A Letter to Those Who Build the Machine

I want to speak directly to the tech workers reading this book. Not the executives. Not the investors. Not the PR departments that will be dispatched to rebut what I have written. The engineers. The data scientists. The product managers. The sales people. The alliances managers. The people who are, right now, sitting in an office somewhere in the Bay Area or in Austin or in Seattle or in Bangalore, building the tools this book is about. I was you. I was very good at being you. By the time I was twenty-two years old I was making a quarter million dollars a year in tech sales. I sold colocation at Exodus. I sold networking at Bay Networks. I raised capital from Marc Benioff and Michael Dell. I sat in meetings with Andy Jassy at Amazon Web Services and managed seven-figure co-marketing partnerships and wrote executive briefing documents for people whose decisions shaped the entire enterprise technology ecosystem. I was inside it. I was building it. I was good at it and I was proud of it. And I am telling you: choose carefully. There are three forces that drive most people in Silicon Valley, and I have seen all three up close. The first is the need for wealth. The second is the need for power. The third is the need for vanity — what you might call the fashion show, the race for the best car and the second home and the right brand of watch and the school your children attend. These forces are real. I am not naive about them. I chased them myself, for years, before the machine broke me and I understood what they actually cost. Talent is rewarded in Silicon Valley. But only for as long as it benefits the corporation. The moment it does not — the moment you ask the wrong question, the moment you sign the wrong petition, the moment you walk out of the wrong meeting — your job is in jeopardy. I have watched this happen. I have watched engineers who built the products that made these companies billions of dollars be walked out the door by security because they asked where their tools were being used. I have watched people I respected make the calculation that their mortgage and their family's stability were worth more than whatever discomfort they felt about what the company was doing. I understand that calculation. I made it myself, for a while. But I want you to understand what that calculation actually costs. It costs your conscience. And your conscience, it turns out, is not a soft asset. It is the thing that determines whether you can look at yourself in the mirror. Whether you can sit across from your children one day and tell them what you did with the years when you were smart and motivated and capable of building almost anything. Whether you can sleep without the question that will eventually arrive: did the work I did make the world better, or did it make it worse? The companies you work for have enough defenders. They have PR agencies and executive communications teams and lobbyists and lawyers. They can defend themselves. They do not need your silence to survive. What they need — what they have always needed — is your labor, your intelligence, your creativity, and your willingness to set aside the questions that your conscience is asking. I am not asking you to do what Daniel Ellsberg did. I am not asking you to do what Edward Snowden did. Both of those paths came at costs that most people cannot and should not be expected to absorb. Ellsberg would tell you: don't go to your superiors first, don't go to Congress first — they'll just label you a

troublemaker and cut you off. Snowden did it right. But not everyone is in a position to be Snowden, and the industry should not require that level of personal sacrifice before a conscience gets heard. What I am asking is simpler. I am asking you to check. To make sure that the work you are doing is ethical, that it is meaningful, that it represents the values you were raised with — not just the values of your stock options or your quarterly bonus. Does the company you work for represent your values? Does what it builds make you proud? Does it respect the human rights and digital rights of the people it affects? If it does not — go. Choose a different company. Choose a different role. Choose a different path. There are more options available to skilled technology professionals than in almost any other field in the world. Nobody who can write a production API or architect a cloud deployment or train a machine learning model is truly without choices. The choice is there. The question is whether you are willing to make it. I learned this the hard way. The hard way was four and a half months in hospitals after the machine I had trusted destroyed my company, stripped me of my resources, and left me with nothing to show for years of work except the evidence that the system is rigged toward the powerful. I rebuilt. I changed direction. I turned what had broken me into the work you are holding in your hands. But I would rather you did not need a crisis to ask the question I am asking you to ask right now. Do not end up like me — working at Amazon Web Services for Jeff Bezos and Andy Jassy, spending your days making a company richer that has already decided you are a replaceable part, contributing your talent to an empire that will thank you for your service and show you the door the moment you are more expensive than the automation that replaces you. You have more power than you believe. The machine runs on your expertise. That is also your leverage. Use it. Choose wisely. Choose the work that makes you proud. Choose the employer that represents the world you want your children to live in. And if you are already inside a company that you know is doing harm — with what you know, with what you can see from where you sit — consider whether this is the moment to say what you know. In the words of former US military analyst turned political activist, Daniel Ellsberg, who passed away in 2023, “The odds are against us. Snowden's greatest fear was that nothing would change. Manning's too. That is likely the outcome. But no one can say with certainty that change is impossible. The possibility is there, and the stakes are extraordinarily high. So the answer is to tell the truth, to take the risks, to say what you know when you know it. The question every person who knows that the truth is being concealed has to ask themselves is whether this is not the time for them to speak out.” I asked myself that question after Amazon. I answered it with this book. You will have to answer it with whatever you are building right now. Choose well. Because the machine does not stop unless the people running it decide it should. And right now, far too many of those people are looking at the same spreadsheet and calling genocide a golden opportunity. You are better than that. I know because I was one of you — and I was better than that, too, even if it took losing almost everything to prove it.