2 ms·
I think you get that response because the computing industry has been constantly attacked with very flimsy, weak and agenda-driven accusations of unethical beha
by peoplewindow 9y ago
I think you get that response because the computing industry has been constantly attacked with very flimsy, weak and agenda-driven accusations of unethical behaviour, for a very long time. So these sorts of accusations have lost their power, there were too many boys crying wolf.
A large part of this was driven by the decline of the newspaper industry. At some point Murdoch decided that Google was evil because of Google News, and the future of news was the iPad. This from a guy who never even uses email. So he gave some speeches and the orders went out and the Murdoch press immediately started attacking Google with very dubious stories, alleging unethical behaviour. I remember this inflection point quite well. For instance the WSJ paid someone to go digging and they found that the behaviour of Safari had changed with respect to third party cookies, in ways that weren't following the specs, and now some old code Google used was setting cookies too widely or something. This regression had of course not been noticed by anyone because everything still worked. So they blew it up into a major drama and claimed it was all an evil conspiracy, instead of a bug in Safari. Meanwhile Apple got glowing praise and a free pass.
It wasn't just Murdoch of course. The whole industry started attacking internet companies and it was all about money. See the "Google Tax" in Germany, Spain etc. So the supposedly unethical behaviour they were trumping up was very often not unethical at all, or only unethical by some totally meaningless redefinition of the word (e.g. all advertising being considered unethical).
So when Kumail tweets - and the purpose of tweeting is to get noticed and spread a message, so I give him no slack for that - and this gets picked up and inflated by the media, my impression of Kumail goes from neutral to bad. Twitter is not a reasonable place to start a debate about the ethics of technology and if he was an engineer and not an actor, he'd know that. But he's just an actor. So why give a shit?