I mean working somewhere like Qualcomm or Microsoft when you care about FOSS, democracy, and the public commons, or a weapons manufacturer for a military that invades other countries and kills innocent people in their homes.
I mean working somewhere like Qualcomm or Microsoft when you care about FOSS, democracy, and the public commons, or a weapons manufacturer for a military that invades other countries and kills innocent people in their homes.
It’s like a corollary to the saying “there can be no ethical consumption under capitalism”.
No matter who you work for (even if you are self employed), some evil will result. I’m not going to sit on a high tower judging someone working in an Amazon warehouse just because that’s the way they are able to keep food on their table.
Like you said, it’s best to judge those who working on concentrated evil. If someone’s working on the AGM-114R-9X Hellfire Sword Missile, they really should be asking themselves if they are the baddies.
Unfortunately, our society does a really good job of minimizing the quantity of evil people needed to do evil aims. According to the US national park service, 500,000 people worked on the Manhattan project. It’s probably a fraction of a percent of those people who even had a clue they were working on a weapon. It’s probably a fraction of a percent of those people who actually knew what caliber of a weapon they were working on, and many of those people probably assumed such a destructive weapon would never need to be used (also what Gatling and Nobel told themselves).