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For example I know people in mining who 1. Work on safety for people in mines. 2. Work on reducing environmental impact. But many of their friends say “I could never work for mining”. And what I hear is “I don’t want that brand”.
nla ------------
You’re eliding two very different things: personal conscience and actual consequence.
The author is obviously free to resign for any reason. But once he publishes a moral indictment of Google and, implicitly, of people who remain there, it is fair to ask what concrete harm his resignation reduces.
The post does not really answer that. In fact, it makes the opposite case. He lists a long set of valuable security and privacy improvements that happened precisely because he was inside Google. Then he concludes that the ethical move is to remove people like himself from the institution.
That may satisfy a personal purity boundary, but it is not obviously harm reduction. It is closer to moral hygiene: “I do not want to be associated, even transitively, with something I dislike.” Fine as a private decision, but not the same thing as improving the world.
That is what I meant by identity politics: career choices framed less around practical impact and more around preserving a morally coherent self-image.
my response ---------------
Practical impact is a useful way to explore ethics, but it's not the only way. I think it's reasonable to refuse to profit from an institution that does harm, even though removing yourself won't change anything. And I think a lot of people would agree if the choice was made stark. For example, suppose someone offered me £1k to go and keep them company while they tortured an innocent person. It's all somehow legal, and if I don't do it they'll just offer the money to someone else who will. Do I take the money? It won't make any difference if it's me or someone else. But I believe most people wouldn't. Or at least they'd duck out as soon as it got real.
It's just regular politics, no identity involved. Everything is political - including our careers.
What in this post is possibly identity politics? It sounds like personal ethics to me. I don't appreciate identity politics, and when you muddy the term with having a spine and anything you don't like you make it harder to debate the actual problems the term is normally associated with.
Muddying waters and making debate impossible are his goals. He hoped to antagonize everyone with his trigger word.
When you view someone's choices for purpose & ethical boundaries through a lens that presents as identity politics, you are revealing your alienation from civilization. Talent with basic freedoms can be selective about their pursuits. If you hold a idea that you are a mercenary or machinery, consider how useful that is to ambitious sociopaths that have abandoned civilization.