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by atduskgreg 847 days ago
People who make addictive social media apps and bureaucratic enterprise software love to glorify their work by lumping it in with vaccines, clean drinking water, and global food distribution in order to claim some of the halo of those obviously beneficial technologies (though claiming “fire and rock tools” is taking that to a hilarious new extreme). I hate to break it to you but you don’t work on any of those things. You work on selling people ads and making it easier for their boss to fire them. That tech is neutral at best relative to these problems you’re claiming and often destructive — ask people in Myanmar about how social media has affected war and violence, for example. Digital technology hasn’t had a demonstrably positive impact on worker productivity let alone mortality, hunger, or war. Start being honest with yourself that working in tech is a lot more like selling carbonated sugar water or making reality TV shows than it is like saving the world.
1 comments

God damn! Threat neutralized. And all without starting a new paragraph.

I agree with all this and yet it’s the sheer force of your prose that I can’t let go of