I remember folks in the web community shunning me when I first started speaking out against Big Tech – because I was criticising their friends who worked at Google, Facebook, etc. – saying I was exaggerating things.
I wonder what the same folks think now given what we know about these very same corporations; given a number of them are actively enabling a genocide.
Am I still an alarmist?
(I understand if some of you are too busy working at one or debating the minutiae of CSS syntax to reply.)
@aral
There are still many people working at IT corporations who don't want to see what their employer is doing. They still think that they're doing positive stuff, that their work matters, that they will be "seen" and appreciated.
I guess it's very very hard to accept that you're just a replaceable cog, a nobody with little worth from your management's point of view. Someone to be sacrificed, easily, to please billionaire investors who want more money.
And it's also very very hard to accept that your work - the job you were so proud of, that actually defined you - simply helped corpos to make the world worse.
How hard can be to realize that you, in your minuscule little way, helped exploitation, misinformation, abuse, genocide?
You just wanted to make nice presentations from your little podium, to feel validated by your peers, to write on linkedin that you're "thrilled" or "humbled" or "excited" for some corpo nano-achievement.
Poor, poor fool. What did you let them do to yourself.
@oldguycrusty An alarmist is someone who alarms people needlessly. If there is real cause for alarm, you are, by definition, not an alarmist for raising the alarm.
@aral There's this one dude who used to work on the Chrome team. VERY outspoken about the importance of web performance as a human rights and access issue. Constantly rails against Apple for being hypocrites on security and privacy.
He would get SO defensive/dismissive if I pointed out that Google is also bad and Chrome is basically a spyware tool.
He's at MS Edge now, still has a vendetta against Apple, and still refused to speak ill of Google.
(And I’ve since been working on the problem and trying to formulate solutions to it, which has led me to what I’ve been working on for the last ~6 years with the Small Web) https://ar.al/2020/08/07/what-is-the-small-web/
@BarryCooke They could see it. They didn’t want to see it. Because they were benefiting from it even if it was indirectly by consulting with these corporations or having their events sponsored by them or by speaking at their conferences, etc.
@aral i used to have friends at facebook, but they couldnt differentiate between "me talking smack about zuck" vs themselves, because apparently they were unable to distinguish between "the company is doing bad stuff" and "i am the company".
@aral back in the twitter days i posted more than a handful of screenshots from the dictionary definition of 'egocentrism', but i dont think it made any difference
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