Your point? Should we stop working in IT and go back to the fields?
Also, I fear that HN somewhat forgets the world is not SF, in Europe going to work for Facebook/Google/Amazon is a enormous bump (we're speaking 2-4x) of salary for many people, which in some cases means you can buy an house after 3-4 years even with the crazy rents back in your home country - and that's HUGE. Why should those people spend their time slaving as a subcontractor for yet another TLC/bank trying to squeeze their customers dry at the first occasion while getting 25% the salary and zero benefits? Are those less evil?
What needs to happen is that people keep applying pressure so facebook is forced to adapt its business model even if it hits their bottom line - which is already happening apparently.
So this is how we justify it now? “But it will allow me to buy a house in 3-4 years”?
I enjoy destroying the environment for future generations so they don't have it too easy?
The "justification" (if you want to call it that way) you are looking for is in the part you forgot to quote and respond to ;)
Doesn't improve the validity of the position though.
Yes. Most of the large and powerful organizations have severe moral problems, almost all of them due to violations of a simple rule: $ < Values
"Love of money is the root of all evil."
We all have choices. We all make decisions.
I would go even further and say that people who ride Uber or buy from Amazon are moral cretins.
Yes, it's an horrible world. I know, I'm saying that it is, I agree completely. What's the alternative? We blame people that work in other companies and claim we are honest and pure? Do we say that since there are X layers between us and them then we're fine? :)
I'm pretty sure we'll end up discussing the various shades of moral bankruptcy soon enough though.
You should change this.
I'm pretty sure you can do good even within facebook, doing your utmost to keep the company accountable (from my experience in another big corp, we don't see 1% of what's happening inside it, and how many people are facepalming - and we'll never know if many things were just humans being stupid or actual calculated decisions). You can also keep your guard up from outside and force facebook to fix itself (obviously, as much as its business allows) from outside, for example pushing it to hire more moderators and get as better so to prevent things like myanmar from happening again.
What I'm saying is that it's impossible (and in my opinion, pointless) to claim moral superiority and to accuse people of being morally bankrupt because they work for corp X.
There are plenty of companies which can't easily be categorized as having significant negative effects to the world. You can work for a "bad" company but consciously constrain your work to a business unit which improves customers' lives.
What you're using is false equivalence. You know what the worst thing for the environment is? Being born. Why do people insist on living when everything is bad? Reject the notion that you're powerless to change things.
So I'm wondering (out of curiosity as I can't personally think of any) where in Europe is that happening?
Whew! It's not just me? That's reassuring (As in, yes, there IS a monster on the wing of the plane, but that's so much less scary if you see it too. Little Twilight Zone reference there.)
> What's the alternative?
I don't actually know. However...
Bucky Fuller calculated that we would have all the technology we need to supply our needs globally for everyone, if only we applied it efficiently, by sometime in the 1970's. We have arguably already passed that point, meaning that our problems today are not physical, that they are just psychological (or moral or religious or spiritual if you prefer.)
Starting in the mid-1970's a kind of effective cybernetic psychology has been developed (under a kind of trade name Neuro-Linguistic Programming) that provides simple algorithms for correcting a great deal of malfunctioning psychology. (Be aware that the Wikipedia article for NLP is crap, it's haunted by skeptics. I can vouch for NLP. Not only is it grounded in hard science, I myself was cured of serious debilitating depression. I owe my life in a sense to NLP.)
To sum up, we have the technology to supply our needs, and the technology to overcome our psychological problems, so I think it's a matter of A) dispelling ignorance of the possibility, and B) logistics.
Tag, you're it.
Not the OP... But no... Just stop working for morally bankrupt companies.
There are enough consulting jobs, to say nothing of current and future startups around (including your own if you create one), to not need to work for them.
> What needs to happen is that people keep applying pressure so facebook is forced to adapt its business model even if it hits their bottom line - which is already happening apparently.
Then again, would-be employers saying loud and clear that they won't hire people who worked for morally bankrupt companies is a potential answer too.
If software engineers pushed hard to consider that working for them was a dead-end job rather than something very desirable, then maybe they might end up attracting less talent and go bust eventually.
On your deathbed you'll only take a single thing with you. Not your house or family; not your wealth; only whether what you did with your life was worth it.
A very very few, like Alfred Nobel, are lucky enough to see what their contemporaries thought about their lives before they passed away and got to adjust. You probably won't.
While Google and Amazon both have their ethical problems and serious anti-trust issues, Facebook is in a league of its own. The complete, cavalier disregard for the consequences of its own actions as long as they get theirs is utterly unconscionable.
Unlike Google or Amazon, they add nothing of real value to society to balance the abuses they bring with them. All their labors are geared towards extracting the utility of other creators (their acquisitions like Instagram or WhatsApp) or to suck the time and attention out of people through addictive mechanisms. If Facebook disappeared tomorrow a hundred federated online platforms to function as generic address books and life-updaters would crop up over night, and just about every one of them would be better.
You would have to look at lines of business like Big Tobacco to find another field of similar moral perfidy.
Alright then, where do we draw the line? Can I go buy a person? If not, can I invade Sudan?[1]
> Ethical consumption is a dead end.
Should we give up even thinking about it and just do whatever is most convenient?
Will that solve all our problems?
You know Amazon treats its employees like disposable shit. If you buy from them anyway you are putting your self-love above the love you should have for the folks working there. You know Uber is extracting value from their drivers[2] and will discard them without compunction when the robots come online. And they killed Elaine Herzberg. If you ride Uber you're rewarding them for all this and putting your self-love above the love you should have for those folks driving.
I'm gonna keep fighting for what I think is right. That means telling people that they are moral cretins when they are blithe about it. (I don't think violence solves anything, but a good rant can shake up a body's thoughts. I have friends that shop through Amazon and ride Uber and I don't chide them too harshly or often.)
Working at FB or one of the other emerging technocracies isn't an instance of "Never let ideological purity prevent you from effective action." It's a case of putting money above core values, or not having those values in the first place, or simply not paying attention.
If you're going to be a Morlock at least be a self-aware Morlock, eh?
> You can't even buy slavery-free clothing or food reliably.
You can try.
If you don't even try you're a moral cretin.[3] It's a common malady in this empty and abortive age.
[1] One of the few places where outright slavery still occurs in modern times. If that's not grounds for attack what is? Oil?
[2] "They don’t pay the cost of their capital. The wages they pay to their drivers are less than the depreciation of the cars and the expense of keeping the drivers fed, housed, and healthy. They pay less than minimum wage in most markets, and, in most markets, that is not enough to pay the costs of a car plus a human." https://www.ianwelsh.net/the-market-fairy-will-not-solve-the...?
[3] "Origin Late 18th century: from French crétin, from Swiss French crestin ‘Christian’ (from Latin Christianus), here used to mean ‘human being’, apparently as a reminder that, though deformed, cretins were human and not beasts." https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/cretin
Maybe, but at least Facebook doesn't actively try to manipulate you into believing that they're the "good guys" and "not evil". That's why, after all, my level of respect for FB is still a lot higher than for Google.
Its like, "Doctor, why dont we just apply pressure on the tumor until it starts to grow at more reasonable rates!".
No. When you find cancer, you try to eliminate it.
Facebook is exactly this -- cancer. They have been aggressively monopolizing software for socializing so that they can arrive to the dominant position they are in now.
Until Facebook becomes more transparent w.r.t how they use the user data and until Facebook gives users autonomy -- they need to be regulated. We need to define constraints regarding how they present and manipulate user data and interactions.
They don't? News to me.
People who work for known unethical organizations are hardly celebrated so these are poor attempts at muddying the waters and distraction.
The bottom line is if you can't behave ethically you can't expect ethics from others in society. If 6 figure earning engineers can't exercise ethical choice then who can? Its incredible given the level of discourse how anyone can expect any ethical behavior from the poor and starving and yet we do. The double standards and greed from educated classes is stunning.
In my mind, FBs inaction in countries like Burma has caused more direct conflict/hate then most tobacco companies. However, if you look at the oil industry, its harder to draw a line... For example: Is the oil industry responsible for the bombing of Irak? The Government gave different reasons, but looking at current evidence for example, it just looks like pipeline protection.
So what i wanted to get at is that when a company gets to a certain size, it gets harder to separate government/ company involvement. At that point we need to look at how the company acts, and in this case, especially FBs, they are doing a horrible job (IMO) at actually standing up for their users, instead choosing to protect their business interests.
(While this is their supposed purpose as a company, there exists people like myself, who believe the current model of stock sponsored companies are the wrong way to do business).
Just a FYI: This is more a rant then anything, Im tired of the BS that these huge companies are producing and selling as the solution to humanities issues. Personally i hope that this current system fails for something better, however, personally i have not thought up anything much better atm.
Hah, good one!
But just in case you're serious: Did you see Zuckerberg's Senate hearing?
There are hundreds of more similar articles documenting hacking by China and Russia. The data breach at the parent of this article even is supposed to have been done by a coordinated nation states. How can a company ever compete against a nations resources? Expecting Facebook to magically secure themselves against attacks by a nation is wishful thinking. If you want to stop breaches like this, the nation's that are doing it must be held accountable. Facebook is an easy target, but that's just attacking the victim. China and Russia are much more intimidating but are the ones who are the true perpetrators.
preventing impersonation is literally the only reason I have an account, since I cannot trust facebook to handle this for me
> They don't? News to me.
News indeed. Being good IS their mission statement. "Facebook's mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together."
This is a spearfishing attack... That's a totally different beast. Let me look at the gross mishandling of data that facebook had recently:
Remember the Cambridge Analitica scandal? That wasn't a hack. That was facebook deliberately letting apps access user data like it was candy, because that's what facebook does. It was done on purpose. Of course, they didn't expect someone to scrape the whole network at that scale, so it wasn't fully intentional. Still, it was absolutely gross negligence, and is absolutely a breach of trust that happened outside of external government interference: https://www.vox.com/2018/3/20/17138756/facebook-data-breach-...
What about the recent scandal revolving around the use of 2FA SMS numbers being used for ad targeting? Against, this isn't Russia coming in and hacking facebook. This is Facebook shooting themselves in the foot with a bazooka. They should have been aware that, when a user enters their phone number for 2FA, they expect it to be used for this feature and this feature only. Not for ad targeting, not for notifications. Again, facebook breached that trust. No outside interference, just facebook being either lazy, irresponsible, and incompetent around user data: https://9to5mac.com/2018/09/28/facebook-ad-targeting-2fa/
There are many other cases like the above. Facebook doesn't need china to attract hate. They can fuck things up by themselves well enough.
"Nation states": The bad guys, usually China and Russia, sometimes Iran.
but I'm also hoping that it breaks apart and we find a better way then invading peoples privacy to monetize platforms
going to work for Facebook/Google/Amazon is a enormous bump (we're speaking 2-4x) of salary for many people, which in some cases means you can buy an house after 3-4 years even with the crazy rents back in your home country
Ah yes, the ends justify the means.
Also EU != Europe
Between you and me, I pulled a muscle in my neck/shoulder this morning and I've been in a devil of a mood all day. I'm not trying to make excuses, I shouldn't have taken out my bad mood here. Today's B.S. is not indicative of my best efforts.
HN is an incredible forum (I interacted with Alan Kay the other day!!!) and I'm ashamed to have added such counter-productive negativity. It won't happen again.
I'm sorry for being part of the problem today. Have a great weekend.
I work at a big tech thing. But these also do a lot of good.
Facebook keeps me more connected to old friends and family than ever before. It facilities communication and organization of events that would far more time consuming to do without Facebook. I hang out with loved ones more, because pinging them is on Facebook is easy.
Sure, Facebook could be better. IMO ads in messenger is a cheap move, that won't play out well. But Facebook could also be a lot worse than it is.
You're not going to rebuild the world from scratch. Nothing will ever be perfect -- but don't let that get in the way of better. Why not make it better from the inside? How is that not ethical?
Facebook is more like Big Tobacco. They're purely malignant, continuing solely through adversarial relationships with their users meant to foster addiction or control the revenue streams of key industries like media and news. They're pirates. What benefits they provide, they have only ever made worse than other services and tools that predated them.
>but I'm also hoping that it breaks apart and we find a better way then invading peoples privacy to monetize platforms
Amen to that. Treating attention as a form of currency has been utterly corrosive to society.