Tech has always been breaking social contracts. It’s how we roll. We did the same thing with taxis and travel accommodations to name a few.

We hid our “we know better” hubris under the term “disruption” because the reality (breaking everything) was a little too unsettling for us.

We ignore laws and regulations where we know better of course. Don’t you love having a homey place to stay while travelling that has just a few weird rules, a small to-do list and stays spotless thanks to that cleaning fee?

And look at all the good we did! A whole new world of slaves (oops gig workers - sorry!)

And of course we’re doing it again with information and content. We should be in charge of monetizing all your work because you’re not responsible enough to do it right. It furthers our need for power and control. Oops we meant to help make the world a better place (We keep doing that, sorry.)

> Tech has always been breaking social contracts. It’s how we roll. We did the same thing with taxis and travel accommodations to name a few.

It is not how I roll and it never has been. I don't and won't make things that are responsible for putting people out of work; I make things that make their jobs less shit. I won't make choices that make things more dangerous or less ethical.

This is a choice you can make. Beware of sitting back and saying "we" when you could be in a position to say "you".

It's possible to do no deliberate evil, to avoid using euphemisms for firing people, to avoid fire-at-will culture. It's also possible to fight against major ethics lapses and immorality.

At the best — highest-paying, most dynamic, most fun — job I ever did, I probably did more good in the relevant industry in one afternoon by writing down my concerns, printing a resignation letter, making both my employer and their client aware it existed and offering to sign it, than I've ever managed since. (You can maybe only do this once per working lifetime; use it wisely)

Even the project I worked on that I was sure would put dozens of identifiable people out of work didn't, because we found a way they could use the product to continue their original tasks until their existing contracts expired/they moved on/they retired and their team could be scaled down through gentle non-replacement.

One of the earliest things I was taught about system design is that sometimes even jobs that appear to an outsider to be noisy, exhausting or miserable give people purpose and meaning; you have to look people in the eye when you talk about things that could eliminate their job role. You don't replace a job that doesn't need replacing. And you have to look at the things they do with care and duty and make sure your systems do the same.

If you come from a corporate culture that treats this as anathema, you should work to change it or quit.

Yeah, small city I grew up in there are no longer taxis. Used to be a semi full time position for 1-2 people, so any night you could get a taxi if you arrived by train or needed to get home from somewhere. Most nights operated of course on a loss, but made up for on the volume during some weekends or periods of the year (like winter holidays). But then when the taxi monopoly broke down, more people started to compete on the lucrative weekends. Good in the start, quicker to get a cab and price decreased. But then the original cab drivers couldn't sustain the new lower income, and got other jobs. No one wants to be up night to Wednesday for perhaps two trips, so now it's impossible to hail a cab most days.

And the relevance here is how this disruption played out. Will the same happen to open source? See it already for instance in how AI makes some maintainers burn out. Where will it lead?

Somewhere at the very beginning of my career, the second year I think, I was part of the team that visited a location of the company we were selling our SaaS solution to, in a branch that was back then still dependent on Excel sheets.

The owner of the company lead us to a large open office with about 30 people working in there, mostly women, and whispered to us that he expects he'll only need three of them after subscribing to our product.

That's when I realised the brutality of what we are doing, and the sales guy I was with realised we should be charging significantly more.

> Tech has always been breaking social contracts. It’s how we roll. We did the same thing with taxis and travel accommodations to name a few.

"We"?

Anywhere in the world I vastly prefer an Uber over a getting a cab off the street. Safer and overall better experience.

> Tech has always been breaking social contracts

The unnecessary hyperbole ruins your argument. Not all of tech is about breaking social contracts. Whose livelihood is destroying the engineer that design better protein folding software? Linus made the world better and richer for everyone. Even the humble startup shipping yet another calendar tool isn’t harming anyone or being the direct cause of layoffs of other workers.

Not everybody works for Uber.

Oh, I think it goes further than that. Many of these companies would not exist without massive subsidies. Their business models were untenable without some monied interest pumping them up. And where did they get their money from? Mainly money-printing, rent-seeking, usury, or good ol' legalized fraud (which is what I consider "burying a right to sell your information to advertisers in the ToS, to the tune of orders of magnitude more value than you get from the service").

And it's not that their services were fulfilling a need, just at a large social cost. Many created a need by using those massive amounts of funding to destroy existing, sustainable services. They're a net negative for the economy and society because they replaced workable businesses (albeit with limited reach because the users bore the full cost) with businesses that will collapse because they're built around ubiquity and forcing non-users to shoulder part of the cost (the only way to break even while paying back investors).

The is a US-centric perspective.

I'm not going to deny the starting premise (tech breaks things, sometimes laws), but I don't think your follow-up is fair (we are responsible for all negatives).

Why is it our fault that governments have completely abdicated their responsibilities? Why is it our fault that everyday people literally refuse to become politically or economically literate and/or vote?

Tech has given the world, for essentially free, the entire wealth of human knowledge at their fingertips. We've given them ways to learn and communicate. We've overhauled transportation and logistics and payment. Fairly soon (decades), human labor may be obsoleted and who knows what good that may bring us.

And, yes, we also gave them mass surveillance and gig economies and hyper-addictive systems. Just like engineers gave us guns and chemists gave us poison and physists gave us nuclear bombs and doctors gave us lobotomies.

They had quite literally decades to recognize the threat. We screamed the dangers from the rooftops and in congressional hearings. We told people social media is poison. Betting sites are poison. You are the product. Watch out for market capture. You need to legislate us.

Normal folk called us crazy nerds and basically told us where to shove our concerns. But now it's our fault, naturally. We didn't do enough. We didn't perceive all possible outcomes, assume the world would be negligent, and refuse to make things we thought would be helpful - as if someone else wouldn't have thought of such Einstein breakthoughs as "socialize online" or "couch jumping online" or "taxis.. online".

And just to be clear, I'm speaking collectively just because you are. I make very boring stuff that is well within the confines of the law and only serves to help people.

All true, indeed. However, it does feel especially sobering realizing tech is hitting its own ouroboros point: a point where it starts to break social contracts that it designed to begin with.

> We hid our “we know better” hubris under the term “disruption” because the reality (breaking everything) was a little too unsettling for us.

That's not quite right. For a decade, the silicon valley mantra was "Move fast and break things", and it was largely accepted as a good thing. The prevailing wisdom was that this "internet" thing was going to fundamentally change the structure of human society, and nothing would ever be the same again. We ignored the laws, and society broadly accepted that those laws weren't fit for this new world of abundance and information freedom anyway. Big tech was offered broad protection from any responsibility through laws such as Section 230, which basically says they can't be blamed for anything, as long as they structure their services as a "market".

After 20 years, I think we've found that actually the structure of human society has remained largely the same. The things we all need are still the same. The only thing we actually disrupted was the economy, such that we now can't produce and disburse the things we need.

Luddites also complain about disruption, you know

The social contracts for taxis and hotels like most sucked anyway. They were in the best case socialism and in the worst case communism. We need more freedom, not less.

Though based on what I've heard it's ironic that nowadays Uber is mostly just like a plain old taxi company. Gone are the days of "ride sharing" when you could make some extra bucks if you wanted to.