Programmers should just obey!
Do not think about the orders you get!
Are you a good patriot or are you against us?!?
Do not criticize your leaders!
OBEY!
Build a startup, try to get rich, and never ever talk about anything serious!
Build a startup, try to get rich, and never ever talk about anything serious!
It is about how we all individually see the problem, but do nothing about. It is a choice. Be a cog in the machine that makes your life livable, but makes everyone's just a little bit worse by doing so instead of trying to change the system.
A single raindrop never feels responsible for the flood.
If we all, just the technologists all got together and said, hey, quit it with that war shit and refused to make new or maintain old war making machines, war would end almost immediately. But the system has made the consequences of an individual or a minority doing that disastrously bad for them if they do it alone. It is a cage of fear. Legitimate fear. Fear of what would happen if we end up standing alone in our rebellion.
But we don't. We read HN and talk about making money. And that economic output, that money will be used against us to make things worse for everybody but the plutocracy that controls the political duopoly.
It seems to me (with my extremely limited view of economics), that it would just create shortage of supply, and so the technologists that would continue to participate would make a lot more money. That in turn would make it more difficult for the techs that might agree with your position, but are currently in dismal financial circumstances for whatever reason, to refuse to create/maintain the "war machines."
Perhaps I'm too pessimistic, and am the problem you're speaking of. But it seems like a "boil the ocean" proposition to me, at least from any way I can try to envision it happening.