logoalt Hacker News

safety1stlast Wednesday at 2:31 PM1 replyview on HN

I would have thought that if you are the co-creator of Django, co-owner of a consulting agency, and Treasurer of the Django Foundation, at this stage you would have enough financial flexibility to say no to doing any work you feel is evil, and invest some time into work that you think advances the cause of good.

So it doesn't make sense to me that he would leave the tech industry because of the evil in it. I agree with him completely about the evil being there, it's increasingly horrifying what the tech industry is becoming. But the net is vast and infinite. Surely he can go somewhere the evil isn't involved.


Replies

nine_klast Wednesday at 2:53 PM

Going anywhere the evil isn't involved is hard. I'd say that the human nature has the capacity for evil, as much as it has the capacity for good. Anywhere you go with the intent to do good, you have prospects of seeing evil, because you're going to work with humans, and especially their social structures.

Maybe one can get into e.g. pure mathematics. Proving a conjecture usually does not have a direct societal impact, so it's can't be evil. By the same token, it doesn't do anything obviously good.