some asked about my thoughts on the ethics of full time employment in my intro thread (https://futureofcoding.slack.com/archives/CC2JRGVLK/p1632414970023600), since there were other topics in the thread as well i'm splitting them both out to threads here. this one will be just for the ethics of full time employment in tech. rant follows. it comes down to the power to say no meaningfully. full time employment ties your wellbeing to that of your employer. employers are fundamentally pro profit, or at least pro continuation of the organization generally (nonprofits don't tend to stop existing, partly because they hardly reach fundamental solutions, which... well, it's never incentivized) code has immense power to structure the very fabric of our world. i got into caring so much about this because of overdraft charges in the US, which i thought, there just has to be a better way this could work. why can't this shit be more instantaneous and easier to reason about. turns out that was partly just a money making scheme by the banks, but also? the US financial infrastructure is absolutely awful. and websites were always full of awful crap that made my life unmanageable as an invisibly disabled person (autistic, ocd, cptsd). every organization i've been part of in my decade of paid tech, no matter how nominally benevolent, has casually made decisions that harm others without consulting them. every single one. and i've worked at places that just like, taught literal arithmetic to elementary students. you'd think that could be harm free!! in my time as an SRE at google, I realized just how fundamental conflict and disagreement is to software. i was repeatedly incentivized to harm my end users and spin it as doing a good job. i saw the tendency of infrastructure teams to say no reflexively, even when there was clear benefit to users, and people actively depending on and asking for the features. at the same time, higher ups were saying satisfying the end user is in fact the most important thing. that we should be talking to them, doing surveys, etc. when i went to implement this, it was used against me in perf as being on task. same for when i tried to defend our data integrity SLO against a migration that would fundamentally break it, right after we'd just adopted it. i could've done better by those users if i'd actually been empowered to serve their needs. i could've done better by everyone impacted by my work across my whole time in industry, honestly. but i would've had to be able to actually listen to and trust users and other stakeholders. i couldn't do that and advance professionally. i couldn't for a decade, and i tried so hard. but serving users better and aligning interests with them has never been in the interests of my employers, and fundamentally can't be in the interest of any for profit organization as we structure them today. i think to do better we need platform coops where all stakeholders have governance power of some sort. literally all. i don't think we can ever make tech more usable or ethical without it. the reason is that tech is a wicked problem (wiki it) space, full of essentially contested concepts (wiki it) (this is not the venue for deliberation over these questions, but) two examples everyone will be aware of in some way: • what is a name • what is a gender really illustrate the point here. there is fundamental disagreement on these. with disagreements about such fundamental compound datatypes, the very idea of software correctness looks questionable at its philosophical foundations. correct for who? for what purpose? by what values? we can't even do the weak notion of software correctness we talk about these days, much less reliability or usability, and we're never going to get anywhere by ignoring the fundamentally socially complex nature of our work. corporations aren't suited to address those kinds of questions. they can't be. we've reached the point where tech is too personal, and as the personal is always political, corporations must try to grapple with political and social questions while being composed of individuals who are profoundly incentivized to never discuss such things bcz professionalism and for-profits-should-be-neutral-or-only-good-for-branding-reasons. that's some thoughts. (@Konrad Hinsen @Eric Gade since you both asked about it over in the original thread.)

Thanks a lot @heartpunk for this detailed explanation. No surprise so far - I think I have been led astray by focusing on "full-time", as opposed to for example "half-time". But that isn't the issue, it's really employment.

yea, i was using it as a shorthand for a specific employment arrangement

This was a very thoughtful rant, Sophie. I was cheering along with:

with disagreements about such fundamental compound datatypes, the very idea of software correctness looks questionable at its philosophical foundations. correct for who? for what purpose? by what values?

I just finished an interview with @Scott Anderson for the podcast, and one of the things we talked about (spoilers, haha) was the ethical / social / power dynamics in the emerging VR platforms. This whole area weighs heavily on my mind. I really appreciate you bringing this up here — and I wish I had more to contribute, other than to say "this is important", but.. I'm really not sure what to do next.

I think by aligning distributed governance with distributed ontology development we can perhaps make substantial progress on solving wicked problems and making steady progress around essentially contested concepts.

Can you elaborate on "distributed ontology development"?

Thanks for the term “wicked problem,” that was new to me

just that ontologies are good for standardizing machine readable versions of social concepts, which all essentially contested ones will always be. by distributed development i just mean your standard open source collaboration.

I think this problem is much more endemic than just in tech. The infrastructure for cooperatively disagreeing at the societal level just does not exist. Bret Victor talks about model-driven discussion quite a bit (an example: http://worrydream.com/#!/ClimateChange ) which would be a significant step up in how we do things. I agree about ontologies being useful, rather than the oft repeated maxim that systems should be value-neutral, I think they should be value-flexible. And more importantly, that flexibility should be usable at a local level, at the level of individual users and groups. We are dealing with large problems of scale in society now, the size of society is larger than the buffers of the environment it operates in, and it is vital that we find more efficient, and humane ways to communicate and coordinate, because the fallback is always a boot to the head (sorry, couldn't resist), since the most efficient form of communication is no communication, and the most efficient form of coordination is top-down command. But of course neither is at all humane. So, we are under a timer to solve these issues. I look forward to a future where I can talk to someone, have a debate based on actual data, with all the provenance information available, without having to think about all the technology that ties it all together. But this is a political problem as well, of course, even more than it is a technological one.

Just want to say that this conversation gets to the heart of so many things, important, persistent problems. I like @S.M Mukarram Nainar’s comment about "value-flexible." There isn't going to be one source of truth. So let's accept that. And how much truth do we need? For the task at hand, is name relevant? Make it more operational, "name on birth certificate" or "name as printed on passport." (I feel this being in the process of immigrating. Oh man, I have a son who may have three last names depending, and my wife who has at least four first names depending. And, come to think of it, I have two entirely different full names.) Ontologies, there's a word don't hear much. (I was adjacent to OWL back in the day.) These days though, I'm pleased when I see people using RSS rather than whatever siloed "top-down" app-driven garden walling fiefdom building technique is dreamed up. Lastly, it's interesting to scale down from the disfunction of organizations to the disfunction of individuals: even when we're well rested, actively trying to communicate (rather than self-deceive), and have aligned goals — it can be tricky to get a handful, two, even one person pointing in a useful direction. (Think of a change to some coding convention, say the lifecycle of model objects in your software.) So I guess as a prerequisite, a position of patience without complacency is where I have to start when surveying coordination problems.

I really liked following the wiki trail that started with wicked problems, then led to contested concepts, and then to contestable concepts in a shared ethical framework. Basically, if I understand correctly, if we can find common goals, we can stop the attempt to resolve a disagreement with logic, and consider tactics

Value-flexible is a nice concept. We also need value-explicit. Much technology enforces values that its designers would perhaps be ashamed to discuss in the open. Political debate should be both model-driven (for the non-social aspects) and value-driven (for the social aspects). There is one more aspect to political debates, which are related to technology as well but I don't see yet how they could be taken into account. In addition to having different values, and different information/knowledge about the outside world, people differ in attitude to risk-taking, novelty, etc.

@Konrad Hinsen I like value-explicit. Reminds me of a great talk by Bryan Cantrill: As for attitudes for risk-taking, etc, that is a good point. I think it indicates that a polyculture of communication/coordination methods are necessary. While there will always be failures in effective communication, I don't think it's the duty of us as toolmakers to design systems from the top-down to fix these problems entirely. But I do think we should give people the tools to communicate as they see fit. That said, I'd be interested to see if any research in psychology, economics, or something has some information about what the distributions for these things are emperically. We just had an election where I live, so I've been thinking about this a bit and had this idea. Political debates could be long-form with citations, on a mailing list or something similar, and happen asynchronously, which I think would work much better for actually debating policy. That said, some people just don't like reading long-form, so they could be summarized by third-parties (the moderating party, I guess) afterwards. Finally, I think we should recognize one of the key types of tools people use and need are mental tools. We talk a lot about tools for thought, but I think tools of thought are sorely neglected. By which I mean education. We should seriously consider educational reform as something to be designed for. Not only can education change the energy barriers around communication, it can also change the meta aspects, such as effective risk tolerance via reducing uncertainty about the world, etc. The principle I have in mind is that access to information should be accompanied by the tools to interpret and understand it. Or more generally, that new capabilities should be accompanied by the capabilities necessary to regulate them. One innocent example is office tools. Stuff like Microsoft Word has awful defaults, and doesn't even try to provide some knowledge of typography to their users. The end result is everyone suffering awful design everywhere, which can actually have practical results—improper typography can be and often is hard to read, and likely wastes lots of time on the scale of society as a whole.

@S.M Mukarram Nainar Your comment makes me wonder if wanting to fix problems is perhaps the ultimate problem with techies. It's of course a very good attitude for small-scale problems that you can fully comprehend. It's also a reasonable attitude for your own immediate problems. But on a larger scale, problem solving requires participation of all stakeholders, and tools that help people see, understand, and fix problems collectively, rather than being themselves the fix.

@Konrad Hinsen I would go even further. I don't really believe in problem-solving at scale at all in most cases. It's usually very ill-defined what a problem even is. Solving a problem is about meeting requirements, yet at scale formulating clean slate requirements is usually impossible—the naive solution of consensus does not generally work and is usually the problem. Ultimately it's both a problem of possibly conflicting values, as well as one of (computational) complexity. Optimal economic planning isn't feasible, and optimal societal action would require it for everything else. To be clear, I don't think that improving things is impossible. But "problem-solving" usually implies that there is some well defined problem you can find a perfect or closely approximate solution to by following the process. I think that ethos just doesn't apply at all. The best you can do is satisfice, and compromise. And that is in fact what happens, even when the problem-solving ethos is applied to societal problems—it's just that usually in those cases, the people compromising is some other group. That's why having better tools for coomunication and coordination is important since it allows for faster and more efficient negotiation of these dynamic equilibria, which is probably the best we can do modulo omnipotence.

There was a comment posted here by @Doug Luce to the effect of "welcome to capitalism". It was deleted due to "not adding anything to the conversation" but I completely disagree with that assessment. Maybe he was being a bit cheeky, but if you ask me, this thread could use a little cheek. The terse comment was in stark contrast to the long-form comments above, and challenged the fundamental nature of so-called "first world" work. So far, no one has even mentioned capitalism or class struggle, but it is painfully obvious. The power to say no is disintegrated in the capitalist mode of production, where the worker has little recourse and (at least in America) very little to no safety net. We only have the freedom to move from one profit-seeking company to another. Lack of agency for the worker in the capitalist pursuit of profit vs doing good for the common person is fundamentally and directly tied to capitalist vs worker (and thus civil) power. The discussion of value again does not explicitly bring in the context that within capitalism, the capitalist extracts value from the worker, regardless of the form that value takes. We will never be able to fix what is wrong with the world if we can't imagine a better one. Disabling capitalism as "inevitable" or "normal" is the first step. Challenging the idea that we have to live under it is crucial. @heartpunk mentions platform cooperativism, which points toward the solution, imho. Coops of all varieties will be essential to fixing the obvious drawbacks of capitalism. We, the 99%, now have the connective superpower called the internet, and we're not using it to its fullest potential.... yet.

@David Brooks I totally agree. I avoid using the word capitalism as a matter of habit because 10 people tend to have 11 different definitions for it. But assuming your definition accords with mine (which it appears to judging by the rest of your post), I think we have similar ideas in mind. The system as it is, however you call it, is utterly broken, and many of the cracks run on class lines, with vast amounts of power inequality making it hard to change it. However, as has been famously said, it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. The difficulty is not in imagining alternative systems (that's relatively easy), but in finding a mechanism to get from here to there. And so the issue is, who can we change the system, and in a good way? Crucially, since we want to resolve the aforementioned inequality, we need to do this without perpetuating them further. That means that large parts of the change has to done by people who currently lack power. The catch-22 for course is that those are the people who currently lack power, and so they simply can't do it as it is (unless you are proposing a violent revolution of some sort, which I find even more improbable). The big lever we have today is computation. I mean that in the broadest form. Changes in computation and communication have the potential to completely change how the game is played, opening up the crack for that mechanism we wanted. It follows that we should focus on this. In particular, what we call "end user" computation currently is critical, because it could ease off much inequality in the system. I agree that coops are great. But how are we going to get there? (Sorry if it seems that I was ragging on your post, that was absolutely not my intention. I just thought your post was a good jumping off point to write down some things I've been thinking about recently.)

Not at all @S.M Mukarram Nainar 🙂 I think those are excellent points. I agree, I think computation (more specifically in my mind "the internet") is the most powerful tool we currently have. It allows us to connect in ways that were unimaginable not long ago. I may be biased (I am a worker-owner at a coop) but I think it is widely held that supporting coops in all forms is a relatively proven plan to get us to a less exploitative, less extractive (less capitalist) world. If I remember correctly, the United Nations called 2012 "the year of the coop", and indeed coops have been sprouting up all over the place recently. It's never been easier to start a new coop, or convert an existing business into a coop. The Democracy at Work Institute https://institute.coop/ has highly recommended programs to do exactly that. And the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives https://www.usworker.coop/home/ , an organization dedicated to supporting the coop movement, has seen explosive growth in the past few years. There is a new coop in NYC https://drivers.coop/ that is competing with Uber and Lyft for their market and surprisingly doing very well. Each driver is an equal owner of that company, and each given a vote in how it is operated. So in summary, I'd say "jump in, the water's fine" :)

I’ve also been thinking about coop forms of organization, and how they might be really well suited to projects that spin out of communities like this one. Discussion boards are full of people who on the one hand have never met irl, but on the other are self-selected and potentially hold a lot of subcultural norms and values in common. From what I understand so far about the new coop concepts, they seem to have a lot in common with software licensing: simple explanations, backed up by real contracts and precedents, designed to encourage trust among distributed groups of strangers.

Coops are a great and proven way to organize collaboration on a small scale, so I am all for strengthening this form of organization. BTW, if you take a step back and are generous with implementation details, many Open Source communities are coops. The issue I have with "let's do coops" is that they don't scale. In a world where all work is locally organized in coops, we'd have coops compete for much the same scarce resources that corporations are competing for today. For examples, look at the Open Souce world again. I got myself flamed in a Python forum when I pointed out that the Python Web site is as much product advertising as any commercial one: it emphasizes advantages without mentioning downsides, it says "download me!" without saying "look at me critically first", and its Open Source equivalent of the EULA, the licence, is carefully hidden from sight. It hardly seems to matter that the Python community is not competing for profit with anyone. Competing for mindshare has exactly the same consequences.

@Konrad Hinsen I question whether it's desirable for organizations to scale up in the ways they do today. Corporations with even ten thousand employees scare me so much. In general same for most organizations. Norm building and many other important things break down welllllll before that. Doubt you can avoid oppression with large organizations, ever, fundamentally.

@heartpunk I agree that unchecked growth of organizations is socially not desirable. More generally, any variable subject to a Matthew effect is a social risk factor. That's basically the point of my comment about coops - coops rather than for-profit companies makes a difference on the small scale, but not on a larger scale if some coops are much larger / influential than others. I also doubt that coops can remain egalitarian as they grow beyond, say, the Dunbar number. At some point, most people can't keep track of everything any more, and a small elite will effectively take power, even if it remains informal.

I don't think we need to aim for perfection, and I also think there are clear and immediate problems addressed by giving users a governance role in organizations. I think the nature of the coop and its governance structure matters quite a lot, and even if larger ones will tend toward including hierarchy and inequality themselves, it won't be anywhere near the magnitude of what we see in supposedly meritocratic organizations (which... how do they NOT consider the fundamental attribution error how is all of tech so deeply sociologically illiterate djfsalkldsfjlakd;fjaldskjfadsk;)

@Konrad Hinsen I think you make a valid point. Small-scale coops are easy to differentiate from the alternative, and the benefits are very obvious. At a large scale, some of the egalitarianism does seem to erode a bit. I'm thinking of the Mondragon coop in Spain, which nets tens of billions of dollars a year. From the outside looking in, it seems as though they have lost their "coop spirit." Some of the "low-level" workers have in recent years begun complaining that "upper management" isn't listening to their concerns. I would fault their governance system, myself, but I don't know all the details. What is clear, however, it that it is undeniably better than an alternative capitalist Mondragon corporation, where the worker's value is extracted / stolen and funneled into the pockets of a handful of individuals (or one).

@heartpunk @David Brooks I definitely agree with your point of coops being clearly the lesser evil, even when they grow. But my main worry is not the emergence of inequality within a large coop, but the inevitable asymmetries in relations between coops of different size.

Ah I see @Konrad Hinsen. IMHO, I think if we get to a place where coops are competing with each other and not capitalist enterprises, we have essentially already fixed some of the biggest problems in the world. But just in case anyone isn't aware, coops have the Rochdale Principles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rochdale_Principles we adhere to. And principle 6 is cooperation between coops. In practice, this means that coops are often directly involved in the creation and support of new coops. See the Arizmendi Bakery coops http://arizmendi.coop/ for a model where the coop does a "cell division" into a new coop if the market for one is there.

So here is a related question I have: what are some of the good worker coops doing tech work? Ideally I'd like to be a part of one but it's hard to know where to start

the driver's coop in nyc is the main one i'm aware of in tech

@Eric Gade @heartpunk there are quite a few tech coops in the U.S. and around the world! https://github.com/hng/tech-coops

@heartpunk That's too bad -- I'm a terrible driver!

@Eric Gade they have developers too! it's a ride share app.

oh, right. of course.

Thanks @David Brooks for the pointer to the Rochdale Principles, which I hadn't seen before. Just checked with a friend who works in a German coop, he hadn't heard about them either. It sounds very reasonable of course to apply the principles behind the inner workings of a coop also to its outside relations, but that doesn't mean it's actually done.

Absolutely @Konrad Hinsen There is nothing stopping from a coop not adhering to the "coops cooperate with other coops" principle, but within the coop community, it is a highly valued principle. I've never seen a coop not follow the principle, myself. In the current economic environment we have, it simply makes logical sense for coops to watch out for one-another. If we ever get to a place where we're not competing with capitalism, but rather coops are the norm, then it will be interesting to see if the principle still holds. But at that point, it doesn't really matter, imho.

There is so much here. I’ll try to start with the coop branch. Bringing coops to life and to sustain them is quite the challenge but there are lessons that can be learned. I really like Kei Kreutlers piece which looked at the similarities of: cooperative, gaming guilds and DAOs https://gnosisguild.mirror.xyz/t4F5rItMw4-mlpLZf5JQhElbDfQ2JRVKAzEpanyxW1Q

fyi here's the @Chris Martens (they/them) link referenced earlier, pretty sure https://futureofcoding.slack.com/archives/C5U3SEW6A/p1608142107386200

I was thinking ... if somehow the future of coding community, i.e. "us" would be interested in doing some coop experiments. Then I thought of https://radicle.xyz/blog/radicle-orgs.html

I'm in a coop @curious_reader, is there something this community would like to do to make money?

Please start a new thread in #CEXED56UR to discuss meta-level stuff about the community, since that's unrelated to the broad arc of this thread.

Seconded. #CEXED56UR is the right place to bring up the topic. The people likely to be interested are most likely to see it there.

https://twitter.com/heartpunkk/status/1449077274225958915 jfyi, goin more public re this topic, and interest in moving in this direction.

please @heartpunk I'm quite interested in this topic, do we discuss this here or at another place?

https://futureofcoding.slack.com/archives/C5U3SEW6A/p1634322416209400 over here seems best