail workers than they do with carpenters, engineers, or accountants.
Yeah, and read the responses to your comments: "but, but, 'professional' is a state of mind, not just a piece of paper" and some crap, completely missing the point. Professionals push back with "I'll lose my license/certification/disbarred". Software developers push back with "yes, sir, how high, sir?" or "I quit".
Nothing that you say is responsive to my point. None of your so-called engineers at Tesla has ever said, "I'm sorry Mr. Musk, we won't deploy those features because it's against the Software Engineering Code to do beta-testing on live vehicles where it harms users and endangers members of the public. You can fire us, but you'll get the same answer from the next engineer you call into this office."
Absolutely, and real professions with real professional ethical standards have considered such questions[0] and taken informed positions on them. Nothing of the kind exists for programmers.
I didn't say voting would work, only not ruling that out; I said those other approaches would not work. It's possible nothing works.
Voting does work if enough voters feel strongly about something. Look at the policians scurrying about now that they're seeing the deeply negative polling on data centers.
