Concerned with consequences of Tech with age – feeling paralyzed

Question

I feel with every year that goes by, I am more conscious of the impact my decisions have on myself, loved ones, and broader communities, particularly when it comes to decisions around my career and what I choose to commit myself to. And that awareness is making it hard to move forward in my career.I saw the rise of social media and the damaging effects it has had on my own mental health, those of family members, and society as a whole. The lack of deep, embodied connection brought about by the prevalence of screens and mobile devices. The rent-seeking behavior of BigTech. In some way I feel I'm developing a "digital technology = bad, physical nature = good" mindset &ndash; a mindset I can't seem to pull myself out of and one that is making it very, very hard for me to feel any sort of excitement for tech.I feel almost ethically paralyzed from a professional standpoint. Is this what becoming old an grumpy is like? I'm only 35!

salawat · Accepted Answer

I second the call to pay more attention to Free (Libre) Open Source Software as a potential direction, and believe me, you are not the only one feeling ethically paralyzed in reference to the industry. Further, I want to emphasize, you are not wrong to feel that way. Your moral/ethical compass is working just fine. You are an actor bringing morals and ethics with you into an industry ripe with unethical, power seeking actors who either did not have a functional moral/ethical compass in the first place, or abandoned it in the name of a paycheck, knowingly, or unknowingly at the time they accepted the job. You are not broken. The stuff the industry wants to build, and the motives behind why are.
Your job is essentially setting the status quo everyone else starts from, and as of right now, you're only working for people looking to shape things for max $$$ extraction from everyone else. Implementation skews toward availing oneself (as a business) of access or management capabilities over vast swathes of the world population's data, economic activity, or some combo of the two,and the concommitant control such management capability confers.
Welcome to mid-life. Where you finally start to get a high level enough picture of how horked everything is, and start to realize that there may not be enough time left to even start to make a big enough dent in the suck to get things going back in a less suck filled direction.
Stay strong, friend.

fsflover · Answer

Perhaps you should pay attention to the concept of free software [0], which gives the control to the users instead of the big tech. No surprise that the big tech never mentions it and uses "open source" [1] instead. Even the latter is used as rarely as possible, e.g., not in javascript [2]. Personally, I am relying more and more on free software and feel much better. Very excited about my Libem 5 phone running an FSF-endorsed OS [3].
[0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-impor...
[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy//po/open-source-misses-the-po...
[2] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html
[3] https://www.fsf.org/news/fsf-adds-pureos-to-list-of-endorsed...

PaulHoule · Answer

I think the time period of 2016-2022 has been particularly bad. I mean, there was a time when somebody could have thought social media was a good thing but it was the events around the election of 2016 that got me to delete my Facebook and Twitter accounts. Since then we have also had the cryptocurrency grift.The fallout of musk buying Twitter and the wave of crypto collapses despite the efforts to keep it going may be the beginnings of a better era.

treis · Answer

I'd look into CBT via a self help book or therapist. "digital technology = bad, physical nature = good" is a "All or Nothing" negative thought pattern than is usually #1 or #2 on the list.