It's a Lot Easier to Participate in the Unethical System Than to Oppose Injustices in It
As a general rule, or as we put it yesterday with the examples of Assange and Dotcom (quick followup on Dotcom here), antagonising powerful people or companies (sometimes governments, though governments are typically controlled by those same powerful people or companies) is the "harder" way to live. It's a moral way to live, sure, but that does not mean it rewards people in terms like money or fame.
I recently wrote a number of lengthy essays about what drew me into writing about technology not just in the 'pure' sense (like programming stuff, which I used to write a great deal about). What good is another line or code (or another million lines of code) if that code gets misused to do harm to society? There's a wide range of activities that may leverage some code to discriminate, to intimidate, even to kill. That's not to gloat about misguided people who want to exclude particular coders and users. Rather, it's about taking a stance against apathy, maybe against cowardice.
That cowardice isn't about "obedient" or careless coders. It's also about the media. The parrots who spread Apple's lies this week (claiming that it invests vast amounts of money in the US, exceeded by Apple's deep debt) or insist that each time Microsoft is shutting something down or laying off plenty of people it's to "invest in hey hi" (AI) are part of the problem. Days ago we showed that The Register MS is being paid to participate in this misinformation campaign, propping up bubbles. Those bubbles will cost all of us a great deal; think about how they'll evaporate people's pension funds. It is highly immoral; it's self-serving and they don't seem to care about us, the "externalities".
When RMS (founder of GNU/Linux) was viciously attacked some years ago the attacks were spearheaded by the very same crowd that attacks my wife and I [1, 2]. They wanted to turn a person with lots of accomplishment under his belt into a perceived villain that must be ostracised and deleted from history. They didn't get their way (some of them suffered breakdowns or health catastrophes; some careers ended); but they did waste a great deal of time and caused a lot of trouble. Later it turned out that some of those people were themselves pedophiles (even with convictions). Some of them were simply projecting.
Going after powerful and high-budget interests is never easy; when I began exposing EPO corruption it took the EPO only a year to spend loads of money on several laws firms in London - to harass, to bully, to spy on me. David Allen Green (Preiskel & Co.) protected me and I'm still grateful for it. He did that on a pro bono basis.
Here we are 10 years later and I'm still writing about EPO corruption on a regular basis. Nothing can stop my criticism of Microsoft either, not even monsters who strangle women and then use Microsoft money to bully those who merely mention that. █
