Yep, the classic dilemma of software devs with YouTube on their resume:
Keep working for YouTube, or never work at any other software company or non profit organization or any other employer that wants software devs, or any other kind of job, and just starve to death.
Its truly a shame the software dev's decisions are so binary.
Do you want me to come up with a personal recommendation for yourself?
With a job or other source of income, or lifestyle that propogates/depends on less overall harm.
So your plan is to write subversive fiction, and have third places where people will talk about theories.
Uh ok neat, we are doing that here, virtually, and people have been doing this on the internet for two or three decades.
(Insert Einstein's definition of insanity here)
So again, what's the actionable, definable, realistic plan?
...
I'm currently getting my ass downvoted into oblivion in another thread for saying that software developers unwilling to sacrifice their livelihoods or lower their quality of life, and who instead continue to write software that directly promotes corporate profit seeking and spreads fascist propoganda are part of the problem, that they bare some degree of moral responsibility for societal degredation.
"Someone else will just do the job."
To me it looks like a great many people have a vast, in depth understanding of all of the things that are broken with society, but we are already past the threshold where all of these people who understand the problems...
... well, they're unwilling or materially unable to...
... you know, do anything about it.
tl:dr;
we are already neofeudal serfs.
discussing theory is great, but if it doesn't lead to any actual, implementable plans for change, nothing will change.
Yes sacrifice your livelihood so that someone else can implement the feature anyway.
Yes, that's called having a backbone, aligning your actions with your own moral code.
This is the same logic as 'well if I had quit my executioner job, someone else would have done it, therefore I am a morally blameless and non hypocritical executioner who is against the death penalty.'
Just use an ad blocker.
Obviously this is the easy solution for yourself personally. Costs you nothing, benefits yourself, allows the systemic bad practice to continue.
The actually accurate analogue would be to contribute toward actually creating or maintaining a free and widely usable adblocker, an alternate platform, to do something that helps other people overcome the problem.
Failed joke attempt.
I am stealing this image though, its great =P
I was attempting to riff on the above joke by making another joke based on an equally absurd linguistic misunderstanding which would also lead toward the same punchline of car-involved sex acts.
Guess my delivery wasn't so great.
Intermittent explosive disorder involves repeated, sudden bouts of impulsive, aggressive, violent behavior or angry verbal outbursts. The reactions are too extreme for the situation. Road rage, domestic abuse, throwing or breaking objects, or other temper tantrums may be symptoms of intermittent explosive disorder.
Are you looking for the autoerotic asphyxiation community?
You know, the one where people pipe their car exhaust into their car and jerk off inside said car?
Yes, this as well.
All while the Democrat strategy was to... not do any effective counter propoganda at the same scale or in the same manner whatsoever, keep relying on the traditional media outlets that they also simultaneously know are dying and becoming more biased against them.
But then they also do a surprise pikachu face when the mediums they know are dying and irrelevant... don't reach people.
Oh I didn't say we should do nothing.
What I am saying is, is that we are past the threshold of a good future, for all but the hyper wealthy.
Yes, we can do things to make it a less bad future for the masses, but there is no realistic plan where everyone, all 340ish million Americans, all 8 billionish humans, get to be free.
Telling everyone authoritarianism is bad is not an effective strategy.
Evidence: It's what leftists and liberals have been doing for 8 years and it resulted in the greatest Republican sweep since Reagan.
You have to actually do things, things which have a realistic chance of working.
If your plan is to hope really hard, the lesson our hypothetical ancestors will learn is: Hopium cheerleading is an exhausting, virtue signalling waste of time that accomplishes nothing when it is not paired with actual, actionable plans.
Have you got any of those?
But uh, that shouldn't apply anywhere near as significantly to a software dev for YouTube, as compared to a person making shit tier wages at all call center or McDonalds or something.
The software dev is getting paid a whole lot more, has a whole lot more pre-existing wealth, has a resume that would enable pursuing other, similarly though perhaps slightly less lucrative jobs in the same line of work, that don't feed the beast as malevolently.
The beast that disproportionately feeds upon the objectively less well off and more victimized lower wage workers.
I used to work for MSFT. Large Intl. Import Export Firm.
Then I realized I could not stomach the guilt.
Took a voluntary paycut and worked a similar job for a Non Profit helping the homeless.
(Software Engineer, DB Admin, Data Analyst, Root Cause Analyst, BI Reporter/Analyst, blah blah blah.)
I am not holding software devs with huge salaries to any higher moral standard than I hold myself to.
Of course many, many people are basically stuck in a position where they have no realistic alternatives.
I very well understand the economic and societal factors that play into why people stay at jobs they hate, why people will not typically voluntarily risk their job for a moral stance.
It would be very stupid and shortsighted to say that everyone working paycheck to paycheck ahould commit noble economic seppuku out of protest.
But this thread is about Software Devs for one of the largest and best paying Software companies in the world.
They could protest. They could quit. They could afford that.
MSFT just fired a bunch of people who didn't want to work on projects or for a company which is directly aiding and abetting the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
The truth is most of these well off software devs do not have the moral backbone to do anything other than develop a self loathing complex, if they even care about anyone other than themselves at all.
Most of the people that I knew, the corpos, they took their high incomes and immediately became AirBNB or traditional landlords or house flippers.
They only cared about their net worth, all while basically pantomiming, Patrick Bateman style, concern and sympathy for all those affected by the problems they know they are excacerbating.