I feel like there's two groups in tech, and sadly the one I am in is way smaller. There's the silicon valley tech cowboys who love new tech and make things to see how they break things, impact be damned. And the people like me who think tech is cool, but maybe we should think about the ramifications of what we create before making it? And not make things that enforce capitalist norms on society etc.

I'm glad to work in a place where I don't need to juggle these concepts, and am free to create free and open software and data. And that mastodon is a place filled with more of my people than the other (though the others are here too to my dismay). I just really wish the field of tech contained more ethics and philosophy instead of just being treated as a purely scientific or mechanical endeavor, all engineering is highly political and we need to consider how it is and what impact we have.

@GLaDTheresCake IMO there's a big 'cultural inertia' component to this - I've been beating this drum in the Node.js IRC channel for years, and something that really stood out to me was that a lot of people didn't *decide* not to care, they simply never even were exposed to the idea that your design choices might have real-world consequences. It's just not part of the cultural fabric.

So yeah, I feel like this is one of those cases where 'awareness' is actually an important thing to work on, with accessible explanations as to how and why this matters (I often link people to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0ucEt-La9w but it's not particularly comprehensive), and really insistently spreading the idea that you hold responsibility for what you build.