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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

Give me a break. Most of us aren't dropping everything to go join the Peace Corps, we want to live a comfortable life, and by no coincidence, most of us work for assholes. Nearly any sufficiently old company has its share of controversies (this includes startups, they're just smaller so they're not as publicized).

I will agree that Facebook's controversies are a bit more egregious than most, but at the end of the day I don't really see how a random Facebook engineer is substantially worse than an engineer who works for Microsoft, or Apple, or Google, or Lockheed Martin, or <insert large corporation here>. People just want to make a decent living, not change the world.

However, I think there's plenty of blame you can place on the decision-makers at Facebook (most of the executive level team).

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Have you read Solzhenitsyn's "From Under the Rubble?"

It has a section called "The Smatters" where he derides Soviet Russia's intelligentsia for being cowards that would trade physical comfort in return for sacrificing their soul and morality.

This is in contrast to "Old Russia's" intelligentsia, that would canktankerously fight and even sacrifice themselves and their personal needs, just to uphold their own (many times removed-from-reality) ideals.

The former's "pragmatic nihilism" of only taking cares of one's self and one's interests is mirrored today among our society.

That's not to say I'm any better.

I, too, am a coward.

I mean, I said in a sister thread that I do think there could be an argument that me working for an awful corporation does enable them and I am at some level responsible for their actions, but I don't know that it's realistic to expect someone in the corporate world right now to drop everything and only work for ethical people right now...our entire society is somewhat based around us working for evil corporations.

I agree that it's unrealistic to expect.

But there is something intoxicating and sublime in being unrealistic.

But that's just an easy argument that keeps the status quo. In a western society today may be impossible to escape some big "evil" corporation, but there's a major difference between having no choice to participate in the system and willingly choosing to work for said corporation. In the case of Facebook someone who works there may not be directly responsible for its actions if they're not at a very high level but they are directly condoning them by working for Facebook and helping further its mission.

Nobody is asking for that burden or level of effort, just not people literally out to actively exploit... everyone.

I would absolutely give you a break if you don't join the Peace Corps. I won't give you a break if you choose to take a lucrative job at Facebook. This is not a black-and-white issue.

>I will agree that Facebook's controversies are a bit more egregious than most

So, I would posit that working at Facebook is, thus, "more egregious than most" other jobs. That's the point here. Nobody is saying that it's either work at Facebook or join the Peace Corps. I, personally, think an engineer at Facebook is contributing more harm to society than an engineer at any of the other companies you mentioned, yes. Substantially worse? Depends how we define that. But, worse? Definitely.

>I don't really see how a random Facebook engineer is substantially worse than an engineer who works for Microsoft, or Apple, or Google, or Lockheed Martin, or <insert large corporation here>. People just want to make a decent living, not change the world.

The Nazi SS officers also used this line of arguments during the Nuremberg trials, that they were just "following orders from above, with no choice in the matter (other than the choice to voluntarily join the SS for personal gains), just like the soldiers of the allies; what's the difference that makes them the bad guys?"

My point is, you can make big tech bucks at other places as well, nobody forces you to work for an evil corp, you choose that voluntarily. And there are other less evil places you can work for.

I knew this was going to come up because this is the internet, but I don't think this line of reasoning applies to every arbitrary Facebook engineer.

The Nazi soldiers tried at Nuremburg were directly murdering the Jews, and so "just following orders" led to a direct harm. However, I don't think that logic went transitive for forever; did we execute the secretaries that took phone calls in military Germany headquarters? I don't think we did, but you could argue that they helped enable all the murders.

Similarly, if a person's entire job at Facebook is to contribute to Presto or React, I don't really view them as guilty as a person who worked on all the data-harvesting stuff, and way less guilty than an executive making the decisions.

>did we execute the secretaries that took phone calls in military Germany headquarters? I don't think we did, but you could argue that they helped enable all the murders

Unlike military members of the SS, their secretaries didn't really have the power to send people to their deaths or perform executions.

Isn't that what they are doing? There was a story not long ago about a lady in her 90s who was a secretary at a death camp at 18. She's being dragged to court.

It's here: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/german-96-year-old-nazi...

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