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Comment by WheelsAtLarge | Hacker News Reader

He talks about tech workers but he leaves out users. We users decide what companies survive. Tech workers work because they need to eat. Users use the tech because it's cool or convenient. We can make plus arguments or minus arguments for both sides but only users decide what companies succeed. If we don't use the tech there is no way for it to succeed. At some point we need to decide if using a service is really worth the overall impact it has in society and decide whether it's worth using.

It's time that we as users take more responsibility on what tech is deployed. Is the convenience of tech worth the impact it's having in our society? By most measurements, we are saying yes, emphatically. It's important that we stop saying that the power lies with someone else. We have the power to change the situation too.

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Its a bit of both users and employees. Users are often not informed. If I describe many of the bad behaviors of tech companies it is often disregarded as crazy conspiracy theory. People will not believe what power some companies have until its completely proven to them. Some users also are willing to ignore bad behavior if it aligns with their belief systems.

But it is most definitely not the shareholders. Definitely just the users and employees. Yup. ;)

I don't think this is a valid argument, because it ignores the power imbalance between users and tech companies. A user is on their own, while a tech company has vast resources to nudge or force a user to behave a certain way. There has been conducted vast psychological research how to manipulate users psychologically - e.g. keeping them glued to the screen. Many more detailed choices are taken out of a users hand via forced updates or conscious functionality limititions. often, the only choice a user is left with is to behave exactly in the way the tech company intended - or stop using their product altogether. However, the latter choice might not be possible at all (e.g. if the service is essential or required as part of work or education) - or will incur significant costs, e.g. loss of your extended social network.

And Raytheon, Palantir, Lockheed-Martin, et. all? They make most of their money with direct government contracts.

There's no grey area when directly working on missiles

Well, this is where things get very gray. We are the users of that tech too. The government is us too. "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union...", as the Constitution says, decide what our government does. It's time we tell our representatives what we want. No more military contracts? Then make sure that no representative that's for those contracts gets elected. It's a matter of getting involved. Like I said, we have the power. It's time we use it.

Electoral politics has failed the people time and time again. The only way to prevent these technologies is to organize and strike.

This deserves a.. LOL..

I think someone forgot to tell you.

We don’t live in a democracy. That’s just what they want you to believe, so that you can tell your children fairy tale stories at night.

If you vote for politicians that invest in missiles, it's rather hypocritical to criticize people who develop the same missiles. If you happen to be a pacifist it's reasonable to be against all such technology, but the fact that clearly most people aren't makes it odd to single it out as non-grey area. (Unless it's about how it's clearly white-area as it's in service of democratically decided policy.)

Absolutely, it's a problem that can be attacked on multiple fronts

Missiles (and most other weapons technologies) are definitely a gray area. Yes, producing them means they can be used for bad ends. But not producing them doesn't mean they'll cease to exist. It means you can't challenge anyone else who has them, including bad actors.

You seem to assume that working on weapons programs for the military is wrong, and I'm not sure why. Defense (and war) are one of the core reasons for the existence of the US government, and are clearly enumerated in the constitution.

Do you think the armed forces should be disbanded? If not, should the armed forces achieve their objectives through the use of obsolete equipment, or would you prefer they simply import it?

Wanting to abolish the military isn’t the only reason someone would claim it’s unethical to work for defense contractors. Two other reasons come to mind. Firstly, few if any of the conflicts the US is currently engaged in could be described as “just wars”. Secondly, the US is the largest arms exporter in the world, by a large margin. And many of those arms go to dictatorships, such as Saudi Arabia or Egypt.

Unless, of course, the product is a tool for surveillance and the users are therefore the ones doing the surveillance and not the ones being surveilled.

The victim can only do so much to stop this maluse of technology when they aren't the ones making it, aren't the ones using it, and aren't the ones funding it.

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