I think a lot of people, including the author, think of a very specific thing when they think of "tech". They think of software development, and very specifically software development at massive...
I think a lot of people, including the author, think of a very specific thing when they think of "tech". They think of software development, and very specifically software development at massive web companies like Google, Facebook, or Amazon. That's not what most tech jobs are though.
Most tech workers are not building the torment Nexus. They're installing email servers for medium sized businesses, writing databases for hospitals, answering calls at the help desk for the regional tire distribution company, or fixing networks at the supermarket chain.
The full stack JavaScript optimizer working 80 hours a week at Google and getting onsite massages along with his 600k a year total comp is a very very small minority within the tech field.
The good news about that is that if you don't want a job doing evil shit you can just... find a job where you don't do evil shit. Most tech jobs don't require you to negatively affect people's lives on such a massive scale
My job is stressful, frustrating, annoying, and hard at times, but it's not evil. I work for a local government, and most things I do help to make the lives of my neighbors safer, more convenient, easier, or more affordable. Yeah, I don't get paid Amazon money, but that's the tradeoff you make for your soul. I don't need Amazon money to be happy.
I don't have a whole lot of compassion for people who work in technology building awful shit who say things like "yeah, I know it's bad but you know, I have to eat". You can eat and not destroy the world, you just have to compromise, like you do with everything else.
You're not entirely wrong. But all these tech workers caving and buying things from the Nexus Makers are still building the Nexus, even if in service of something good. They're not designing and...
You're not entirely wrong. But all these tech workers caving and buying things from the Nexus Makers are still building the Nexus, even if in service of something good. They're not designing and building it, but they sure are funding it.
How many of these good services will be willing to empower their tech workers to abandon the convienience of all Microsoft software in order to stop fueling the AI spend (both directly and via OpenAI)? To stop using AWS? To abandon Oracle for Postgres? To abandon Google or Facebook spyware? To stop them from installing surveillance? To kick the Chromebooks and iPads out of classrooms? Best I can tell the answer is an infantesimal rounding error, especially as the MBAs propagate like rats. I got laid off in part because I fought against those things in a sector I felt was trying to do good.
How many tech workers will quit jobs until they find an employer that will let them do these things? Also virtually 0. I'm hoping to thread that needle and fine one that will (PM me if you have any leads).
How many tech workers install Nest or Ring stuff in their home? How many will be willing to sacrifice a few FPS to stop buying NVIDIA cards? The list goes on.
At that level of responsibility, we're all responsible. I use tech, though that's not my profession. I don't demand we use open source software where I work. Do you? Is that level of...
At that level of responsibility, we're all responsible. I use tech, though that's not my profession. I don't demand we use open source software where I work. Do you? Is that level of purity-testing worthwhile in the pursuit of a better world?
I made an edit: Yes, I did. I fought for it with every RFP, fought against every step deeper into the ecosystem. Saved them a bunch of money by doing so. And the reward for my efforts was being on...
I made an edit: Yes, I did. I fought for it with every RFP, fought against every step deeper into the ecosystem. Saved them a bunch of money by doing so.
And the reward for my efforts was being on the chopping block for layoffs after 13 years. Because the person writing the list of cut positions is really pushing for an Azure migration.
That's the whole point of the blog post: That if we're not willing to make those sacrifices for one reason or another, we get to live with the guilt. Or as the pious folks sometimes say: "The road to hell is paved with good intentions."
I broke my vow to not shop at Target since they kowtowed to the DEI mandates an hour ago. I made sure to steal enough that my visit was a net negative.
It's fundamentally a part of capitalism. Concentration of wealth leads to concentration of industries. Industry standards are driven by independent reviews, which when they get popular enough...
That's the whole point of the blog post: That if we're not willing to make those sacrifices for one reason or another, we get to live with the guilt.
It's fundamentally a part of capitalism. Concentration of wealth leads to concentration of industries. Industry standards are driven by independent reviews, which when they get popular enough become their own institutions. These institutions end up propping each other up, and working with each other making competition difficult through direct and indirect means. Ultimately if things get enshittified enough we might see small changes over to a competitor and the cycle starts again.
A net negative is a win, that's praxis. But also I have compassion on some level for absolving or not doing purity tests in certain contexts. There's absolutely a difference between 600k a year and 200k a year, and I think differences like that are where we can draw the line. If Target has the cheapest/most convenient <<insert grocery here>> I have some compassion for the person who is struggling to get by and shops there regardless of their shitty policies.
It sucks they put you on the chopping block because of the ego of some douchebag. I've had that happen at other companies for more mundane shit (didn't end up getting fired over this and the store manager ended up getting fired after they moved over similar stupid policies) and I do my best to advocate for changes within the healthcare system that I'm in, but I think there also needs to be space for intersectionality and comfort of life to be examined. I'm going to have far more leniency on a black woman going to work for a DEI team at an objectively evil corporation, for example. They may be able to effect some level of change in such an organization - never enough to stop the organization from being evil, but it's a very different set of identities and contribution than the programmer helping to create the software which is contributing to the evil corporation.
I think this is the crux of our minor disagreement. I'm perfectly fine with not absolving and pointing blame where blame is due. I also don't find it a moral failing that people have a bucket of...
But also I have compassion on some level for absolving or not doing purity tests in certain contexts.
I think this is the crux of our minor disagreement. I'm perfectly fine with not absolving and pointing blame where blame is due. I also don't find it a moral failing that people have a bucket of shame because of it. Nobody is burning in hell for unabsolved minor sins (ignoring the state of climate crisis on that). Only that they look at it, acknowledge its existence, and maybe work toward shrinking it. Like a smoker acknowledging that they are killing themselves by continuing to smoke, rather than parroting talking points about why they should be permitted to do in diners again.
And, as you accurately point out, recognize that this is a horrific failure of capitalism: That it will inevitability build the Torment Nexus. It's why we should be looking to dismantle as many private-sector pocket-lining schemes as possible and replacing them with well-funded public sector solutions.
I eat meat. I am part of the industrialized farming problem, not the solution. I am not somehow blameless for its continuance because of my circumstance. And I have to live with that choice.
Early in my career I built my share of Torment Nexuses. I think part of the trap is how (at least here in America) your work and social lives are often intertwined to some degree--the people you...
Exemplary
Early in my career I built my share of Torment Nexuses. I think part of the trap is how (at least here in America) your work and social lives are often intertwined to some degree--the people you work with are also the people you tend to socialize with, and make friends who you hang out with after and outside of work. Even if you manage to break free of the toxic mindset and realize that what you're doing is bullshit and making the world a worse place, to walk out on the job can also mean walking out on your entire social life, making it even harder.
For me, an additional problem was that we lived in a part of the country where there wasn't really a thriving tech scene--if you wanted to be a programmer you had a choice of maybe half a dozen companies to apply to at most, and they were all either working on boring products with terrible tech stacks or in the advertising industry building products with the sole purpose of moving money from unsuspecting "customers" into the pockets of your bosses while providing as little value as possible. So moving to a better job also meant moving away from my wife's family (who were an extremely valuable resource because both me and my wife were working and we had two young children). We did end up moving as soon as I had a new opportunity, but it was not an easy decision or adjustment to make. We had to leave our entire support network--all our frends and family, and moved to an unfamiliar city where we didn't know anyone and started over from scratch.
In the end it worked out great--I love where my career ended up going and it never would have happened if I hadn't taken that leap, and I'm working on stuff now that doesn't make me feel like a scumbag or give me existential nightmares. But I bring this up because the factors that go into staying in these kinds of jobs is often more than just a simple "I need food and healthcare" that you could get at a different job. In a country where your job often dictates several aspects of your identity and life it's not such a simple decision to move on.
Good God, I read that article and I've gotta say, it's bold of you to admit to all of that on the internet. Do you know if A) anything you guys were doing there was illegal? And I don't mean...
Good God, I read that article and I've gotta say, it's bold of you to admit to all of that on the internet. Do you know if A) anything you guys were doing there was illegal? And I don't mean "maybe we could wiggle out of this because we kinda sorta ish did the legal steps required", but do you think it runs afoul of the spirit of any laws in the US? and B) was that a concern with management at all? Like did they openly speak about how what they were doing was illegal in any way? Did they bring it up at all or account for doing business in a legal grey area as a risk?
Not being a lawyer, I can't really answer the question on legality in any meaningful way. The company did have lawyers who would get involved once something crossed a certain threshold as far as...
Not being a lawyer, I can't really answer the question on legality in any meaningful way. The company did have lawyers who would get involved once something crossed a certain threshold as far as how much money was coming in, at which point they would write various EULAs and sometimes made us tweak things (like make the opt-out checkboxes more prominent, reword text we're displaying, and so on).
As for your second question, the complete opposite was true. When talking about the stuff we were doing, the higher up the management chain you went, the more everything was couched in language and worded in a way to suggest the products and services we worked on were completely legitimate and actually providing incredible value to people. The ads we serve are helping to connect people with companies and products that they otherwise would never know about. Our "customers" are "choosing" to install the software bundles we're distributing because they're useful programs. There's a lot of gaslighting that goes around and it can feel almost cult-like at times.
edit to add--One side-effect (maybe benefit) of working in that kind of environment and learning to see it for what it is, I think I've become much more skeptical of and innoculated against anything that has a similar odor coming from upper management in every company I've worked at since even in non-toxic industries. I'm not sure if it hurts or helps me these days, for example when everyone else is pumping their fists and jumping on the AI/LLM hype train I'm the cantankerous old greybeard yelling from the basement about how it's all a waste of time and people either don't want this shit or have unrealistic visions around what it's capable of. I'm not sure if I'd be as big a wet blanket if I hadn't lived through such an extreme example of how gaslighting and same-think can basically control an entire company's culture.
I'm not currently working for a company building a Torment Nexus, nor do I plan to work for one, ever. However, I grew up during the time that the author described as 'hopeful', hopeful that we...
I'm not currently working for a company building a Torment Nexus, nor do I plan to work for one, ever. However, I grew up during the time that the author described as 'hopeful', hopeful that we could use technology to actually improve the world, that things were getting better. I went into computing as a career not just because I thought I could make a living out of it, but because I genuinely loved the field and thought I could do good through it. That feeling was stripped almost before I started my education.
I mean, even before, there were parts of tech I didn't like, I was a FOSS software nerd overall. But I naively thought that somehow, software that did good would win, and that harmful software would be rejected. In some ways, I feel robbed of the future I grew up to believe I could contribute to.
I feel like the term Torment Nexus is being used really broadly to the point of not having much meaning. If your product is designed to make money by harming the attention-input to the money...
I feel like the term Torment Nexus is being used really broadly to the point of not having much meaning. If your product is designed to make money by harming the customer attention-input to the money machine, then sure, that feels fair to call a tournament Nexus. Deceptive ad platforms, much of social media, etc. But not every for profit soulless tech can be a "Torment Nexus" without diluting the meaning to nothing. Like, how is people soft or workday or MSSQL server harming the customer? Does it fund big tech? Sure. Are there problems with big tech? Yes. But is everything a torment Nexus? No.
Oh look out, it's the fun police. I help build the torment nexus by being on the offshore team for a company contracted by Dell to work on their ERP system (Microsoft Dynamics 356 for Finance &...
Oh look out, it's the fun police.
I help build the torment nexus by being on the offshore team for a company contracted by Dell to work on their ERP system (Microsoft Dynamics 356 for Finance & Operations), so we subject people to owning Dell computers.
On a more serious note I do genuinely wonder sometimes if working for the benefit of megacorporations goes against my politics and my morals, but working on the report that tells them if they don't have enough components on hand to fulfill some orders even after considering substitutes (damn you Order Shortage Report) probably doesn't do much harm.
Then again the people working on actual torment nexuses probably also tell themselves that their individual contributions aren't that bad
I think a lot of people, including the author, think of a very specific thing when they think of "tech". They think of software development, and very specifically software development at massive web companies like Google, Facebook, or Amazon. That's not what most tech jobs are though.
Most tech workers are not building the torment Nexus. They're installing email servers for medium sized businesses, writing databases for hospitals, answering calls at the help desk for the regional tire distribution company, or fixing networks at the supermarket chain.
The full stack JavaScript optimizer working 80 hours a week at Google and getting onsite massages along with his 600k a year total comp is a very very small minority within the tech field.
The good news about that is that if you don't want a job doing evil shit you can just... find a job where you don't do evil shit. Most tech jobs don't require you to negatively affect people's lives on such a massive scale
My job is stressful, frustrating, annoying, and hard at times, but it's not evil. I work for a local government, and most things I do help to make the lives of my neighbors safer, more convenient, easier, or more affordable. Yeah, I don't get paid Amazon money, but that's the tradeoff you make for your soul. I don't need Amazon money to be happy.
I don't have a whole lot of compassion for people who work in technology building awful shit who say things like "yeah, I know it's bad but you know, I have to eat". You can eat and not destroy the world, you just have to compromise, like you do with everything else.
You're not entirely wrong. But all these tech workers caving and buying things from the Nexus Makers are still building the Nexus, even if in service of something good. They're not designing and building it, but they sure are funding it.
How many of these good services will be willing to empower their tech workers to abandon the convienience of all Microsoft software in order to stop fueling the AI spend (both directly and via OpenAI)? To stop using AWS? To abandon Oracle for Postgres? To abandon Google or Facebook spyware? To stop them from installing surveillance? To kick the Chromebooks and iPads out of classrooms? Best I can tell the answer is an infantesimal rounding error, especially as the MBAs propagate like rats. I got laid off in part because I fought against those things in a sector I felt was trying to do good.
How many tech workers will quit jobs until they find an employer that will let them do these things? Also virtually 0. I'm hoping to thread that needle and fine one that will (PM me if you have any leads).
How many tech workers install Nest or Ring stuff in their home? How many will be willing to sacrifice a few FPS to stop buying NVIDIA cards? The list goes on.
At that level of responsibility, we're all responsible. I use tech, though that's not my profession. I don't demand we use open source software where I work. Do you? Is that level of purity-testing worthwhile in the pursuit of a better world?
I made an edit: Yes, I did. I fought for it with every RFP, fought against every step deeper into the ecosystem. Saved them a bunch of money by doing so.
And the reward for my efforts was being on the chopping block for layoffs after 13 years. Because the person writing the list of cut positions is really pushing for an Azure migration.
That's the whole point of the blog post: That if we're not willing to make those sacrifices for one reason or another, we get to live with the guilt. Or as the pious folks sometimes say: "The road to hell is paved with good intentions."
I broke my vow to not shop at Target since they kowtowed to the DEI mandates an hour ago. I made sure to steal enough that my visit was a net negative.
It's fundamentally a part of capitalism. Concentration of wealth leads to concentration of industries. Industry standards are driven by independent reviews, which when they get popular enough become their own institutions. These institutions end up propping each other up, and working with each other making competition difficult through direct and indirect means. Ultimately if things get enshittified enough we might see small changes over to a competitor and the cycle starts again.
A net negative is a win, that's praxis. But also I have compassion on some level for absolving or not doing purity tests in certain contexts. There's absolutely a difference between 600k a year and 200k a year, and I think differences like that are where we can draw the line. If Target has the cheapest/most convenient <<insert grocery here>> I have some compassion for the person who is struggling to get by and shops there regardless of their shitty policies.
It sucks they put you on the chopping block because of the ego of some douchebag. I've had that happen at other companies for more mundane shit (didn't end up getting fired over this and the store manager ended up getting fired after they moved over similar stupid policies) and I do my best to advocate for changes within the healthcare system that I'm in, but I think there also needs to be space for intersectionality and comfort of life to be examined. I'm going to have far more leniency on a black woman going to work for a DEI team at an objectively evil corporation, for example. They may be able to effect some level of change in such an organization - never enough to stop the organization from being evil, but it's a very different set of identities and contribution than the programmer helping to create the software which is contributing to the evil corporation.
I think this is the crux of our minor disagreement. I'm perfectly fine with not absolving and pointing blame where blame is due. I also don't find it a moral failing that people have a bucket of shame because of it. Nobody is burning in hell for unabsolved minor sins (ignoring the state of climate crisis on that). Only that they look at it, acknowledge its existence, and maybe work toward shrinking it. Like a smoker acknowledging that they are killing themselves by continuing to smoke, rather than parroting talking points about why they should be permitted to do in diners again.
And, as you accurately point out, recognize that this is a horrific failure of capitalism: That it will inevitability build the Torment Nexus. It's why we should be looking to dismantle as many private-sector pocket-lining schemes as possible and replacing them with well-funded public sector solutions.
I eat meat. I am part of the industrialized farming problem, not the solution. I am not somehow blameless for its continuance because of my circumstance. And I have to live with that choice.
Oh okay yea, I agree with you on this. We should be aware of the harm we are doing and work to minimize it, or other harms in the world where we can.
Early in my career I built my share of Torment Nexuses. I think part of the trap is how (at least here in America) your work and social lives are often intertwined to some degree--the people you work with are also the people you tend to socialize with, and make friends who you hang out with after and outside of work. Even if you manage to break free of the toxic mindset and realize that what you're doing is bullshit and making the world a worse place, to walk out on the job can also mean walking out on your entire social life, making it even harder.
For me, an additional problem was that we lived in a part of the country where there wasn't really a thriving tech scene--if you wanted to be a programmer you had a choice of maybe half a dozen companies to apply to at most, and they were all either working on boring products with terrible tech stacks or in the advertising industry building products with the sole purpose of moving money from unsuspecting "customers" into the pockets of your bosses while providing as little value as possible. So moving to a better job also meant moving away from my wife's family (who were an extremely valuable resource because both me and my wife were working and we had two young children). We did end up moving as soon as I had a new opportunity, but it was not an easy decision or adjustment to make. We had to leave our entire support network--all our frends and family, and moved to an unfamiliar city where we didn't know anyone and started over from scratch.
In the end it worked out great--I love where my career ended up going and it never would have happened if I hadn't taken that leap, and I'm working on stuff now that doesn't make me feel like a scumbag or give me existential nightmares. But I bring this up because the factors that go into staying in these kinds of jobs is often more than just a simple "I need food and healthcare" that you could get at a different job. In a country where your job often dictates several aspects of your identity and life it's not such a simple decision to move on.
Good God, I read that article and I've gotta say, it's bold of you to admit to all of that on the internet. Do you know if A) anything you guys were doing there was illegal? And I don't mean "maybe we could wiggle out of this because we kinda sorta ish did the legal steps required", but do you think it runs afoul of the spirit of any laws in the US? and B) was that a concern with management at all? Like did they openly speak about how what they were doing was illegal in any way? Did they bring it up at all or account for doing business in a legal grey area as a risk?
Not being a lawyer, I can't really answer the question on legality in any meaningful way. The company did have lawyers who would get involved once something crossed a certain threshold as far as how much money was coming in, at which point they would write various EULAs and sometimes made us tweak things (like make the opt-out checkboxes more prominent, reword text we're displaying, and so on).
As for your second question, the complete opposite was true. When talking about the stuff we were doing, the higher up the management chain you went, the more everything was couched in language and worded in a way to suggest the products and services we worked on were completely legitimate and actually providing incredible value to people. The ads we serve are helping to connect people with companies and products that they otherwise would never know about. Our "customers" are "choosing" to install the software bundles we're distributing because they're useful programs. There's a lot of gaslighting that goes around and it can feel almost cult-like at times.
edit to add--One side-effect (maybe benefit) of working in that kind of environment and learning to see it for what it is, I think I've become much more skeptical of and innoculated against anything that has a similar odor coming from upper management in every company I've worked at since even in non-toxic industries. I'm not sure if it hurts or helps me these days, for example when everyone else is pumping their fists and jumping on the AI/LLM hype train I'm the cantankerous old greybeard yelling from the basement about how it's all a waste of time and people either don't want this shit or have unrealistic visions around what it's capable of. I'm not sure if I'd be as big a wet blanket if I hadn't lived through such an extreme example of how gaslighting and same-think can basically control an entire company's culture.
I'm not currently working for a company building a Torment Nexus, nor do I plan to work for one, ever. However, I grew up during the time that the author described as 'hopeful', hopeful that we could use technology to actually improve the world, that things were getting better. I went into computing as a career not just because I thought I could make a living out of it, but because I genuinely loved the field and thought I could do good through it. That feeling was stripped almost before I started my education.
I mean, even before, there were parts of tech I didn't like, I was a FOSS software nerd overall. But I naively thought that somehow, software that did good would win, and that harmful software would be rejected. In some ways, I feel robbed of the future I grew up to believe I could contribute to.
I feel like the term Torment Nexus is being used really broadly to the point of not having much meaning. If your product is designed to make money by harming the
customerattention-input to the money machine, then sure, that feels fair to call a tournament Nexus. Deceptive ad platforms, much of social media, etc. But not every for profit soulless tech can be a "Torment Nexus" without diluting the meaning to nothing. Like, how is people soft or workday or MSSQL server harming the customer? Does it fund big tech? Sure. Are there problems with big tech? Yes. But is everything a torment Nexus? No.Oh look out, it's the fun police.
I help build the torment nexus by being on the offshore team for a company contracted by Dell to work on their ERP system (Microsoft Dynamics 356 for Finance & Operations), so we subject people to owning Dell computers.
On a more serious note I do genuinely wonder sometimes if working for the benefit of megacorporations goes against my politics and my morals, but working on the report that tells them if they don't have enough components on hand to fulfill some orders even after considering substitutes (damn you Order Shortage Report) probably doesn't do much harm.
Then again the people working on actual torment nexuses probably also tell themselves that their individual contributions aren't that bad