Leverage.
You don't throw your foe to the ground with brute force alone. You take him off-balance, and move in with good timing and technique.
If your goal is solving climate change, well, the leverage isn't really in the technical solution, but in the political economy. We need a redesign. That's problem one.
But if it's the power structure that needs changing, what affects it? Knowledge. Signalling. Valuation. And then you get into things that you can potentially change as a tech worker, by pushing for information systems that change our valuation metrics to match a philosophy of sustainability. And that positions actors who wish to take sustainable actions to have the leverage to realize it.
That, I think, is the trick to feeling OK about it. At the end of the day, it's a war fought in an abstract, everyday sense: Build up your sense of morality and build your career around those principles. You might not be the hero, but you won't be the villain.
You don't throw your foe to the ground with brute force alone. You take him off-balance, and move in with good timing and technique.
If your goal is solving climate change, well, the leverage isn't really in the technical solution, but in the political economy. We need a redesign. That's problem one.
But if it's the power structure that needs changing, what affects it? Knowledge. Signalling. Valuation. And then you get into things that you can potentially change as a tech worker, by pushing for information systems that change our valuation metrics to match a philosophy of sustainability. And that positions actors who wish to take sustainable actions to have the leverage to realize it.
That, I think, is the trick to feeling OK about it. At the end of the day, it's a war fought in an abstract, everyday sense: Build up your sense of morality and build your career around those principles. You might not be the hero, but you won't be the villain.