|
I encourage you, unreservedly, and without any personal malice, to fight the reality distortion field that causes people to make decisions like the above. Users do not want this. Engineers, PMs, and executives want this. Google's 23% YoY revenue growth wants this. To Google, users who don't subject to dystopian tracking, who don't consent to Google knowing everything about them, who just want to go about their own lives while not being studied like a lab rat, or pestered to let an all-powerful force in the sky wring their lives of all digital value, are a round-off error. Google has shifted from its default modes of putting the user first, offering them services and information at their request, of being uninteresting in who or why is asking...that it has become one of the leading forces eroding user privacy, agency, and trust. Inside of Google, the reality distortion field is intense. It doesn't feel intense, it feels rational and right. Google sees itself as an infinitely benevolent force for good in this world that occasionally makes mistakes. It literally cannot fathom what an abusive, creepy, and unfeeling machine it's become. It sees itself as being made of very moral people. It cannot understand that its enormous size, its market position, and its list of priorities have created a configuration of people that can do nothing but eat the world, and at this point it is doing so, despite what those people have in their heads. |
One would hope that there will be an effort to shame these engineers for their role in normalizing mass surveillance, and for their shallow attempts to play down the damage they cause to society.
A year ago I've seen a Google engineer boasting here about his occasional donations to charities, while he works on ads and regularily defends his employer in public, dismissing some of the illegal activities that are taking place at Google.
I'd understand working for your own selfish reasons on something harmful to other people out of necessity, but I doubt most Google and Facebook engineers are only designing and writing the code that intrudes on our personal lives because they just could not find an engineering job at a less scummy company.