- The Ranter
Are You Coding For Big Brother?
In today's (15th May 2017) Financial Times journalist Rana Foroohar has written a disturbing article entitled "Silicon Valley has too much power". Here's a brief extract (with apologies to the FT but we feel this is a special case):-
"the interests of the largest tech firms — from Google to Facebook — and the customers they supposedly serve are no longer aligned. “There’s a reason why culture and politics are being turned inside out to become more ego driven,” he says. “There’s an entire army of engineers at all these firms working to get you to spend more time and money online. Their goals are not your goals.”
Mr Harris has started a guerrilla movement, called Time Well Spent, to try and push tech companies to change their business model, having left Google after deciding that it was “impossible to change the system from within”. He’s not the only techie in an existential crisis over the fact that software is being used to reshape election results or lure poor people into predatory loans."
It's a sobering fact that the Big Tech companies that once attracted software developers because they were 'cool' now have all the features that George Orwell attributed to Big Brother in his cautionary masterpiece "1984". Working for Big Tech (Google or Facebook and probably Amazon) is no longer remotely cool, if it ever was, it's working for Big Brother to help manipulate and control the world's population on behalf of big business. At least our co-workers who, for instance, write software to control weapons of mass destruction, don't bleat on about it being cool.
So coders at Google and Facebook - drop this 'cool' crap and accept who you are, Big Brother's shock troops. Big Tech = Big Brother.
