> should be a little ashamed. Aren't we though? In my experience people that are super proud to be working close to things like adtech or social media are gen

> should be a little ashamed. Aren't we though? In my experience people that are super proud to be working close to things like adtech or social media are generally early-career, and haven't worked out for themselves yet how these things are a huge net-negative. At least you could make the argument that AI is more ambiguous. And whether you're a data-scientist, application developer, or infrastructure engineer, the situation is the same. I think we'd all rather be curing cancer, working on climate change, maybe even doing meaningful work in the government sector. Those jobs mostly don't exist, and where they do: they don't pay market rates, and they aren't like other tech jobs where meaningful experience is much more important than things like academic credentials. Regarding market rates, one could argue that tech workers are in a privileged position and should have the luxury of concluding that money isn't everything. But even without dependents, even with a tech salary, for lots of people housing is still pretty unaffordable, healthcare is nuts, retirement pushed back or seeming impossible. This kind of insecurity understandably leads to scarcity mentality where honesty/integrity and other ideals of how to be a morally upright citizen are on hold, and slimy behaviour or at least associating with slime is just normal. Most money of any kind isn't clean if you really look into it, and it seems like there's fewer ways to earn an honest living in tech compared to say blue-collar work. Coding was still mostly fun and games maybe as recently as 10 years ago, but weaponized disinformation is bringing it closer to something like chemistry, where even if you're not working on nerve-gas you're probably still trafficking with adjacent big-pharma, oil companies, etc. But there's a lot more tech-workers than chem PhDs. Shame seems like it's still required, but actually feeling guilty requires responsibility, and responsibility requires viable alternative options.