A different framing for this initiative might be ‘working within your existing (or closest, or most familiar) community’.
The thing is that there’s an opportunity cost to everything we do. All the time you spend setting up something new is time you could have spent enriching something existing (as @mrchrisadams discussed) or doing something more effective, if that existed. Here is an example of how fossil companies created the idea of a personal carbon footprint to essentially allow people to make changes that feel significant but really aren’t, which tends to make them not make changes which actually are significant such as working for regulation of companies like BP. Here is another example re: recycling. By getting people to spend effort and time on things that don’t actually matter it’s easy to use up all their time and effort budget.
Obviously in this case there’s no nefarious evil actor trying to make you waste your time, but recently I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about this. I guess this is a somewhat personal topic for me because I’ve come to the conclusion that most of the things that I thought were an effective use of my time and/or money were not, and I did them mostly to make myself feel better - this has been a very hard realisation for me. I’m not saying that this is the case with you, but I guess I would like to encourage thinking around what is the most effective use of time since these problems are very urgent. If you think that this is a good use of your time then absolutely you should do it.
Anyway, this is getting pretty off-topic for Clojureverse, so I’ll leave it there.
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TBH, even the effective altruism approach, I find problematic in some ways, because throwing money at a problem without engaging critically with it, generally results in avoiding necessary discussions about what we need to do differently as a society, in favour of what that lot over there need to do differently, and tends to favour maintaining a state of affairs where the altruists are the ones who get to say what altruisim is effective, and what isn’t.
This is pretty different to how I think about it. Personally I’m coming to the conclusion that my skills are just not a great vehicle for solving these problems, and that what is needed is political and economic action. I’m singularly badly placed to actually become a politician or an economist with any influence, so my best option is probably to take advantage of the fact that tech is ridiculously overpaid and either:
- Donate to others directly to facilitate them doing work that I can’t do myself, or will be much worse at than they are.
- Donate to existing activist organisations to put pressure on them indirectly.
Rather than avoiding discussions about required change, it’s more about being honest with myself about whether I’m the best person to actually achieve the required change.
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Hey everyone, great to see this being discussed here.
If people want to try running this on ClojureVerse then I think we can try out enabling anonymous posting. I do have some concerns that this might be opening a pandora’s box, and that this will put more work on the mods, so I would appreciate it if one or more people would stand up in that case to strengthen the mod team. We can then try it out and evaluate after 3 to 6 months if a) we are actually seeing constructive, critical posting being done anonymously and b) we are not getting more troll posts and spam than we are willing to accept.
Hi @plexus , very happy to read that. I think indeed that embedding in ClojureVerse seems like the best option now.
In concrete details, I would propose:
- A new category called “Sustainability-oriented work”, or maybe just “Sustainability work” for short. (“Sustainability” alone would be a mistake IMO, too vague, as this thread has illustrated.) Maybe we could have it in blue?
- with sub-categories: “Companies & Projects”, “Job offers”, “Open-Source”, “General discussion”.
- I can write up one or more Welcome / README post to pin in that category, detailing:
- What content is appropriate / encouraged in each sub-category
- Stressing that this should not be viewed as the exclusive and all-encompassing approach towards sustainability for a Clojurian, mentioning in particular the alternatives that have been evoked in this thread, such as CAT, considering non-Clojure or non-programming jobs, effective altruism, political action, volunteering, activism at the workplace etc.
- Populating the “Companies & Projects” sub-category with a few company introductions - several have responded to this thread already, and hopefully I can get them to introduce themselves.
I understand the concern. I’m willing to step up if needed.
So, I’ve sat with this for a few days now and remain unconvinced that the goals of a) fostering tools and community to help adapt to /mitigate our climate crisis (in clojure centric way, of course) and b) holding companies and policy makers accountable are orthogonal. For a) I think we’re uniquely positioned to make it happen. For b) I think there are other organizations that can do a better job - e.g. https://truthteller.life
I think it would be fair for people to refer to other whistleblower sites to help provide perspective and a degree of separation that would allow us to focus more on doing the best job of a).
@ivar you might feel confident discussing and questioning the impact of a potential employer without anonymity ; but other applicants might not be. Recruiters might be reluctant as well, and I wouldn’t blame them.
The main intent of anonymity here is not to allow for whisteblowing (which IMO should be considered a rare last-resort measure) but to create good conditions for a constructive albeit challenging discussions, which are typically much more effective for understanding and orienting impact.
It’s not only about holding companies accountable are orthogonal. It’s much more about understanding their (potential) impact and value system in a fine way. Again, sustainability-oriented action involves diverse and sophisticated plans and tradeoffs, and experience shows that these things cannot be assessed objectively and without challenging discussions.
I also still don’t see why you would be against opt-in anonymity. If you don’t want to comment anonymously, then don’t, but let’s not exclude others from important conversations they would not have without anonymity.
@vvvvalvalval - this is one of those few areas where making anonymity available could occasionally be of value. But it would be a shame to allow this to leak too far through Clojureverse. I don’t know much about Discourse - is it possible to limit this to a single category?
As to it being opt-in and therefore necessarily harmless - I think there’s enough water under the internet bridge alone (never mind many other areas like driving, limited liability investment etc) for us to be confident it can be socially poisonous. That’s a known known. A risk worth taking for this purpose, agreed. But I’m just wondering if that risk can be limited.
I thought that would not be possible because anonymous posting is a global setting, but actually it seems that it’s possible to code Discourse Plugin to restrict the behaviour to a category: a similar development was made in Always-Anonymous Categories Plugin - plugin - Discourse Meta.
@plexus if I wrote a Discourse plugin for category-specific anonymous posting, would the mods consider adding it to ClojureVerse?
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Eep. I had no idea. Thanks for opening my eyes to this.
I checked out of the corporate IT space 10 years ago in large part on account of the issues that kicked off this thread. I started a small business (a home-based bakery). It’s certainly been challenging, but still a very constructive way to make positive changes in my community. For instance, it would be hard for my family purchases to keep a local farm in business, but I’ve spent almost $50k buying from about a dozen farms and that can be very significant to their success. A small business gives you some reasonable tax treatment and the immediacy and control that is lacking in so many other areas. Most small businesses are a high labor and low profit venture and can really use the technology help - especially when it provides the appropriate amount of value for the cost. Tons of useful nonprofit work happens at this same small scale and would benefit from this same type of appropriate technology. I encourage people to think about this as an area to apply your talents. Also my business network includes almost no one with any amount of computer systems background so it would be good to find some other collaborators.
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