> you support what’s happening.

I don’t know that things are that black and white.

Do you feel the same about the billions of consumers who buy and use the products these companies make?

dns_snek 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

No because employees are making the actual thing that inflicts harm while consumers' actions are completely diffused and many steps removed from the harm they cause. That's why ad-tech is so effective in the first place.

Consumer pays $1.10 for a can of coke, $0.10 of that goes to ad-tech, the consumer watches some coke ads, ad-tech pays $0.05 to the publisher and the consumer receives $0.05 in benefits in the form of "free ad-supported content" (which they already paid $0.10 for).

The only way for consumers to avoid this is to just stop spending money with any brand that advertises online, which is completely unrealistic and a much taller ask than asking employees to give up their deal with the devil (and work for just about anyone else except big tech).

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reactordev 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Replace “tech” in this scenario with “ammunition”.

Does your argument still hold up?

>”employees are making the actual thing that inflicts harm while consumers' actions are completely diffused and many steps removed from the harm they cause.”

“employees are making the actual thing that inflicts harm while consumers' actions directly cause deadly harm.”

I’m not arguing that we shouldn’t be voting with our wallets and supporting these people but your initial argument is flawed. They produce goods precisely because consumers buy them…

	▲	hamdingers 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> Replace “tech” in this scenario with “ammunition”. Does your argument still hold up? Can you explain why you think it wouldn't? Tons of principled engineers choose not to pursue opportunities at military contractors, for instance, and this is not widely seen as unreasonable.
	▲	dns_snek 7 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I didn't say "tech", I said "ad-tech" and "big tech" (meaning ad-tech like Google, not TSMC) which aren't morally neutral like ammunition is. Invasion of privacy and exploitation of private information is an inherent part of their business model.

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lukan 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

"The only way for consumers to avoid this "

Or they could stop drinking coke? But I guess that is too much to ask.

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account42 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That's what gp said, except Coke isn't the only thing that funds the advertising industry - it's pretty much every product you can buy.

	▲	cogman10 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's not perfect, but you can go a pretty long way by prioritizing store brands when possible. Stores still fund the advertising industry but to nowhere near the extent that name brand goods do.

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dns_snek 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You can avoid coke but approximately every brand in the supermarket is funding ad-tech. And even if you can find brands that don't, your supermarket is likely funding ad-tech to advertise itself so you can't go to there at all. Maybe you still have a farmer's market but chances are that they're advertising online.

You can't buy a car or any smartphones you've ever heard of, you won't find an ISP that doesn't advertise online, and good luck finding a decent job without supporting ad-tech.

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cogman10 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There's a large difference in the magnitude of spending.

A big chain like kroger, for example, is spending around 10 to 100M. Coke is spending around $5B.

Avoiding national branded products goes a long way in avoiding contributing to the problem.

Things don't need to be all or nothing.

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homeslice69 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Coke is always a discretionary purchase. Basic food staples are not. Kroger relies on national brand advertising to lure people from the perimiter of the store into junk food land.

	▲	cogman10 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Most (maybe not all) basic food staples have store brand alternatives. Even junk food does. Sometimes (maybe even often) those products are just repackaged version of the name brand. If the goal is to decrease money going into advertisement budgets, then the best thing you can do is buy store brand when possible. Even if both products are ultimately made from Nestle corp, the cheaper store brand will send less money into Nestle's pockets which means less money for advertising. That's what I mean by "avoiding nationally branded products". A package of "signature frozen peas" will taste just as good as the "birds eye green peas" without sending money to a major company (Looks like all the major companies have spun off their frozen food departments, but at one time this was a Nestle brand. I spent too much time looking into major frozen food brands :D). The advertisement budgets for the grocers are simply a lot smaller than that of the national brands across the board. It also doesn't seem (to me at least) to have been really spent on invasive advertisements.

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cindyllm 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]

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cindyllm 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]

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Paracompact 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There are degrees of culpability in any discussion. Generally, this is approximated by how much damage you individually are doing to your society compared to the alternative. You have to consume a lot of a company's products before your impact is comparable to working for them.

	▲	Eddy_Viscosity2 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Exactly. If you have regular meetings on how to best progress development of the torment nexus, then you can't claim innocence just because you aren't the one deploying the torment nexus for torment-purposes.

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testfrequency 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Consumers less so.

They are the victims, not the source.

	▲	amelius 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Fully agree. If you want to put the blame on consumers, at least show them on your adverts, product packaging, etc. all the morally abject methods used in the production of the product. If you hide it from them, all the blame is on you.

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cucumber3732842 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Black and white thinking is a large part of what got us here.