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I'm inclined to believe that most people want to do the right thing, but, right now, in some fields, I'm not seeing much evidence. In "tech", most of the noise we're hearing within the field about responsibility seems to be coming from two directions: (1) some of the most abusive/dangerous companies, looking to manage PR and give the appearance of self-regulation; and (2) people seeing this as an opportunity for their own careers as intellectual, "thought leader", or PR cover, seemingly more interested in career than mission. What we're not hearing is many "tech" employees avoiding and fleeing the companies that are well-known to be irresponsible, sometimes arguably criminally so. Each of our mental lists of the least-responsible "tech" companies might differ, but some I'd suspect would be on most people's lists are flocked to by new grads every year. Did their colleges and general awareness of industry not clue them in, do they have no other employment options, or is responsibility not a factor in career and "total comp"? Even those of us who don't go to what we think are the worst companies, perhaps the majority of us knowingly employ practices that a modest amount of forward thinking should suggest is irresponsible (e.g., grabbing users' data without informed consent, leaking every Web site visitor's detailed behavior to various third parties in the business of profiling, etc.). Before these practices became normalized, "tech" people could've (and often did) tell you that this sort of thing was a bad idea, and actively fought against some of them. Organizations like the EFF, CPSR, and EPIC (and efforts like PGN's Risks) started for a reason, and there was demand for that among the much smaller "tech" world. Now things we'd already foreseen as bad are normalized, and if you point it out, there's usually silence, derision, or what might as well be quoting of Ayn Rand. |