In a recent episode of the Climate Denier’s Playbook (their “Mailbag” one, where they answer listeners' questions), Nicole Conlon referred to an post by Hamilton Nolan on his blog How Things Work , called When Do You Need to Quit Your Job?. It’s a call for people working at scummy, fascism- and climate-denialism-enabling companies (tech, mostly, but big oil, too, of course), to quite for the sake of their souls and our societies.
Nolan is a strong proponent of organiz(s)ed labo(u)r in the US, and encourages people in companies and industries that are worth fighting for, to do so by unionising and fighting to rebalance the economy towards society at large. This chimes with much of my recent reading (I am planning a post on that!), about society and capitalism in particular: Nolan channels a righteous anger that I’ve not been focussed enough to write myself, so I’m grateful for that.
The question of ethical work is something that niggles at me a where I work, since a major customer of our sensor systems is the fossil fuel industry. I can only hope that our sensors help them to be as efficient as possible and minimise leaks, etc, whilst our other sensors in renewable energies, pharma and other neutral-to-positive industries gain in importance.
