Dan the company man felt loyalty to the corp
After 16 years of service and a family to support
He actually started to believe the weaponry and chemicals were for national defence
'Cause Danny had a mortgage and a boss to answer to
The guilty don't feel guilty, they learn not to.
brah. You will merely break many peoples bodies with explosives in the name of capitalism, corruption and colonization.
At my job I corrupt entire countries full of children, starting at an early age. I run user bucket targetting experiments on them to get them to spend more and steer them to befriend "friends" I select for them to optimize some pennies for our network edge performance. The measurements and manipulation of their vulnerabilities never stops. I take high resolution scans of their faces that we can use for the rest of their life to identify them anywhere--all so they can change their face to be an animated fox face, or stuff like that. I hope authoritarians never get ahold of this info because that could be bad for these consumers/kids, but hopes and prayers are not exactly my job. We never delete their info because parents click through the terms of service to shut their kids up. We say we educate kids to learn to program but inside the company that concept is spoken of mockingly.
I measure and steer their temperament and engagement with new games that are open to their worst impulses, and keep them on the treadmill. I transcribe and save literally every single word they utter. I analyze those spoken words for sentiment, and to build an ongoing model of which bucket they belong in to maximize their spending. The loaner? the helper? the team player? authority truster? authority abuser? rule driven, rule antidriven? I have loot, friends, new games, and contrived self serving "bugs" for all of them to find and think they are exploiting the games without my knowing.
I teach them to get addicted to loot boxes and I arbitrage endorphin hits between their peers and from the game. I give them their entire range of their lifes highs and lows. The best and worst times of their short lives are things I hand out. The later at night it is, or the longer their session, the more loot I give them to keep them playing. Like an IV drip of drug where sometimes you need to squeeze the bag to push more through to feel that hit strongly even when exhausted, and get them to defy their parents' calls for them to sleep.
You think darkness is your issue. But you merely adopted the dark for a paycheck; I was born into it right out of school, moulded by it. I didn't see socially useful internet services till I was an old man, by then it was nothing to me but a different way to drive engagement and raise the value on my rsus. My legacy will be a path of human wreckage and misery, same as yours only much bigger.
Every corp you work at has a dark side. Maybe not Lockheed Martin level of destruction.
My current job, we build systems to get people to spend more for things they don't need.
My last job, we provided technology to "free speech" folks and looked the other way unless legally obligated to take it down
The nonprofit i worked for spent 80% of their time and energy just for funding. Like $2mil a year, and 1.6mil went to paying staff.
Sometimes jobs frame it to look like it's a positive.
I worked at one company that "gave opportunities" to offshore engineers because they were a fraction the cost of Americans.
Another company outsourced our graphic design to people on Fiverr to help fund "freelancers", and then repurpose the work for million dollar ad campaigns.
And for me, I just constantly think of what the line is and how much of it I can cross to feed my kids.
If you can get a job for LM, you can get a job somewhere else. If a bit more money persuades you to help build child pulverizing machines, you never had any ethics to begin with.
I had a job offer from Cambridge Analytica, they were up front about the work they were doing as well as the pay. Though it was tempting to sell my soul for the pay, even I have my limits.
It could be worse like the insurance industry. It's bad that we need tools of war, but it is not like raping you and your doctor for your health care while making the CEO and investors rich.
Selling out being an option for people just means the system is working as intended. People are so poor they are willing to compromise their morals to keep food on the table
Someone has to learn the government secrets so they can spill it to the revolutionaries later when they become disillusioned so they can build their own weapons.
After a history of ethically questionable jobs, I thought I had escaped it into something almost benign where we were only wasting the money of other companies.
Recently we started going balls deep into making AI products, and I feel very uncomfortable with it