I can't speak to whether it's self-righteous or not, but collective action is not possible if people can only ask others to do what they have also done. Everyone has different abilities and positions in society that enable them to take action in different ways. College students couldn't divest from South Africa during apartheid, but they pressured their colleges and other businesses to do so, and that feels perfectly reasonable to me.

Perhaps it's self-righteous to argue that nobody should help Palantir provide DHS with a Muslim registry under any circumstances, even if it means negative consequences for them and their family (and for most software engineers it really won't!). But that's what I believe, and I'd like to think it's the choice I would make in that situation, and I'd hope that my family and friends and strangers on the Internet would push me to acknowledge the moral choice I was facing and make the choice that helped others instead of maximizing my own narrow self-interest.

> but collective action is not possible if people can only ask others to do what they have also done.

Hmm, I think you don't believe in leadership? Even warlords in the ancient times know they have to risk losing their lives fighting when they recruit an army for themselves.

We Chinese call the people Keyboard Men who ask people to do all kinds of things, behind their keyboards.