[hackpelican]

Architects produce buildings. These buildings are useful and remain useful for decades. We build software that may be useful to the average joe at first, but it's only to acquire users. Then the enshittification cycle begins to extract as much value as possible from said users. It's not the same.

We can sit here and provide examples of software that is useful, safety-critical, etc. And you're right, there is a lot of software out there keeping people alive in automobiles, airplanes, medical equipment etc. But this software is not borne of the tech industry culture, but rather one engineering culture or the other. Not the programming that I or most programmers do.

Policing is definitely a real job. Though abusers are plentiful, the ones harming society are rightly called abusers. Programmers writing software that harms society are just regular tech industry professionals. Same as banks that invest in companies profiting from apartheid systems or from destroying the environment.

I don't think I'm being unfair when I compare the morality of your average tech industry professional with the morality of your average finance bro or investment banker.