Long term readers will have noticed, and everybody else is about to be told, that this blog has had posts in the Responsibility category since 2010. I’m not rigorous in my use of WordPress categories, but it’s not much of a stretch to assume that most of those 40 posts touch on professional ethics, and that most of the posts on ethics in this blog are in that category.
In recent times, the idea that maybe the world of computing should take its head out of its butt and consider its impact on wider society has escaped the confines of goggle-eyed loon practitioners like yours truly and hit the mainstream. In the UK, newspapers call for change: the leftist Guardian writes “Big tech is broken”, and liberal centrist paper the Independent tells us that “Those of us with any sense of morality should hate Apple“. Editorials document how social media platforms, decrying fake news while running ads for anyone with the dollars, have supplanted democratic rule with new, transnational, shareholder-run government. They show how the new unicorn startups achieve their valuations by disrupting labour law, reversing centuries of gains in workers’ rights by introducing the neoserfdom of gig economies and zero-hour contracts.
Software is eating the world, and turning it into shit. You can no longer pretend that it isn’t happening, and that you are not playing a part. That supporting the success of your favoured multibillionaire transnational platform vendor isn’t helping to consolidate ownership of society among the multibillionaire platform vendors. That your part is just making the rockets go up, and that where they come down is a different department. That your job is not a position in society and without consequence.
