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Comment by BiteCode_dev | Hacker News Reader

That's pretty much how all people working on tracking features at GAFAMS, all people working on algo manipulating people's behavior on social networks and shopping sites, and incidentally how people working on the manhattan project, moved.

They get into the interesting problems and miss the forest for the tree.

Plus it's fun to be among smart peers, and well-paid.

The author woke up from this, but many do it for their whole life and see no problem with it.

That's why I rejected interviews from Google and Facebook. Because I knew I would do the same. It's too tempting.

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Yep, I -- an always very political, lefty, very critical person -- went down this trap. Nerd-sniped myself. Ended up working in ad-tech for some years and making pretty good money at it, and eventually ending (through acquisition) at Google because of exactly this. Because of intellectual interesting things... because of opportunity to do those things...

Copious quantities of impression data? Get to do big-data-ish things? Play with things like Cassandra etc (back then kinda interesting), k-means clustering and fun stats stuff and eventually ML?, high throughput & low latency transaction processing... shaving milliseconds off here and there... and lots of money in the sector... to hire devs, to do these things... which were at least back then somewhat intellectually challenging...

Especially for people not in the Bay Area, opportunities like this were/are hard to come by...

But then once you take a step back and look at how the sausage is really made, you start to feel icky.

Granted, that was ad-tech in 2010ish time-frame. It became much much worse.

Luckily within Google I was able to transfer out of ads, and into things that seemed on the surface much less icky (consumer hardware, etc.) But the thing is... no matter what you're doing at Google, that project is funded by ad-tech... So...

If you're using ad-tech money to do something actually good, does it matter that the money was made from ad tech?

Yes. In a sense, your behavior launders adtech’s poor reputation.

Think of it like this: what if I tried to argue with you “think of all the good we can do with the profits from the baby-pulping machine!” as an executive of the baby pulping company. Maybe I run a dog adoption agency with the profits, or a soup kitchen. I’m using acts of charity as a way to launder the horrific actions of my company.

The question then is not about the CEO but the people working in that dog adoption agency, is their work unethical?

That’s a question indeed! If you know your largest donor is baby pulping inc. is it ethical to take that money?

I mean, you're doing an "appeal to extremes" argument here... And I think it's a bit more subtle.

Almost everything we do as a consumer or worker in a capitalist market is tied somewhere down the line to a generally-agreed undesirable outcome somehow.

So the really tricky part that involves using your brain and heart is figuring out where that line is.

(And it's sad that in large part our voice in the world's operations is reduced to mostly ineffective "buy or not buy" ... )

By doing something good, do you mean buying a pile of synthesizers and vintage computers and gardening tools? Asking for a friend :-)

But seriously, I think there's a big difference between ad-tech in the strict sense of pre-"social media" ad tech and ad-tech now. When I was doing it, behavioural targeting was just getting started. One of the startups I worked at was trying to get knee deep into it (pretty incompetently, IMHO), but overall it was still "here's a stream of mostly undifferentiated impressions/bid-requests/clicks" and that was that...

Overall, it was hard to make a strong moral judgement at that point. Ads paid for the Internet as we knew it and most publishers could not survive without it.

But after about the Facebook IPO, we're talking about a very different thing, one that gets more much more morally grey-area, and sometimes outright just evil.

If the thing you're working on ends up with pushing even just one teenage girl into an eating disorder... How do you feel now about it now, even if you dumped your earnings into charity?

If you're using human trafficking money to do something actually good, does it matter that the money was made from human trafficking?

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