Thread by @HeyChelseaTroy

So a Worldcon guest tweeted that U.S. defense companies can be ethically "grey" despite, uh, getting paid to orchestrate killing people.

The evidence: the OP's partner works at one; the OP used to work at one that helped w the moon landing.

I'm not here to drag. Let's talk.

/1

FIRST THING FIRST: I'm not sharing the screenshot because I believe it is unfair to share people's de-anonymized hot takes without notifying them or linking to where they might amend. That's closer to lashon hara than accountability and that bothers me.

On to the take.

/2

I've watched something like this play out pretty often in tech: a person thinks of themselves as a good person, or they are dating an ostensibly good person, and that person works for a company that does bad things.

So now they have to back-justify what's happening.

/3

I've talked about that before right here and I admit that it's a tough dissonance to hold.

It's ESPECIALLY tough in tech fields because, for historical reasons, tech maintains this pernicious fantasy that they're saving the world.

/4

https://twitter.com/HeyChelseaTroy/status/1467228858344779777

This happens often, because many companies do bad things, and because capitalism deliberately accumulates power in a way that forces people, eventually, to depend on companies that do bad things.

So let's disambiguate a couple of concepts. This part is important.

/5

IMPORTANT: There is no grey area on whether U.S. Defense companies do bad things.

Straight up, the U.S. Department of Defense, the foundation client for U.S. defense companies, was renamed to that in 1949 from its original name, the U.S. Department of War.

Why?

/6

In short, to make it less EXPLICITLY and OBVIOUSLY about advancing the national interest through extrajudicial killing and imperialism.

But *waves hands at history* the MEANS and the ENDS clearly stayed the same.

That's not ambiguous. Here's what remains to disambiguate:

/7

What does it MEAN about a PERSON to somehow aid a company that does bad things?

A FEW things have made this question a particularly biting and cruel one to try to answer. Let's go through those things, one by one.

/8

Thing 1: The Myth of Individualism

Western culture maintains this idea that our individual choices are the most important, meaningful ones. That it is ALL UP TO US, RIGHT NOW, to fix things, and if we can't or don't, we are INDIVIDUALLY evil.

/9

Thing 2: The Centralization of Economic Power

In the U.S., a few companies draw increasing $$$ and power from a widening wealth gap atop a populace that depends on employment for survival. We have no universal basic income, not even universal health insurance.

That means...
/10

...it's not uncommon to face a survival necessity to work in service of an unsavory org.

These orgs also deliberately take advantage of individualism to create scapegoats.

Example: a giant oil company trying to claim that people having house pets is killing the planet.

/11

Thing 3: Long chains of accountability.

I've watched ppl lose Patreon $ bc they got credited by someone who defended someone else who got dogpiled over a tweet.

If not being evil requires 4+ degrees of separation from anyone who ever did a bad thing, it's unattainable.

/12

So how do we deal with all this?

Well, that's the thing. We never learn the skills of navigating this situation.

So one option is to have a nervous breakdown and become a drain on oneself and society.

Hmmmm...

Don't love it.

Next:

/13

Another option is to become Doug, the ascetic pushover from the Good Place who commits to a three week round trip on foot to memorialize a snail.

Doug abdicates all opportunity to make positive impact to avoid all risk of doing the tiniest bad thing.

/14
vulture.com/2018/11/the-go…

Sure, it's a comical depiction.

In the real world what that looks like is an individual going WAY out of their way, to the point of MASSIVE personal inconvenience or even disempowerment, to avoid unsavory orgs as power centralization makes them harder and harder to avoid.

/15

The third option is to grit our teeth and rationalize.

And THAT is where you get "Defense companies are a grey area."

Or "crypto is in fact a diverse community and that's how I know its critics are wrong."

Or "Putting a man on the moon was worth it, right?

...RIGHT??"

/16

Or THIS, which is, in my view, taking the rationalization strategy just a SKOSH too far

"I'm cool and support progressive shit in theory as long as it doesn't require me to be personally inconvenienced" isn't my, uh, FAVORITE personality

/17

https://twitter.com/HeyChelseaTroy/status/1232386885546278917

So where does that leave us?

In hell.

I'm kidding. (Sort of).

There are a few things we can do. Let's go through them.

But first, a gif with Mazikeen in it to bolster our spirits, because @LesleyAnnBrandt always bolsters my spirits

/18

The first thing is to develop a more nuanced understanding of where our impact lies. That makes it easier for us to allocate our efforts for greatest impact relative to cost to us, or survival risk.

I did an example for tech workers right here:

/19

chelseatroy.com/2020/08/24/tec…

That's gonna make it easier to make value judgments around this stuff.

"Should I work there? What impact will it have if I do or if I don't?"

"Should I spend 5x as much and hand over my address and CC info to a sketchy website to buy my KN-95s without supporting Amazon?"

/20

The second thing is to own up to the rationalizations we're using when we DO choose to perfunctorily participate in capitalism with orgs we don't support.

I'm thinking of one rationalization in particular, "Change requires people on the inside."

/21

This is true. Change does require people on the inside.

It also requires the people on the inside to have the skills to enact that change.

Here's a starting point:

/22

chelseatroy.com/2020/09/23/tec…

The third thing is that these ethical tradeoffs have systemic causes, and they'll require systemic solutions.

My recommendation: find a group that you trust in its efforts to create systemic solutions. Ask for the unsexiest thing they need help with, and do that.

/23

And fourth, I think we should be honest with ourselves about our ethical tradeoffs.

Less institutional power might mean more pressure to compromise values. But it doesn't really help to then rearrange our world view to hide the compromise.

That's all I got.

24/24