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Reminder that as a technologist, everything you do is political. You are building the context inside of which society exists. You are building the canals along

Reminder that as a technologist, everything you do is political. You are building the context inside of which society exists. You are building the canals along which power flows. What you're doing might seem innocuous. It might be innocuous at the time. But as the pieces fall into place, as it responds to pressures from the market and the state, it might transform into something else entirely. Assuming this story is true, the tooling that was used here probably started it's life much like Dropbox. What more innocuous app is there then that? I don't really have answers for how to respond to this information; it's something I'm still working on myself. But as a community and industry, we can't blink it.

poisonborz 4y ago
Absolutely this. Society, and the industry itself views software engineers still as highly paid blue collar workers doing menial plumbing tasks. In reality they are writing the words on the pages of social engineering. It can be a washing machine firmware programmed to ignore circumstances that could save shelf live of the device, networking firmware giving access to manufacturer that could be backdoored, game development where other parts of the software siphon data to advertisers, all realms of software has the potential to be a tool of adversaries. While this potential is there for every paid job ever, software works invisibly, it's untraceable and ununderstandeable for the general population. The profession would gain a lot from something like a code of conduct that everyone could make an oath to.
- smoldesu 4y ago
  > The profession would gain a lot from something like a code of conduct that everyone could make an oath to. They have a word for this in non-American countries - "regulation".
  - maxbond 4y ago
    There are regulations we should adopt, but what GP proposed is a bottom-up rather than a top-down approach like regulation. For instance, we could, as software professionals, take an oath not to write malware or spyware ("malware with a budget"), and at the same time, take an oath to invest time in the security of a piece of software. If a civil engineer is approached to design a bridge in an unsafe manner, it is the expectation of society that they will refuse. If that bridge collapses, they're expected to take responsibility and to participate in an investigation to ensure this never happens again. We should be thinking along these lines. I used to think I was just a hacker and that software engineer was just a job title. After reading this series of blog posts [1], my eyes were opened. Once I accepted I was some kind of engineer, I asked myself what that meant. What I realized was, an engineer has a responsibility to society, because they build the context society inhabits. That's what separates them from a hacker or tinkerer, exploring in their garage for the joy of it. In your garage you can be an artist, accountable to no one. When you build the systems people rely on every day - you aren't a hacker anymore. [1] https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/are-we-really-engineers/ https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/are-we-really-engineers/
draw_down 4y ago
This doesn’t actually tell us anything though. In this view buying grapes at the market is a political act.
- maxbond 4y ago
  How so? I'm suggesting that when you build infrastructure that profoundly effects society, it cannot be said to be apolitical or value neutral. In what way is this comparable to buying grapes?
psychomugs 4y ago
"Whether or not it draws on new scientific research, technology is a branch of moral philosophy, not of science." - Paul Goodman Having spent a decade in engineering academia with a fair bit of time in companies, it's deeply troubling how little attention is paid to this sentiment.

poisonborz 4y ago

Absolutely this. Society, and the industry itself views software engineers still as highly paid blue collar workers doing menial plumbing tasks. In reality they are writing the words on the pages of social engineering. It can be a washing machine firmware programmed to ignore circumstances that could save shelf live of the device, networking firmware giving access to manufacturer that could be backdoored, game development where other parts of the software siphon data to advertisers, all realms of software has the potential to be a tool of adversaries. While this potential is there for every paid job ever, software works invisibly, it's untraceable and ununderstandeable for the general population. The profession would gain a lot from something like a code of conduct that everyone could make an oath to.

smoldesu 4y ago
> The profession would gain a lot from something like a code of conduct that everyone could make an oath to. They have a word for this in non-American countries - "regulation".
- maxbond 4y ago
  There are regulations we should adopt, but what GP proposed is a bottom-up rather than a top-down approach like regulation. For instance, we could, as software professionals, take an oath not to write malware or spyware ("malware with a budget"), and at the same time, take an oath to invest time in the security of a piece of software. If a civil engineer is approached to design a bridge in an unsafe manner, it is the expectation of society that they will refuse. If that bridge collapses, they're expected to take responsibility and to participate in an investigation to ensure this never happens again. We should be thinking along these lines. I used to think I was just a hacker and that software engineer was just a job title. After reading this series of blog posts [1], my eyes were opened. Once I accepted I was some kind of engineer, I asked myself what that meant. What I realized was, an engineer has a responsibility to society, because they build the context society inhabits. That's what separates them from a hacker or tinkerer, exploring in their garage for the joy of it. In your garage you can be an artist, accountable to no one. When you build the systems people rely on every day - you aren't a hacker anymore. [1] https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/are-we-really-engineers/ https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/are-we-really-engineers/

draw_down 4y ago

This doesn’t actually tell us anything though. In this view buying grapes at the market is a political act.

maxbond 4y ago
How so? I'm suggesting that when you build infrastructure that profoundly effects society, it cannot be said to be apolitical or value neutral. In what way is this comparable to buying grapes?

psychomugs 4y ago

"Whether or not it draws on new scientific research, technology is a branch of moral philosophy, not of science." - Paul Goodman Having spent a decade in engineering academia with a fair bit of time in companies, it's deeply troubling how little attention is paid to this sentiment.