I mean look, my goal is to communicate to the engineers involved in this business that they are responsible for the product they work on, and the monster they've created. People working for G and fb have options. If they choose to continue to work for these companies for great personal gain, at the cost of exploiting and tracking their own users (basically half of the world population?), they are not our friends and I think should not be treated as such. I don't want to play nice and read your blog and validate you, I want you to stop making the world a worse place.

Why do we grant them such a generous separation of work/personal life? They spend their day screwing us over, in the evening we all sing kumbaya? There's been no accountability.

Yes, my message is not going to bathe them in the positivity sunshine they've likely grown accustomed to in their work environment echo chamber. I am okay with that. Others might be more successful getting through to them with their slider closer to the carrot. I truly respect that ability, I just keep thinking appeasement is a failed strategy.

...I shouldn't have gone with "whoring" I suppose, sorry about that. I like the idea of serving your argument from your own site, decentralization and individuality and all that. But for some it's just another way to pad their resume to facilitate becoming more of the problem.

> Others might be more successful getting through to them with their slider closer to the carrot. I truly respect that ability, I just keep thinking appeasement is a failed strategy.

Fair enough. I prefer to engage with both sides on this issue, but I suppose there are other issues where my feelings are strong enough, and my faith in one side of the issue low enough, that I would not bother engaging.

If you read about the heyday of RJ Reynolds tobacco and all the money they had and all the good they did for Winston-Salem, I think there is a big parallel. If someone wrote a "Why I work in big tobacco" post, talking about their charitable work, I don't think they'd make any friends. But I think order of magnitude wise, the impact on quality of life, mental health, public discourse, etc etc of internet advertising (and specifically the attention economy it gives rise to) will be shown to be (a) just as addictive and (b) as harmful as tobacco was.

So I agree with you, there is no moral high ground for the people involved. They should be looked on no differently than anyone else exploiting addiction for profit.