Note that the underlying problem isn't that "tech" is good or bad, the problem is that tech workers over the past many years have evaded their responsibility to

Note that the underlying problem isn't that "tech" is good or bad, the problem is that tech workers over the past many years have evaded their responsibility to ensure that the work they do is beneficial rather than harmful by pretending that this responsibility didn't exist. That the responsibility lay elsewhere (on users, for example) or that the technology they were creating was somehow orthogonal to the issue of morality. And, further, you can see this influencing behavior at all levels, including behavior in the office and between coworkers. People see software like a bridge or a highway and imagine that simply building such things is morally neutral. But if you build a highway by destroying a neighborhood full of black businesses that has implications on society and racial equality. If you build a highway in a way that excludes the addition of a rail line along it or that has unusually low overpasses which limit where buses can take people then you are deepening socio-economic divisions and exclusions. (These aren't just hypotheticals, look up the history of Robert Moses for a prime example.) Stop thinking of tech workers as being part of some scrappy, underdog counter-culture. Geek culture is mainstream culture. The tech industry is the establishment. Tech workers are elites who are working to maintain the establishment. If you're a coder working at Facebook or Apple in 2017 you are little different from the people working at General Electric, Exxon, Union Carbide, Raytheon, Dow Chemical, or Phillip Morris back in the 1960s. You may wear a t-shirt, jeans, sneakers, and a hoodie while they wore business suits, but that's a superficial difference. What we build and what we do affects the world in profound ways. We must develop the skills to wrestle with the morality and the social consequences of what we build as well as take on the responsibility to build things that make the world a better place. We are not simply cogs in a machine, when we decide to go to work at amazon, or uber, or facebook we are making a choice in how our talents will change the world and affect people's lives. We need to be mindful of that. Every day.