Tech Morality Is Hard
The article explores the ethical complexities and moral dilemmas faced by technologists in their work, arguing that navigating conflicting values, unintended consequences, and trade-offs makes clear-cut "right" decisions difficult in tech development.
Background
- This post wrestles with the idea that building technology is not morally neutral — every design decision encodes value judgments about how people should live, what trade-offs are acceptable, and who bears the risks.
- The author draws on the "techlash" era (the post-2016 wave of public backlash against Big Tech over privacy violations, misinformation, and algorithmic bias) to argue that Silicon Valley's old "move fast and break things" ethos was naive, but the current regulatory and cultural response often oversimplifies the moral dilemmas engineers actually face.
- Key subtext: many tech workers now feel paralyzed between defending their industry (straw-man accusations of "evil") and accepting a cynical view that all tech is extractive. The piece pushes for a more nuanced, virtue-ethics framework rather than simple rule-following or consequentialist calculus.
- Relevant history: the "tech morality" debate exploded around the 2016 US election (Cambridge Analytica, Russian disinformation on social media), then widened to include content moderation, AI ethics, gig-worker rights, and the environmental cost of data centers.