My current goal is to get a job as a developer and work towards combining my career with my revolutionary activity. But I’d like to build skills that are as applicable as possible to digital revolutionary struggle. Any thoughts?
My current goal is to get a job as a developer and work towards combining my career with my revolutionary activity. But I’d like to build skills that are as applicable as possible to digital revolutionary struggle. Any thoughts?
I'm a veteran software dev and recently quit my job to study security engineering full time and to try to get an entry level job doing that.
The problem with software jobs is generally always that you're doing shit work (relatively speaking I guess it isn't, but I'm sick of it) to make rich people richer. Or in many cases, you're on a death march of a shit project that's stupid and pointless and doomed to fail and you're wasting some rich guy's money, but in either case you're attempting to enrichen the rich. Software is fucking expensive and only the rich can afford it.
The biggest things in my opinion to further social good in software:
Build tools that allow uncensored and anonymous communication . This is a huge rabbit hole but it spans a lot - let people browse the internet privately, send messages private, consume information privately. Right now virtually all web traffic is monitored and stored. Between your ISP, the servers you're hitting (Amazon's), maybe even the VPN you use that claims to not log anything (one was recently caught doing this) - there is very little privacy. There are some tools that allow all of this in bits and pieces but none are mainstream.
In conjuction with the first point, create software platforms that prevent coordinated inauthentic behavior. Bots. As technology improves it becomes more and more impossible to tell bots apart from real posting. It's going to get worse and worse and people with billions of dollars will be clicks away from massively influencing general opinion in the same way it's currently being done by buying media and news outlets.
Work in furthering AI. AI is going to be the lynchpin of moving past scarcity and having the human race continue to exist past biological bodies.
The first two points are difficult to make any money doing. There's no money in federated, private, anonymous services. And there's a super high ceiling for the skills needed to work on these platforms and problems. Those skills can get you related work but probably not for anything socially "good".
I think AI is the best route. There is money to be made (again, enriching the rich) but the expertise allows you to contribute to the community as a whole, too. But AI is the sort of field where it's pretty necessary to have a PhD or similar and that's not for me.
I chose security for selfish reasons. It's technical and my background helps and I find it the most interesting option of my employment avenues.
Another option: get a do nothing job that pays a lot and wastes someone's money. They're out there. I've had jobs where I did virtually nothing and no one cared. It didn't pay great personally, but the high paying ones are out there. I've read stories from people who work at Google making $300k+ a year and they admit they do virtually no work because they aren't interested or motivated to do it. If you can manage the balancing act of working hard enough to get hired and then knowing how to bullshit and not actually do any work, you can do your small part in draining money from shitty orgs like Google
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