Snowden: Tech Workers Are Complicit in How Their Companies Hurt Society | Hacker News Reader

Snowden: Tech Workers Are Complicit in How Their Companies Hurt Society

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91 pointselsewhen55 comments

It is intentionally naiive to dismiss the concept that your actions, however small, have societal impacts.

Whether you intend them to, or are aware of the extent that they do, is a function of your personal curiosity and ability/data to analyze the causal impacts of your actions on broader outcomes.

I always see a lot of "I'm just a cog trying to make ends meet" responses, to these kinds of challenges. This is a willfully ignorant cop-out. Which is different from embracing some form of existential nihilism.

It might sound trivial but the quote from Socrates applies:

"The unexamined life is not worth living"

My strategy is to mentally amplify my decisions to the space of all the other people who might be in my same situation, facing the same decision. I ask myself if it would make the world better for all of those people make a given choice, and if so, I do it on the faith that they will.

It's not about whether or not they actually will; obviously my individual decision will rarely have any kind of causal impact on others' decisions. It's about having a mental tool for weighing collective action; circumventing the psychological effect of the knowledge that, yes, your individual drop in the bucket probably won't make a meaningful difference on its own. At an individual level that logic is sound, but at a collective level it makes it impossible to create change.

This strategy also works for voting, making donations, etc.

What about if I just don't care?

I totally understand if you think less of me for this perspective but at least I am honest.

I legitimately do not care.

That's sad friend. Your community failed you when growing up. This makes me want to weep.

Outside of people with severe psychotic disorders, I have yet to meet anyone who had no consistent desires.

So I'd say you likely just don't know what you actually care about. Much like the vast majority of humanity since forever. So, you're in good company!

Honestly, the majority of people feel the same as you, they just won't admit it.

Most do care but about other things. For example they might care a lot that their company has a diversity policy and blacks out their Twitter avatar but not that their company helps overseas regimes kill journalists and opposition politicians.

Or they might care about their family, parents in care homes and their neighbours and church but not where their wage comes from a company that doesn't hire equally.

I would say its practical. That's basically people with nuclear families without support structures. Single people most likely will quit unless they are planning to get married. People would also most likely quit in functional countries as opposed to dysfunctional countries.

He talks about tech workers but he leaves out users. We users decide what companies survive. Tech workers work because they need to eat. Users use the tech because it's cool or convenient. We can make plus arguments or minus arguments for both sides but only users decide what companies succeed. If we don't use the tech there is no way for it to succeed. At some point we need to decide if using a service is really worth the overall impact it has in society and decide whether it's worth using.

It's time that we as users take more responsibility on what tech is deployed. Is the convenience of tech worth the impact it's having in our society? By most measurements, we are saying yes, emphatically. It's important that we stop saying that the power lies with someone else. We have the power to change the situation too.

Its a bit of both users and employees. Users are often not informed. If I describe many of the bad behaviors of tech companies it is often disregarded as crazy conspiracy theory. People will not believe what power some companies have until its completely proven to them. Some users also are willing to ignore bad behavior if it aligns with their belief systems.

But it is most definitely not the shareholders. Definitely just the users and employees. Yup. ;)

And Raytheon, Palantir, Lockheed-Martin, et. all? They make most of their money with direct government contracts.

There's no grey area when directly working on missiles

If you vote for politicians that invest in missiles, it's rather hypocritical to criticize people who develop the same missiles. If you happen to be a pacifist it's reasonable to be against all such technology, but the fact that clearly most people aren't makes it odd to single it out as non-grey area. (Unless it's about how it's clearly white-area as it's in service of democratically decided policy.)

Absolutely, it's a problem that can be attacked on multiple fronts

Well, this is where things get very gray. We are the users of that tech too. The government is us too. "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union...", as the Constitution says, decide what our government does. It's time we tell our representatives what we want. No more military contracts? Then make sure that no representative that's for those contracts gets elected. It's a matter of getting involved. Like I said, we have the power. It's time we use it.

Electoral politics has failed the people time and time again. The only way to prevent these technologies is to organize and strike.

This deserves a.. LOL..

I think someone forgot to tell you.

We don’t live in a democracy. That’s just what they want you to believe, so that you can tell your children fairy tale stories at night.

Missiles (and most other weapons technologies) are definitely a gray area. Yes, producing them means they can be used for bad ends. But not producing them doesn't mean they'll cease to exist. It means you can't challenge anyone else who has them, including bad actors.

You seem to assume that working on weapons programs for the military is wrong, and I'm not sure why. Defense (and war) are one of the core reasons for the existence of the US government, and are clearly enumerated in the constitution.

Do you think the armed forces should be disbanded? If not, should the armed forces achieve their objectives through the use of obsolete equipment, or would you prefer they simply import it?

Wanting to abolish the military isn’t the only reason someone would claim it’s unethical to work for defense contractors. Two other reasons come to mind. Firstly, few if any of the conflicts the US is currently engaged in could be described as “just wars”. Secondly, the US is the largest arms exporter in the world, by a large margin. And many of those arms go to dictatorships, such as Saudi Arabia or Egypt.

I don't think this is a valid argument, because it ignores the power imbalance between users and tech companies. A user is on their own, while a tech company has vast resources to nudge or force a user to behave a certain way. There has been conducted vast psychological research how to manipulate users psychologically - e.g. keeping them glued to the screen. Many more detailed choices are taken out of a users hand via forced updates or conscious functionality limititions. often, the only choice a user is left with is to behave exactly in the way the tech company intended - or stop using their product altogether. However, the latter choice might not be possible at all (e.g. if the service is essential or required as part of work or education) - or will incur significant costs, e.g. loss of your extended social network.

Unless, of course, the product is a tool for surveillance and the users are therefore the ones doing the surveillance and not the ones being surveilled.

The victim can only do so much to stop this maluse of technology when they aren't the ones making it, aren't the ones using it, and aren't the ones funding it.

I disagree with Snowden's notion that "all work is political work". That requires a stretch of semantics that most people simply would not agree with. The word 'political' has a definition. It doesn't just mean "everything".

If we're saying everything affects everything else, then that's not really interesting or useful to note. Meaningful decision making and meaningful discussion requires compartmentalization. Words like 'political' do have boundaries.

I remain in favor of workplaces that stay out of politics and the culture wars, and instead adopt as close to ideologically neutral stances as they can. This is very possible and is where businesses largely were just a few years ago. If people have an issue with where they work, they should quit. But leave political warfare to the sphere of actual public-facing politics. Increasingly, overt ideological warfare is taking over every space - work, media, leisure activities, etc. It's unnecessary.

How can we separate politics from work when making products for people?

Being ideological neutral is still a political stance, because it's an implicit backing of the status quo.

That "with us or against us" status quo stance is sophistry not logic. At very best it may be strategy.

One example that is should be especially obvious in the era of a pandemic that some tasks are effectively neutral because everybody needs it to not die. Food production, limiting the spread of disease and treating it, etc. Even those "against the status quo" don't usually support everyone dying of starvation. Putting aside that said binary is useless as a descriptor. Where Q = the status quo !Q includes all of "pay workers more","steal the businesses and give a share of the profits to the workers instead of a paycheck" ,"enslave the workers" , and "kill literally everyone" as against the status quo. I guarantee that those related !Q are not one big happy family.

Nowhere did I mention "with us or against us". The status quo is a multi-dimensional set of normative values.

Being "apolitical" is still a political stance, you're signaling that the current set of norms is acceptable.

What am I signaling if I say I don't believe in Santa Claus?

But food production during the pandemic was and is a matter of political discussion. Canada and Mexico recently came to an agreement to accept Mexican labourers due to the shortage. This means migrants and this scares some people.

The demand for meat (though nutritionally unnecessary) and the potential anger from citizens denied the option to buy meat rendered meat plant workers essential workers and thus put at risk for covid.

Food production and delivery is a matter of political deliberation also because we have to ask, "Who works?" It would've been neutral if everyone got time off work, got stimulus checks, and a rotation of ALL people of working age worked at the grocery store to shelve and man the cashiers. But that's not what happened.

The political nature of work isn't only on the material nature of the task but on the people involved.

Totally agree. This is just peeling the skin of an onion.

Who are the people in Russia that help Snoden live his day to day life anyway? Of course you can make the argument that of anyone in the world, Snoden has no choice...however then it just becomes an argument as to what constitutes not having a choice.

Actually, he did have a choice. He decided to sacrifice an objectively better living to alert the public of what was happening in their names without their consent. He also decided not to go home because he believes it is best for his country. If he goes home, he won't be allowed a fair trial under the Espionage Act, which would set a terrible precedent. He has repeatedly voiced his intent to face trial at home if he's allowed a public interest defense in front of a jury.

Taking an "I was just following orders" sort of stance doesn't really mean you're apolitical, and this is the point. It doesn't really matter that you have a "neutral" stance against, say, producing spyware, the fact that you actually do tells the whole story.

The bar for the tech work activists to not consider a company "evil" is impossible high. It seems like any attempt to actually operate like a business (and actually.. you know.. make money?) is met with open hostility. I really don't condone furthering the insistence that these mega-corps pretend to be something that they're not.

That being said, the people with the megaphones that constantly send emails about politics that somehow jump through five hoops to ensure every issue is directly tied to race should put their actions where their mouth is. If 1000 people give an ultimatum that they'll quit if something isn't done, maybe something will actually be done. If not, then the biggest propagators of political distractions are gone. And then those of us that are confused how politics (of a certain slant) became actively encouraged in the workplace can stop aggressively adding email filters for the latest cause of the week.

Each of us has to decide individually where to draw the line. The important thing is to keep your actions aligned with those words, and to not warp your moral system to accommodate a cushy job.

Personally I would never work for Facebook, but I might work for Microsoft (at least, on ethical grounds). That's based in my belief that Facebook causes more harm to the world than good, and that Microsoft (probably) doesn't. At least not to an egregious level.

If someone presented me a genuine moral argument for why they still believe Facebook isn't a net negative for the world, as their reason for continuing to work there, I could respect that. If someone said they're continuing to work there just because they don't care or don't like to think about it, I cannot respect that.

I am ever surprised how much self loathing the tech workers can take on themselves.

If you fix 1 bug related to privacy are you complicit? What about a bug not related to privacy but in a company that is later found out to be a bad actor (Wirecard).

How about we make the managers accountable? I worked for many large organisations and in each of them when work is presented to the developer, all decisions have been made.

There is at least as many decision makers as devs: managers, functional analysts, POs, feature engineers, chapter leads, enterprise architects, customer journey experts etc. They spend countless hours explicitly conspiring to develop these features. They get internal agreements something will be built. It is impossible to unknowingly push an evil feature through all the approvals a bigco requires.

Sure, If you find yourself directly developing immoral code you probably should leave the company but please, there are 10 decision makers who should be held accountable. But don't blame the developers. The management is already doing the blaming [1].

[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/volkswagen-pulls...

"I've been just following orders" didn't work out in Nürnberg last time someone tried it.

Also: nobody says that ONLY the devs are responsible. It's a straw man.

I like the last quote: "It’s not enough to read, it’s not enough to believe in something, it’s not enough to write something, you have to eventually stand for something if you want things to change"

I think for engineers and scientists, it's an ego thing. We tend to believe that intelligence is super important, but standing for something is about courage. It can even be irrational (or dangerous) from a selfish perspective.

And I am guilty as charged. Having courage is difficult. And it cuts across all disciplines and levels of intelligence (if there is such a thing).

I haven't watched the video yet, but the article itself doesn't tell me much about how the companies that employ tech workers are hurting society.

"Everyone above me is looking the other way, why arent they held responsible? I'm not responsible, they are."

Can't you see how this attitude results in EVERYONE looking the other way unless we have 100% virtuous exec boards? So many people in this thread mad that Snowden is putting this at their feet. How much are your morals worth?

Is quitting such companies out of good faith really a good idea? I am not sure. They will find someone else to do the job you had with "lower" morality standards and the wheel goes on.

Is it better to stay, unionize and make a difference from within by standing up against the morally corrupt policies? Maybe.

There’s a finite number of tech workers in the known universe, so that isn’t necessarily true.

Thats the Nuremberg defence “we were just following orders” and “we didn’t make the decisions”.

Hannah Arendt nailed it when she saw Eichmann “evil is when good men do nothing”.

As Chomsky always says "Unionize!". You can't unionize and rebel against the companies' policies when you quit. Quitting is the easier choice. Staying in the company AND refusing to do what's against your moral code of conduct. That might end up having you fired eventually but might shake things up.

What does HN think of police unions now?

I think that tech/dock/office/factory workers unionizing won't result in an increase of civilian deaths.

Public sector unions and private sector unions are apples and oranges.

Even if everyone with ethics refuses to work on something, you can still hire the people who lack ethics. There seems to be quite a lot of them.

A broad refusal to work on something that requires local labor might work, but you can hire software people anywhere.

"Well they'll just hire someone else to do it if I quit. Might as well keep doing it myself."

Fortunately, not what I said at all.

Spot on. To quote Marshall Rosenberg quoting Hannah Arendt:

In her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, which documents the war crimes trial of Nazi officer Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt quotes Eichmann saying that he and his fellow officers had their own name for the responsibility-denying language they used. They called it Amtssprache, loosely translated into English as “office talk” or “bureaucratese.” For example, if asked why they took a certain action, the response would be, “I had to.” If asked why they “had to,” the answer would be, “Superiors’ orders.” “Company policy.” “It was the law.”

From Nonviolent Communication, page 19 on “Denial of Responsibility”.

Sad to see there's a lot of office talk being used in this thread.

Coal power. Fracking. Big agriculture. Logging--you name it. Compartmentalized work. Compartmentalized minds. People are unmoved. I don't see Snowden has added anything to the conversation.

But hey, at least there IS a conversation.

Ok. Conversation is good, when people are not talking. But we need progress on hard topics. Compromise.

How long do you need to talk before you get to: I don’t care. I’m taking care of my family. End of discussion. Or, our firm needs to grow in order to be competitive (and other economic ideologies of continual growth)? Or, government regulations are too burdensome. Let this be decided by the people who live (upstream) here.

I’m not inclined to be generous for half a discussion. If Snowden wants to lead, then lead.

Leans back in rocking chair, tamps pipe.

When I was younger I used to code in C and C++. Borland compiler and IDE tools were my favourite. From what I recall Microsoft stomped all over them. It was my first introduction Big Tech. I loved DOS (yes DOS!) and I was getting to learn Windows but I felt that Microsoft was stifling its competition by abusing its dominance of the PC OS market. I was young and naive and had never heard of Free (as in freedom) Software and Open Source was a term that was yet to be coined.

(I'm going somewhere relevant with this.)

When Linux came along it made a few small ripples, I jumped on board when it was maybe six or seven years old – a beat up PC running Slackware was being used as a router connected to an ISDN line in a business park I interned at. Some dude explained roughly how it worked and gave me a burnt CD. I had to figure out how to load CD drivers manually, compile the kernel manually, I learned so much. And in time I learned about FOSS and GNU and Stallman and the GPL. I thought, wow – that's a neat hack – using the legal system to guarantee freedoms. Giving people control over their devices, and way less of an opportunity for a big company to stifle it. I was a convert.

We're been at the Ad/Data Lock-in/Surveillance Tech equivalent of Stallman and the mythical printer for over a decade now. I personally think our modern Borland moment was when Facebook was allowed to buy Instagram (2012). That should never have been allowed by regulators. Not to mention WhatsApp (2014). Same for Google buying Android (2005), DoubleClick (2007), or Nest (2014). Not to mention Amazon aquistions. Nor Apple. I'm sure there are many more such examples. Someone mentioned this article (https://promarket.org/2019/12/09/the-lack-of-competition-has...) recently about the concentration of corporations in the US, I made a point of bookmarking the link. And that's before we even get on to the topics that Snowden brought to light.

It's hard not to become totally cynical. We need the contemporary equivalent of Stallman and Torvalds to do to Big Tech what GNU/Linux has done to Microsoft – and it was for Microsoft's own good, they're a much better company now! Linux could not have succeeded without the GPL. Do we need another legal hack to spread from the USA to the rest of the world? I'd say probably. Back in the day there were calls to break Microsoft up into a PC OS and Office tools divisions. There appears to be a complete unwillingness in the US to break up or prevent the formation of abusive monopolies in tech. Until antitrust regulators get their you know what together I think we need to legally mandate that key tech standards are federated. I cannot think of any other solution. We need to force Facebook and Twitter to plug into an ITU (https://www.itu.int/en/Pages/default.aspx) like standard for a start. (I think we can fix Amazon (and a whole lot more) by forcing them to pay their lowest paid workers and sub-contractors a whole lot more – but that's a whole other topic.) Google I don't know what to do about – possibly get them to divest Android? Force Android to be more open? It's already quite open though. And so is Chrome. They do have a complete monopoly on video streaming and censor and demonetise content in unpredictable, illiberal, anti-democratic and un-free ways – Facebook and Twitter are both unacceptable in this regard also in my eyes.

And it'll only get worse. Microsoft didn't change until they were forced to change. The lack of uptake of Mastadon and Diaspora prove that the FOSS model is not enough. We need FOSS++.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:List_of_mergers_and_a...

Wow what a revelation.

People who build guns are complicit in how their companies hurt society.

People who sell tobacco are complicit in how their companies hurt society.

People who make plastic bag are complicit in how their companies hurt society.

People who work in fast food are complicit in how their companies hurt society.

And on and on ....

Hell he is no saint.

No. The only thing needing regulation for these companies is their marketing messaging, and packaging messaging.

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