When buying stuff, consuming media and picking jobs - where do you draw the line of considering something too evil? Among my peers there’s a lot of people who will actively avoid Nestle products, or who don’t eat meat. But none of them bats an eye at using Facebook or X. Nobody cares about using products made in China under awful working conditions. I have worked as a freelancer translating greenwashing for a few doubtful megacorporations, others work as lawyers or programmers supporting them.
Especially when it comes to work I find myself between a rock and a hard place. I have tried doing blue collar jobs instead to avoid this. My body tells me very clearly that it’s not a full time option for me and I have been running into the same problems of having to consider working for people who either get their money from evil megacorporations or and/or having to do stuff that actively causes some kind of harm, and being forever poor while doing so.
Where do you draw the line? How do you live your life in such a way that it doesn’t support evil directly or indirectly while being able to bring food to the table and pay the rent?
products made in China under awful working conditions
You’ll be glad to know that this is just propaganda.
Remember, it’s all or something, not all or nothing.
For me, I look at each major category of things in my life a few times a year and ask myself how I can improve the ethics of my participation.
So for food, I have been vegetarian for years now, which is good, but lately I have been trying to cut out most processed foods. I also have started shopping more and more local, getting as much of my food as I can from local co-ops, individual sellers, and small local grocery chains.
For software, I’m FOSS everything as much as I can be. 100% Linux on my computers and servers, and I have replaced almost all my programs with FOSS alternatives. Even my phone doesn’t run stock Android.
For work, try to find places to work that roughly align with good principles. For instance, try to get a job at a credit union vs a traditional bank, or try to find an employee-owned establishment vs a traditional top-down corporation.
If you have to work for a corpo, try to pick one that has a good reputation with unions and workers, like Costco, vs Starbucks or Walmart.
Capitalism is a machine that grinds us all down, so don’t feel guilty about not being perfect. But do the best you can to reject it, little steps at a time. Always be improving, bit by bit.
It’s pretty impossible not to be tangentially connected with someone bad somewhere. Unless I have reasonable grounds to think the production of something was directly unethical I can’t and don’t worry about it.
For example, if you buy a thing from a poor country, there’s a chance a slave made it, but a greater chance it was part of somebody’s ticket out of rural poverty, and no way to tell. On the other hand, meat is always meat (unless it’s lab-grown I guess, but that technology doesn’t work very well to date).
Depends of course. But when I moved states to get closer to my in-laws I looked for programming jobs in the nearest city. There were exactly two available. One was for an address broker. I only applied to the other one.
What is an address broker?
A company that collects and categorises addresses and sells them to other companies for advertising purposes.
For me there are a few no gos:
- working for a weapons manufacturer
- working for a company that does business with saudi arabia, north korea, russia, and similar authoritarian states/dictatorships
- working for any FANG company (and obviously any company owned by elmo)
- working for car manufacturers
- I try to avoid buying products produced in the US, China, and Israel as much as possible
- I also try to avoid any company that hosts its stuff on AWS, but that’s quite challenging, if you even know in the first place
