The the (unspoken of) responsibility of engineers. Or: The Responsibility of Intellectuals, Revisited

When Chomsky published The Responsibility of Intellectuals in The New York Review of Books in February 1967 (Chomsky 1967), the title was a deliberate echo of Dwight Macdonald's 1945 essay The Responsibility of Peoples, which had asked what ordinary Germans owed to the dead of the camps. Chomsky's target was the war in Vietnam and the people who had supplied it with its intellectual furniture: Walt Rostow, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the McNamara-era defense intellectuals, the RAND theorists, the social scientists who could explain in clean prose why the next escalation was both regrettable and necessary. The piece is now usually read as a text about academics. I argue that this reading is too narrow. The central claim was always conditional. Where there is unusual access to information, institutional legitimacy, and the means to clarify how power actually works, there is a corresponding obligation. By that test, much of the engineering profession is already inside the frame, even when individual engineers refuse the word intellectual.

Software workers do not sit at the edge of power, they sit inside it. They build the ranking systems that decide what hundreds of millions of people see, the moderation systems that decide what they are allowed to say, the logistics layers that decide whether a warehouse worker has time to use the bathroom, the credit models that decide whether a family rents or sleeps in a car, the biometric systems at borders, the targeting layers of military hardware, the surveillance products sold to police departments and to dictatorships, and the immense overhead of AI tooling that institutions are now racing to insert into hiring, sentencing, schooling, healthcare, and warfare. They are not standing outside history commenting on it. They are writing the procedures by which institutions see, classify, punish, recommend, deny, and disappear people.

And yet the dominant culture asks them to think of themselves as craftsmen, neutral problem-solvers, engineers in some innocent mechanical sense. The word engineer was not always so morally weightless. Wernher von Braun built rockets first for the Wehrmacht and then for NASA, and Tom Lehrer's joke about him in 1965, "once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? that's not my department, says Wernher von Braun" (Lehrer 1965), was funny because it was the recognizable self-understanding of an entire class of people. That self-understanding has not died. It has only been laundered into something that sounds like professional humility.

This is not humility. It is, in Sartre's terms, a sustained exercise in bad faith (Sartre 1992), the pretense that one's role inside a structure is something other than what it is, in order to enjoy the benefits of the role without paying its moral costs. Some engineers can argue for hours about language design, type systems, package managers, editor wars, and whether some API should return nil or an error object, but when the topic becomes a genocide, a famine, or an organizing drive in the warehouse next door, suddenly they become careful souls who "do not know enough" to say anything. They are not, in fact, ignorant. They have read enough. They have seen enough. They have decided, in advance, that public speech should stop at the edge of professional convenience.

Most engineers have read enough. They have seen enough. They have decided, in advance, that public speech should stop at the edge of professional convenience. This decision is itself a political position, even when it dresses itself as restraint.

Because there is rarely such a thing as politically neutral engineering inside large institutions. The choice to optimize ad targeting rather than public infrastructure is political. The choice to ship the bid for the border contract is political. The choice to keep your head down while your employer signs the military deal is political. The choice to make eviction software, policing software, predatory finance software, or manipulative recommendation software a few percent more "efficient" is political. Hannah Arendt's now-overused phrase, the banality of evil (Arendt 2006), was about exactly this kind of domesticated participation. Eichmann insisted he was not an antisemite, only a competent administrator following the procedures of his department. We do not need a Nazi analogy to make the point. As Edwin Black documented, IBM's punch-card subsidiary, Dehomag, leased and serviced the machines that organized the Holocaust through ordinary commercial contracts administered by ordinary employees in Berlin and Geneva. None of them, presumably, woke up wanting to become accomplices to mass murder. They were just doing their jobs, well.

A more recent name for this posture comes from Václav Havel's The Power of the Powerless (Havel 1985), written under late communism in 1978, applicable now with embarrassingly little adjustment. Havel imagined a greengrocer who places in his shop window a sign reading Workers of the world, unite!, not because he believes it, but because not placing it has costs. The sign, Havel said, is not an expression of conviction. It is an act of demonstrative compliance, a small visible signal that the greengrocer accepts the rules of the system and will not embarrass it. To live within the lie is to perform that compliance over and over until it becomes second nature, and to receive a quiet, comfortable life in return. The contemporary American or European engineer does not put a Soviet slogan in his window. He puts a different signal: the studied apoliticism, the technical posture, the insistence that one's job is just to ship features, the careful cultivation of public neutrality on whatever the firm happens to be doing this quarter. The grammar of the sign has changed. The function has not.

It is worth being concrete about what refusal looks like in our own period, because refusal does happen and has occasionally even worked. In 2018, around three thousand- Google workers signed an open letter against Project Maven, the company's contract to provide computer vision for U.S. military drone footage, and Google declined to renew the contract. In 2019, Microsoft employees publicly objected to the HoloLens IVAS contract with the U.S. Army. Amazon workers have organized against the company's contracts with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Workers at Google and Amazon have organized for years under No Tech for Apartheid against Project Nimbus, the cloud contract with the Israeli government. Timnit Gebru was pushed out of Google's ethics team for refusing to retract a paper she had every intellectual right to publish, and the lesson of that episode is precisely that corporate "AI ethics" departments exist to manage the appearance of conscience, not to host the real thing. Frances Haugen took thousands of internal Facebook documents to The Wall Street Journal. Most of these people paid for what they did. The point is not that any of them ended up purified, but that they made visible, in public, the fact that the engineer is not a powerless cog, and that the appearance of powerlessness is partly a story the engineer tells himself to avoid having to pay anything.

Most spend their days on e-commerce funnels, payment integrations, subscription billing, analytics pipelines, catalog systems, recommendation rankers for ordinary products, and the slow sediment of growth work. The easy version of the argument I am making would let this mass of ordinary work off the hook, and most versions of it do. I want to insist on the harder version, because it is the more interesting one philosophically. The work is more banal. The responsibility does not vanish. It is only more diffuse, and there are at least three reasons it does not vanish.

The first is that the infrastructure of contemporary commerce is not innocent in aggregate, however unremarkable any one of its components feels at the level of the ticket. The engineer at Stripe who tunes a webhook is not "neutral" because the surface of the work is a webhook. The payments stack is the circulatory system of an economy that, in the last two decades, has used frictionless purchasing to push buy-now-pay-later credit onto people who cannot afford it (Klarna, Affirm, Afterpay), migrated the consumer goods market to drop-shippers running on Chinese sweatshop labor (the Shopify–Temu–Shein layer), and hollowed out the retail employment that used to support working-class livelihoods in towns now characterized by Amazon warehouses and Dollar Generals. The Amazon effect is not a metaphor. The labor conditions inside Amazon fulfillment centers, where workers urinate into bottles to keep their pick rates, are made tractable by software written by other people who will never see those buildings. The cheap parcel that arrives at the door is the visible terminus of an invisible extraction chain, and the engineer is somewhere along it. Banal does not mean detached. It means in the middle.

The second is that the dominant business pattern of the sector is not the production of goods but the engineering of compulsion. The disciplines now taught under names like growth, conversion optimization, engagement, and retention are applied behavioral economics directed at users who are not, in any classical sense, the customer. Dark patterns, A/B-tested upsells, infinite scroll, push-notification scheduling, the deliberately byzantine subscription cancellation flow are not neutral techniques deployed for neutral ends. They are designed to work on the parts of human attention that are weakest, and they are calibrated through quantitative experiments run on captive populations. Shoshana Zuboff's phrase, surveillance capitalism (Zuboff 2019), is one name for this. The honest description is that a great deal of what passes for product engineering is paid manipulation, and the engineer who tunes the funnel is the manipulator, even when the manipulation is mediated by ten layers of abstraction and described in the company copy as user delight. Even the strictly internal "analytics pipeline" feeds this loop, since the loop is what the analytics are for.

The third reason is the philosophical one, and it is the one that most often goes unstated. Capital does not need every employee to be a war criminal. It needs most employees to perform their nominally innocent work competently and quietly, while the war is conducted, the borders are policed, and the political life of their society decays around them. In a passage of the Grundrisse that is much abused but still useful, Marx described the general intellect (Marx 1973, pp. 690–712), the way scientific and technical knowledge becomes embodied in fixed capital and made productive for accumulation. Software workers, in our period, are about as close as the world gets to that general intellect, and they are largely rented out, in their working hours, to the firms that own the platforms on which the rest of life now runs. This is why even the e-commerce engineer is in the frame. He/she is not personally aiming a drone, but he/she is part of the class whose competence underwrites the wider arrangement, whose technical mystique gives the arrangement its prestige, and whose public silence supplies its political cover. To dismiss any individual engineer as too small to be implicated is to misunderstand how a system of this size actually reproduces itself, which is precisely through the dispersed, coordinated, perfectly polite participation of people who each believe their own role to be marginal.

None of this makes the e-commerce engineer morally equivalent to the targeting engineer at a defense contractor. But the exposure is not zero, and it is not a discharge of responsibility. It is, at most, a report on what one's hands have been doing. It is silent on the questions that actually matter: what political life have you participated in, and on what side; what have you said in public, and to whom; what have you done with the time, money, status, and skill that this profession has given you. Someone can spend a decade moving buttons around on checkout pages, tuning conversion rates, helping a retailer sell a few percent more shoes per quarter, and still live through a documented genocide and a documented assault on labor without ever speaking publicly, showing up to anything, organizing, donating seriously, or attaching their name to any cause larger than his/her career. That too is a fact about a person. My arguement here is not only about what one builds. But also about what sort of person one becomes while building it, and which obligations one keeps refusing.

What I find most repellent in current tech culture is not bad politics, exactly, but a cultivated absence of speech. The familiar figure has words for everything except the things that matter. He/she has elaborate opinions on editors, databases, laptops, frameworks, hiring practices, remote work, startup strategy, office culture, perhaps wine and coffee, and on actual crimes he/she becomes vapor. Not one sentence. Not one public sign that he/she belongs to the same world as the victims. He/she is not ignorant. He/she has trained himself/herself, professionally, to be morally mute. He/she will publish a thousand words on why static typing improves maintainability and find himself/herself genuinely unable to say that a massacre is evil or that a famine is being engineered. He/she records podcasts about what senior engineers should focus on in 2026 while populations are being crushed, and somehow this silence is still presented as maturity.

The corporate environment helps the process along by reducing every question to scope. As if moral responsibility evaporated the moment labor was sufficiently subdivided. This is exactly how irresponsible institutions reproduce themselves, through long chains of people each claiming to be a tiny, blameless fragment. The defense from Nuremberg, I was only following orders, does not become noble because it is now delivered with better grammar and a larger total compensation package.

The reply that "engineers are workers too" is true and beside the point. Of course they are. But being a worker does not absolve one of responsibility toward other workers, or toward the people harmed by the institutions one helps run. The worker framing becomes especially weak in engineering because engineers, particularly in rich firms in rich countries, often have far more room to maneuver than the people below them in the hierarchy of labor. A warehouse picker cannot easily refuse a shift and a migrant cleaner cannot easily speak publicly. A cashier under camera surveillance has no margin for dissent. A senior software engineer, whose skills are portable, whose savings are larger, and whose résumé will get interviews next month, has more room than almost any other category of worker in history. This does not make engineers free but, to me, it means their excuses are weaker. If you understand that something is unjust and you do nothing because involvement is unpleasant, you are making a choice. You are deciding that your discomfort matters more than the people on the other end of the arrangement.

The same applies, with less complexity, to the broader public culture of tech, the YouTubers, founders, podcasters, and influencers who treat tech as a sealed aquarium hovering above the world. There is an endless supply of videos about keyboards, editors, frameworks, AI tools, productivity systems, morning routines, desk setups, and the emotional journey of shipping yet another app. There is endless argument over which language is winning, which model is smarter, which side project might reach ten thousand dollars a month. But when whole populations are being butchered, starved, displaced, blacklisted, or silenced, the channel suddenly becomes not political. As if what is going on in the world was a niche interest and not the structure determining who gets to live, move, eat, speak, and work. This world helps reproduce, at scale, the same moral numbness it presents as professionalism. The standing message is always: stay focused on your stack, your salary, your audience, your personal brand. Never become inconvenient. Never become difficult. Never risk professional contamination by caring, in public, about the wrong dead people.

Responsibility does not require martyrdom or full-time organizing or the public-intellectual life, although those would not be bad outcomes either. It does require something. For engineers, it tends to require more than for most others, because they are unusually embedded in the institutions that shape material life. Sometimes that means refusing certain work, sometimes it means speaking publicly about a contract or a policy. Sometimes it talking about and documenting abuses, supporting a union drive, helping coworkers organize, giving money to strike funds or to mutual aid, providing infrastructure or operational security to activist groups, attending demonstrations, teaching, writing, or, at the limit, whistleblowing. The form is less important than the structure: responsibility is active. It is not a feeling. It is not having the correct opinions in private chats. If your "good little believes" never costs you convenience, reputation, money, or at least a small loss of social ease, it is probably decoration.

One of the most corrosive ideas in current professional culture is that activism is unserious, beneath the dignity of the technical adult, and that the mature posture is to keep your head down, do your tickets, take your salary, donate occasionally, and leave history to other people. History does not leave just because you prefer not to touch it. The wars are still supplied. The workers are still squeezed. The displaced are still displaced. If you helped build the machinery while insisting that you were not really political, you were not standing outside the story. You were one of its functionaries.

This is not a personal failure that springs from nowhere. The depoliticization of the technical worker is exactly what one would expect from a class society interested in keeping its most embedded operators quiet. Isolate them from one another. Dissolve their solidarities. Reduce them to individualized sellers of labor. Fill their heads with private advancement: portfolios, brands, founders-in-waiting, well-paid professionals who should stay away from messy collective questions. Once that is done, politics begins to look like an intrusion into life rather than the substance of life under capitalism. C. Wright Mills described something similar in The Power Elite in 1956 (Mills 2000), a managerial stratum that came to identify with the institutions that paid it rather than with the public it was supposed to serve. The contemporary engineer is, in many cases, a quieter and better-compensated version of that figure, and the contemporary tech firm has only refined the trick by adding ergonomic chairs and the ideological flattery of treating its employees as exceptional individuals rather than as members of a workforce.

Tech culture is one of the cleanest examples of this discipline. Everything is reframed as lifestyle, tooling, optimization, or career management. Salaries without class. Layoffs without capitalism. Censorship without power. War without imperialism. Exploitation without labor. Genocide without perpetrators. We are encouraged to have strong opinions about text editors and no opinion about empire, strong opinions about indentation and no opinion about mass murder. This is not an accident of taste of all the professionals you have met in your life, and no I'm not the only one to spell this out, this is ideological training, and it is effective.

Chomsky's original formulation (Chomsky 1967) still works, but it can be widened. The responsibility of intellectuals is not only to speak the truth and to expose the lies of governments. It is also to refuse moral outsourcing, the pretense that someone else, somewhere else, is in charge of the moral content of one's professional life. For engineers, including the ones who write checkout flows for shoe retailers, and for the wider public personalities who orbit technical culture while enjoying its status and audience, that means giving up the fantasy that writing code, reviewing gadgets, debating tools, or building a media persona around tech are non-political acts hovering above the world that all this activity helps reproduce. #Politics #Programming #Modus Vivendi #The free software movement is a political movement