Memes of Production

Look.

The creative urge is also the destructive urge. Right?

And one cant really be held responsible for what other people choose to do with the things one makes. Alfred nobel was trying to make mining safer instead he ended up ushering in a new and terrible era in war. Fritz haber invented the haber process to feed germany, not build bombs! The people who built the early internet are all horrified by what it has become.

Thats just an unfair standard of judgement. Do you think we should never build new things? Content ourselves with fire, perhaps bags knives and wheeled carts if we want to edge things? Even anprims think lean-tos are worth building.

So this last month ive spent designing the restraint system and tactile feedback mechanism for our new r1488 rape missile comissioned by the idf is just cool engineering work. If i didnt do it somebody else would. Somebody else might get it wrong. You know our department lead didnt even consider sensitivity differences in circumcised vs uncircumcised penises for the pilot feedback mechanism? Nobody else considered that an AFAB person might wear the feedback suit. You need a woke kinky queer in here to prevent sub-optimal pleasure for the end user–to prevent hurting more people.

Plus, as an engineer, im special and deserve special treats a six figure salary affords. How dare you suggest i live like a normal person. How DARE you!

Pretty much how I feel about anyone in tech working for Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta.

You need the paycheck, fine. I'm not going to judge your circumstances.

But you sold your soul, and please don't try to pretend otherwise.

Dan, the company man, felt loyalty to the corp

After 16 years of service, and a family to support

He actually started to believe the weaponry and chemicals were for national defense

Cause Danny had a mortgage and a boss to answer to

The guilty don't feel guilty, they learn not to

My step son’s first job out of grad school for computer science was Raytheon. Paid well, got him his clearance (which basically guarantees employment as long as you have a pulse). I could tell it bothered him (as in, what they do), but he was very much trying to be a grown-up and pay his student loans and rent and all that. He’s 22, and very independent.

As soon as he got his clearance, he got another job doing things that aren’t directly related to killing people. Got a nice raise, too. He said the feeling of not working for Raytheon is better than the $10k sign-on bonus they gave him that he now has to pay back. “Worth it.”

They know what they're doing is wrong, and they're fragile as hell about it

I told a friend group that all that shit needs to be shut down and he cried on about how many jobs they create. He’s deeply Christian btw…

What happened to worker solidarity?

People gotta eat. But some jobs do call you to at minimum throw some sand in the gears. If you're not doing that then yeah fuck you.

I totally feel the sentiment of this post but it raises an interesting question. Pretty much every job, especially nowadays, is linked up in some causal chain with helping a horrible company and/or horrible people do horrible things. At what point does it become acceptable? Is it about having more elaborate steps in between? What constitutes being further removed from doing harm?

I dropped the bomb

I built the bomb

I designed the bomb

I funded the bomb

I bought products from the company that funded the bomb

I gave a discount to a friend who buys products from the company that built the bomb

Etc.

Where do we start to consider employment ethical vs unethical? And to what extent? It seems like nothing will ever be 100% pure, but when do I get to stop feeling horrible about myself?

Not an abstract question, am job hunting

Simultaneously on the Fediverse:

• you are a bad human for working for an arms manufacturer

• support Ukraine against Russian aggression by sending them arms

Pick a lane already!

Are the people making weapons to defend Ukraine evil? Surely not, right? Hence working for a defense contractor is not inherently evil either.

Some are of course - like Peter Thiel's Palantir.

And you, young engineer, you who dream of improving the lot of the workers by the application of science to industry - what a sad disappointment, what terrible disillusions await you! You devote the useful energy of your mind to working out the scheme of a railway which, running along the brink of precipices and burrowing into the very heart of mountains of granite, will bind together two countries which nature has separated. But once at work, you see whole regiments of workers decimated by privations and sickness in this dark tunnel - you see others of them returning home carrying with them, maybe, a few pence, and the undoubted seeds of consumption; you see human corpses - the results of a groveling greed - as landmarks along each yard of your road; and, when the railroad is finished, you see, lastly, that it becomes the highway for the artillery of an invading army.

Well it’s not a lot. But it’s weird that it happened twice