Don't Get Distracted (2017)

Professional Guilds and Collective Ethics

• Some argue for a software “guild” or union (inspired by actors’ unions) to set ethical guardrails, minimum rates, and constrain employers, especially around surveillance and dark patterns.
• Others note IEEE/ACM exist but lack “teeth”; they regulate members, not employers.
• Skeptics think any guild would be co‑opted, especially by the military, and that high pay will always attract engineers around restrictions.

Individual Responsibility and Moral Agency

• Many emphasize that individual engineers are the last line of defense and should say no to tracking, dark patterns, or weaponized code.
• Others push back: tools and money are morally diffuse; responsibility lies mainly with decision‑makers, not every contributor in the chain.
• There is disagreement over how far indirect responsibility extends (e.g., from Vim authors to weapons coders).

Military, Defense Work, and Geopolitics

• Strong divide: some refuse any work that directly enables killing; others see military tech as sometimes necessary for defense or deterrence.
• Several note dual‑use scenarios (earthquake survivor detection vs. urban targeting; E911 vs. authoritarian tracking).
• Some argue that refusing to support one’s military is naive or hypocritical, given the security it provides; others cite unjust wars, surveillance, and war crimes as reasons to abstain.
• Mandatory conscription contexts are raised to contrast voluntary ethical stances.

Ad-Tech, Surveillance, and Dual-Use Tech

• Multiple anecdotes of being “nerd‑sniped” into ad‑tech, big‑data targeting, facial recognition, and then feeling complicit or “icky” once consequences were clear.
• Concern that tools built for humanitarian or safety use are later sold for repression or mass surveillance.
• Debate over whether phones or devices are “listening” for ads; some point to sophisticated tracking without microphones, others cite ad products that do use voice data.

Activist Engineers, Codes, and Processes

• Suggestions include a software “Hippocratic Oath,” ethics courses, and company‑wide lines in the sand (e.g., no weapons or “destructive financial systems”).
• Others warn that overtly activist engineering could erode public trust, as some believe happened with journalism.
• Several advocate personal periodic ethics reviews and quitting when alignment breaks, while noting quitting is harder in a weak job market.

Where to Draw the Line & Structural Constraints

• Thread wrestles with spectrum cases: food preservation vs. weapons, hospital janitors vs. weapons coders, proximity fuzes vs. general tools.
• Some argue capitalism structurally limits worker choice; real power would require collective action to control the “why” of production.
• Others defend markets but criticize “late‑stage” shareholder dominance, seeing current problems as feudalism rather than inherent to markets.