Tech Workers Now Want to Know: What Are We Building This For?

If you prescribe to "the end justifies the means", you can stay fully apathetic (blocking out the guilt and shame). Worst case is you find you can't wash your hands of what you've done as you're old and dying (blockage breaks), and one could say it's too late to care then. Best case, you were worrying needlessly and the problem wasn't one (change in perspective). Bitter to me.

Maybe it isn't even a "problem" or "evil" to you, and you're reacting to your perception of "someone else's perspective on evil being forced on you" while you don't consider it as such.

On dichotomies: it's usually a lot more interesting to find a third option or to synthesize the two sides to get to a new position. So perhaps:

* "compensate for your contribution to the evil by reducing it on a larger scale, e.g. company-wide"

* "reduce expansion of evil in the company and support it's reduction"

* "transition to running your own company"

* "pay back society in some form or other once you have sufficient financial security for your family and yourself".

Maybe you have to do this for now, and it's understandable you can't consider the society above your family or yourself, but it can't truly be the final solution?

IMO, there's no cause or outcome where you are justified in working for an "evil" company, especially long-term as you'll inevitably contribute to the company's success (lest you be fired).

Do you think there's a way to consider yourself forced to contribute to evil without running up a debt?

(I mean "evil" from your own personal perspective.)

In his lifetime he was one of the most famous (world-wide) Americans ever to have lived. He traveled around the world more than eighty times. There is a form of carbon named after him: Buckminsterfullerene.

Anyhow, he calculated that we would have the technology to save the world and fix everything by sometime in the 1970's. That happened, so now all our problems are basically psychological or spiritual.

It also so happens that a working psychology was invented/discovered in the mid 1970's and subsequently refined. It's called "Neurolinguistic Programming" (NLP) and it's basically the OS of the mind. Using NLP and off-the-shelf technology we can stop ourselves being foolish jerks and provide a high standard of living for everyone forever.

I suffered from crushing depression until my mid-20's and was totally cured, after considerable self-improvement, by a single intervention with Dr. Bandler (one of the co-founders of NLP) that lasted less than twenty minutes.

Let me repeat that in case I'm not being totally clear: A life-long depression that interfered with my ability to live a normal life (I was homeless for about four years after high school) was cured in a 20 minute session of NLP-informed hypnosis with Dr. Richard Bandler.

So, we have the psychological technology and the physical technology to solve all our problems.

It really is just a matter of getting the word out and putting our backs into it.

My specific recommendations to you are: 1. study NLP and go talk to practitioners, maybe even get some therapy; and 2. Study applied ecology (E.g. Permaculture) and start a small productive system (farm!) to begin to meet your personal needs in a economical and ecological manner.

"The plan was good, it was right, and no one had to get nailed to anything."

BTW, NLP is pretty easy to learn and it's a great career if you're at all good at it. An experienced therapist commands remuneration comparable to that of a computer programmer.

Last but not least, browse Rex Research: http://rexresearch.com/1index.htm There is a lot of weird crap in there but in between the crack-pottery you'll find mind-blowing cool technologies. The idea is to break out of your funk by confronting yourself with existing real-world solutions to all the various BS confronting us today.

My hobby is collecting powerful ideas, I can assure you the best things out there are really amazing and you haven't heard anything yet!

Space is maybe the clearest example of the problem with governments doing anything outside of creating a playground for innovation. 1969 was probably the greatest single government led achievement. We put a man on the moon, having only first put a man into orbit in 1962 and any object into orbit in 1958. That was when space had the government's full attention both as a possible means of weaponization and as a soft power victory of communist powers [ironically] aiming to show the resolve and capability of capitalist nations.

But that same story also shows the downsides of government dependence. Today, nearing the 50th anniversary of putting a man on the moon - we're severely struggling to try to send a man around the moon. And in fact no human would ever leave low Earth orbit after 1972. We not only stopped progressing technologically, we actually and literally technologically regressed. On top of this regression, government never has much of any motivation to cut costs or improve efficiency since they're short term public 'servants' who are just spending other peoples' money. Because of this costs became insane. After all was said and done the Space Shuttle program ended up costing more than half a billion dollars per launch.

At the risk of being tautological, corporations let people pursue what people want to pursue. Governments, by contrast, pursue what governments want to pursue. If you don't like what the government's pursuing you can try to influence votes, lobby, or 'raise social awareness' but in reality it's generally going to be about as effective as pissing into the wind. By contrast, anybody can start a company and start making whatever they want to. And indeed maybe SpaceX would be the proper epilogue here.

Enter corporations. Elon Musk wanted to send a greenhouse to Mars. The costs were unacceptable. It made no sense to him why a rocket that cost on the order of tens of millions of dollars in materials would cost hundreds of millions of dollars to contract. And indeed it didn't make any sense. So he started a company and changed it. Now costs are down by nearly an order of a magnitude, SpaceX is one of the world's largest supplier of launches, and it's looking increasingly likely that the first person to leave our orbit in nearly half a century won't be doing so on a government rocket, but on a privately built, privately funded, and privately launched rocket.

Of course SpaceX would never have been able to get to where they are without governmental contracts and assistance, so I'm not proposing anything like anarcho-capitalism, but rather that government should is the one that provides the sandbox - the people are the ones that build as they choose.

I would also note that a Computer Science degree isn't necessarily the best preparation for a career building commercial software.