the thing about tech work that they don't prepare you for is that unless you're like THE in-house software dev or technician or whatever for a company's own systems you are basically guranteed to have a good chunk of your work be military or police if you want to get paid decently.
they really try to sweettalk you into it too. like they try to say "well you're not actively killing anyone you're making it safer for people [read: soldiers/cops] to perform their duty [read: murdering people]". and people do lap it up you see a lot of tech people who call themselves antifascists or whatever doing work for boeing or lockheed martin or the met.
and i mean. idk. sometimes you do what you gotta do to get paid and i get that to a degree. sometimes you get fired for refusing work like that and you gotta make rent and eat. but then a lot of them brag about it? or defend themselves when no one really asked? its like, you know what you're doing is wrong, but you feel the need to morally justify it by shifting your whole ethical perspective around your labour, as if the reasoning for a police state being a terrible concept falls along moral lines. we don't need to play this game!
and thats just like, the norm in this industry. ive been at my job for a while and uhh. lets just say i would be a lot richer if i threw out my principles like 6 months in and i don't have a lot to show for not having done that besides said principles. lol
one of the many insidious repercussions of how liberalism hides ideology is the now culturally accepted notion that your "career" exists entirely independent of your ethics. like it's childish to expect that the thing you spend most of your life doing won't facilitate mass murder. but this attitude is necessary under liberal capitalism, because while managing conflict and chaos caused by the state for economic reasons (and the reasons for war are always ultimately economic) is itself extremely profitable, it's also morally reprehensible "i was just following orders" shit. so you need a culture that dismisses the alternative. you need a culture that actually looks down on those who would seek an ethical career. it turns into a very "fuck you got mine" attitude from the perspective of those lockheed cop guys, who are entirely unwilling to reconcile the neutral affect of the work they do with the materially demonstrable negative impact that work has on hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of people (a phenomenon also aided by liberalism's occlusion of ideological commitments, boiling down all conflict to good guys and bad guys).
it's uhhhhhhhhh not great
