Comment by camgunz

I have friends who work(ed) at various FAANG companies, and maybe even more shamefully at "silly" places like d2c mattress companies and whatever (I worked on the civil side of a defense contractor, I'm not... ugh, innocent either). They're all pretty self-aware about all this, and I'm the first to say I'll never criticize you for how you make your money. Life in the US is oddly unstable; everything gets exponentially better the more money and status you have; that's the game. There's no sense cosplaying some kind of ethics here.

But, that's a different argument than the collective action problem argument you're making here. This isn't a collective action problem. Tech workers can spurn unethical work, just like doctors, lawyers, chemical engineers, etc. Very few of us would work on ransomware, right? Now we're just talking about degrees.

I just think we're starting to realize the "money firehoses" that are either ad tech companies or VCs laundering government ZIRP stimulus are at best unhelpful and at worst eating away at our mental health, our democracy, and our society. The problem is that these are truly behemoth companies, if you don't work for one the company you do work for probably wouldn't be viable without them (do you... have anything in the cloud?) As noted in TFA, there is a real Upton Sinclair problem here. Tech is unimaginable without Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, or Apple.

In the absence of legislation, I think tech workers should unionize and demand the following:

- ethical, highly regulated supply chains with penalties that make violations economically non-viable

- fundamental privacy protections: companies cannot share or sell data about you without your consent (basically a data HIPPA), and they're liable for security breaches (looking at you Microsoft)

- slowly phase out advertising. This is a hot take I know, but it's super bad for humans, its critics were right the whole time, and it enables business models (e.g. social media companies) that are somehow even worse.

- ethical treatment of workers: no more union-busting Amazon workers

Maybe it'll take 100 years, yeah, but hopefully humans are still around by then.