That’s impossible unfortunately. Money alone won’t “buy” a guilt free, business-as-usual lifestyle in the face of this emergency. I suggest doing a bit more research to see for yourself what I mean.
Yeah this is pretty interesting. There's some set of activities (getting everyone on renewables, making clean construction/ag/transportation cost effective, political action, etc) that would actually allow someone to be guilt free. It would be way more money than just offsetting the footprint but it could fully cover all externalities....
That's kind of theoretical still, but perhaps we could crack it
Definitely not. Precisely because I care about ethics that I bring these up. The reason is that I think we as a society (well, at least a subset of the tech community) romanticizes free (beer and speech), open-source, decentralized, and non-profit projects so much that we automatically equate them as being ethical. (Exhibit A: this website, ethical.net.)
The truth is that ethics is hugely complex and nuanced. For example, what is your take on a super secure messaging app like Signal? Obviously, it is useful because it allows people to communicate privately (e.g., allows confidential sources to talk to journalists without being spied on). Now, what about the cliched scenario where it is being used by criminals to coordinate their bad deeds? Honestly, I don't know. I live in a democratic country whose government respects its citizen's privacy. As such, I am perfectly willing to give up a little bit of privacy (between myself and my government) if it means keeping the society safer. On the other hand, there are people (lots of em) who are not as fortunate as I am -- a wrong sneeze and you are dead.
Ethics is complicated. Even if we fully understand a product (or policy or project), it doesn't mean we fully understand its ethical impact. And even if we do understand its ethical impact, it is almost impossible for us to say if its entirety ethical or not. Because of these complexities, any attempt to consider ethics as a yes/no label (like this site, ethical.net) is almost certainly wrong. In fact, it trivializes this very important issue.
Is this a list of ethical software, carefully curated and thought about, or is this a list of non-main-stream software with the implicit assumption that contrarianism is implicitly ethical?
When I look at your list, I just see a sentence of ad copy about each product and an outbound link. Why not an essay about each product and the criteria you used when deciding that product was ethical and its competitors were not?
Thanks for sharing! I've been personally trying to move away from everything google and it's SO difficult. Gmail and Maps are the last things I'm using, but I am still hopeful. I feel it's more of an addiction than anything else really.
earth.fm is now at 700+ recordings