Tech Morality is Hard
32 points by gmem
32 points by gmem
Few of us can live a life free of compromise.
One of the things I liked about the show The Good Place was it showed what it would be like for someone to try to live 100% ethically. Next to impossible and at a major cost.
We all have to do the best we can, but I'd argue... we could all (myself included) do better and have greater impact without major sacrifice. It would be most effective, of course, if more of us agreed on the big picture things and then worked down the list. The problem is that 1) there are so many objectionable things and 2) people are largely unwilling to make even small "sacrifices" and 3) even the people who do make "sacrifices" can't agree on which things should be prioritized.
I would argue that it is fundamentally impossible, because we always encounter the moral remainder.
The original sin is thinking that "tech morality" is a disconnected thing.
Morality is hard. Ethics is hard. If we eliminate all tech down to the wheel and the spoon this will still be true.
I think you’re right but let me identify two reasons we might be wrong:
If technology meaningfully allows us to do more good or bad stuff to more people with fewer human collaborators; or
If technology leads us to social systems that are harder to opt out of than they were in the past.
My hunch is that the cliff if it existed was the development of writing after accounting.
I have apparentlly walked a similar path as the author, and two things come to mind when I think about principles and comprimise in our connected world;
You can hold yourself to any standard you like, but you cannot hold others to that same standard.
Everything dies a hero, or lives long enough to become the villain.
This is what really sucks about the whole 'connected world' thing. If there's something happening that you don't approve of, it becomes impossible to fully get away from it if you still want to participate in the 'connected world' part. We become Unwilling Participants in all sorts of things we disapprove of (and we can now buy t-shirts that say this) unless we completely remove ourselves from the Internet, which is not only difficult, but something none of us are willing to do aside from a few grizzled old preppers and some tribal cultures that seem happy to stay away from global society at large. The exploitative complexities of capitalism and leveragism, pervasive in all major online platforms, make it impossible for any Citizen of the Internet to not be an Unwilling Participant in something nefarious if one follows the threads.
We can only expect of ourselves our best efforts to make the most concientious decisions we can with the information we have at the time, understanding that information may change and our loyalties, workflow, subscriptions, etc, may need to pivot at any moment to accomodate our or moral scrutiny. This is all we can do, hoping that we are collectively voting with our dollars about what we will give permission to, and what we will deny.
Difficult as it may be to separate the co-owner's politics from the Mullvad company itself, we have to decide if we assume the rest of the company will keep those politics in check, the same way way we did when Proton's leader indicated support for a decidedly fascist/accelerationist US president. The connected world has forced upon us the need to reconcile moral and ethical choices, arguably before we were psychologically mature enough to shoulder this kind of raw exposure to so many different minds, so I argue that each of us, author included, needs to remember to give ourselves a bit of grace as we navigate these incredibly rough waters together.
Difficult as it may be to separate the co-owner's politics from the Mullvad company itself, we have to decide if we assume the rest of the company will keep those politics in check
By design companies are very bad at this
Everything in life is a tradeoff. The most important thing, to me, is exercising agency in making those tradeoffs. I try to stay clear-eyed about what things matter most to me, and I don't subject everything to a moralistic purity test.
Yes we need compromises, but we can still be serious about selected topics: https://www.experimental-history.com/p/surely-you-can-be-serious (hosted on substack, sorry...)
(my take: https://log.pfad.fr/2024/what-am-i-serious-about/e
There are lot of good people on substack who don't know better. I forgive them but also forward them this:
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/04/11/a-newsletter-writer-reflects-on-leaving-substack/
Tech morality is actually mixed. NewPipe is a great study in that: