@thomasfuchs only Google and Facebook? I can think of several other giant tech companies directly and gleefully contributing to the erosion of the internet and personal computing.

@thomasfuchs they are the same as ICE agents.

All of big tech and mainstream media

@thomasfuchs amen! boycott the people socially as well as their products economically!

@thomasfuchs I don't think it's talked about enough that a lot of those people are 'locked in'. I know at least 2 people that are just counting the days until their contracts are done, their shares are vested, and they actually get what they signed up for. Both of them have families. One of them has large medical bills.

I think the exodus will be slow instead of sudden. But it will come over time.

@thomasfuchs The same goes for any dev of any level who creates the tools that harm.

@thomasfuchs collaborators is the only appropriate term. There is no innocence here any longer.

@thomasfuchs But money! /jk

@thomasfuchs reminds me of a certain former Google engineer expressing demeaning opinions of Cloudflare employees. My thought: “but you were happy to take a paycheck from Google while they let Trump use their platform… do you not think this is more consequential?”

All former US big tech people are scabs, no exceptions.

@thomasfuchs I was invited to interview with Google when I left grad school. I turned it down then as they seemed “creepy” to me then (15 years ago). Classmates thought I was crazy. Turns out everything I thought was creepy then (the way they treated people in general) was absolutely right on. The issues aren’t new. @grrrr_shark

@thomasfuchs Yeah, I don't know. I don't like to engage in job-related purity testing (especially when it's common in tech for e.g. people's immigration status to be tied to their job), but I was already side-eyeing people working at those places a solid decade ago, and things have gotten immeasurably worse since

@thomasfuchs had a guy come into my bike shop just yesterday to buy a bike and he was name dropping (multiple times) that he moved here to work for Google… I had to fight so hard to not be like "Am I supposed to be impressed that you're deliberately ruining the world?" but I really can't afford to be fired (or lose a sale) today.

I should have been like "can you finally delete my Google account that it literally won't let me delete without paying for a subscription because you can't delete a Google account with old GCP projects still on it, but also you can't delete old GCP projects without having an active subscription"?

@thomasfuchs I used to know exactly one dude who worked at facebook. He was married to a friend of my wife and he was an obnoxious douche. We barely tolerated him when we had to interact with him. Luckily, they're divorced now. Last time I checked he still worked for Zuckerberg. 🫠

@thomasfuchs I’ve never been to San Fran or Silicon Valley (hardly the US), but I recall 5-10 years ago seeing some tech people lamenting how the culture in Silicon Valley had clearly shifted from being dominated by “traditional geeks” to the types that previously would have gone into finance or business.

From my distant perspective, it seems that the industry just shifted dramatically under the feet of all of us weirdo geeks and with the suddenly risen stakes, are kinda at a loss at what we’re part of.