We need to resist that call to apathy, stop acquiescing, and start demanding better of others. That, incidentally, often starts at demanding better of ourselves.
We have no investors to answer to. We're printing money. Yet at every opportunity company leadership reveals itself as this slavering beast where the only people in positions of power have gotten there through duplicity and a lack of empathy.
The tech job market is terrible. I'm trapped in the guts of a machine that was supposed to be one of the "good ones".
I'm not sure there's anything to do for people who want to act ethically and be decent to each other if even the "good" companies show a complete lack of regard for anything but making their profits take off into the stratosphere.
I see things in terms of a sharecropping analogy, feudal lords (corrupted government) allow the scammers to harvest the crop (victims) for a share of the proceeds. We cannot fix people to the point they are un-scammable and there does not exist a democratic force strong enough to fix the government. Almost all ads I’ve ever seen are for obvious scams, especially on twitter. You’d think the richest guy in history (possibly?) could afford not to allow industrial exploitation of his users but apparently not.
You have gambling sites and binary auction scams that have a turnover that includes a significant percentage of suicides. I wish we had a democracy that could prevent this but we do not. While many of us here may be smart enough to avoid falling victim to these scams we have family members that we care about who are not so this still indirectly costs us wealth.
If we mean ‘we tech workers’ then you’ll just be replaced, just like how I was when I quit being a researcher at FANG companies over this and other ethical concerns. The only observable outcome is that my clear conscious came with the cost that I’m far poorer than I could have been. I’m lucky as I’m still well off but not everyone can make that call and survive. These scamming behaviors are trivial to detect and especially so at the large internet company level. It exists on these platforms because the owners want them to.
Doesn't this rely on us as the individual? We get the government we allow. We, humanity, could've had anything we wanted, this is what we gave ourselves.
Humans have built in innate weaknesses that are easily exploited by the unscrupulous. People have been exploiting others since time immemorial, secret police keep libraries of exploits and you can see them used repeatedly and effectively throughout history. Pied-piper strategy (basket of deplorables), Operation Trust (Q-Anon).
I don’t know how to counter it.
Consider the US scoped studies studies showing that the population doesn't get what it wants. They showed that policy follows the whims of the wealthy even in the cases where the population overwhelmingly agrees on a contrary direction. So the data says "no", control has been removed from us.
Part of the complication is that the determined action of a few actors can efficiently spoil the efforts of communities.
Individual action is known to be so inefficient that the oil&gas industries poured money into promoting the idea of the personal climate footprint.
You and I value our privacy but most people don't. That's the truth. The tone of your post assumes people agree with you but, clearly, most people don't.
It isn't the market that creates the demand.
