I read this article about the photographer that visited a click farm in Hong Kong. It is an intimidating force in my opinion. There was that quote from earlier in this book “the internet changes nothing on its own, but it can amplify existing forces, and those amplified forces might change something”. So anybody with a large amount of money can pay these click farms for massive amounts of engagement and spread misinformation about COVID for example or a certain politician. How easy it must be to get a certain opinion into the limelight. How strange it is too that as a global community, click farms themselves make money in search of our attention.

I love this bot and its’ intent. I have such little experience with bots, I didn’t know that such a code could be written that could go into a pay gap database and post with that information. I am all for transparency when it comes to large corporations, otherwise I believe the company is trying to hide something. I think a post like this (from the university in this example) is made by a human computer. It is virtue signaling. The university clearly does not believe what it is saying it believes because the wage gap has grown in the last year. I didn’t think I could like a bot, but here we are.

I think it is the responsibility of anyone who works for any company to be aware of the ethics and values that the company holds. Is this benevolent non-profit with only good intentions and a transparent approach that keeps everything on the up and up? Or is this a giant tech conglomerate that has its hands in many pies and seeks making money most of all, no matter who they support and no matter how it gets done? It is the responsibility of the worker, I believe, to work for companies that match their own moral beliefs. I couldn’t work for a place that was poisoning the Earth, for example. I think the lead tech workers, the ones actually steering the ship, have a huge responsibility to ask themselves is this technology 1. Helpful 2. Harmful to anybody Along side making tech should be a failsafe, something to combat any negative effects any piece of tech might hold.

The Aztec Virtue ethics say that it isn’t the action that causes one to be good or bad (balanced or unbalanced), but that the virtue of an action is more about context and circumstance. For example, public drunkenness for nobility was seen as a crime punishable by death, but the elderly at a wedding were permitted and expected to get drunk. They believed “the middle path” to be the one of most virtue - dressing not too formal and not too drab. But most of all virtue was communicated regularly by community. The King had advisors, before leaving on a perhaps risky journey, merchants would make sacrifices and receive virtue adjustments in the form of a community ritual - a “refresher course” if you will.