[salawat]

I second the call to pay more attention to Free (Libre) Open Source Software as a potential direction, and believe me, you are not the only one feeling ethically paralyzed in reference to the industry. Further, I want to emphasize, you are not wrong to feel that way. Your moral/ethical compass is working just fine. You are an actor bringing morals and ethics with you into an industry ripe with unethical, power seeking actors who either did not have a functional moral/ethical compass in the first place, or abandoned it in the name of a paycheck, knowingly, or unknowingly at the time they accepted the job. You are not broken. The stuff the industry wants to build, and the motives behind why are.

Your job is essentially setting the status quo everyone else starts from, and as of right now, you're only working for people looking to shape things for max $$$ extraction from everyone else. Implementation skews toward availing oneself (as a business) of access or management capabilities over vast swathes of the world population's data, economic activity, or some combo of the two,and the concommitant control such management capability confers.

Welcome to mid-life. Where you finally start to get a high level enough picture of how horked everything is, and start to realize that there may not be enough time left to even start to make a big enough dent in the suck to get things going back in a less suck filled direction.

Stay strong, friend.