I think the discussion we should be having instead is engineering ethics.

I think Dylan’s letter clearly showed he isn’t really involved in “FOSS radical” circles and has the usual engineering mindset (that was described in the Sam Bent blogpost). Not that I personally blame him, engineering schools raise students for this, and the corporate structure further enforces it with the strict hierarchies where you do whatever management orders you to do. What’s important is that there are many devs who clearly aren’t tied into the ethics discussion part of engineering. There’s even research on engineers’ attitudes afaik, and its conclusion was that freshly graduated engineers’ first response was to implement changes without thinking about the ethics part, and after further prompting and discussion, they could be convinced that this change was bad and they need to push back.

I’ll leave a two links here so when people iwsh to read, they know where to find good stuff.

• Constructive Technology Criticism Annotated Syllabus - I know Medium sucks but the scribe.rip copy I saved suffers link rot
• Awesome critical tech reading list - you can just git clone it and read it without browser