If you’re a sysadmin or a programmer, I want you to ask yourself one question: What do you think your role is on this world?

And no, I don’t mean “What is your job description?”. I mean, what impact on the world do you think your job should have?

It is a fact that we hold a tremendous amount of power in the world due to our roles. We control the IT systems of companies and governments small and big, be it because we literally hold direct access or because our companies make a product that is installed on the systems of other companies. And because everything has a computer embedded nowadays, and because what people are seeing on their screens are influencing them so much, we control not only some abstract digital world, but the physical world.

Yet what are we doing with our power? If you ask me, we are using our talents in service of the Antichrist and the forces of evil currently destroying the world.

We are using them to help the most evil people on earth hold the world’s culture hostage, skirt our countries’ regulations in the name of short-term money in the form of gig companies like the technically-not a taxi company Uber and the technically-not a hotel chain airbnb, send our fellow working class people to these same highly abusive gig companies we helped build via “AI layoffs”, for example, then build even more demon technology to hold over these gig workers’ heads so they don’t get too uppity, in fact we are helping these very same evil people build “AI” systems that are destroying literally everything normal people hold (or used to hold) dear like music, stories, art, the stuff that makes our lives feel fulfilled and stimulate us intelectually. Not to mention a personal problem of mine with certain IT workers at Cloudflare that were very happy to collect dollars stained with Near’s blood for defending Kiwi Farms against online attacks until public pressure made that impossible in a PR sense. This one hit specially hard, Near was a programmer that actually did something good for the world, something I know many of us cannot say of ourselves. They translated Super Famicom and GBA games to English so that non-Japanese speakers could play them and developed highly accurate emulators to enjoy those same experiences, a literal example of someone with IT skills using their skills for the good of the world, killed by Kiwi Farms, with the help of the IT workers who helped Cloudflare’s leadership defend them against online attacks.

And yes, I do believe we are responsible in part for all the evil gig companies, AI companies, companies willing to defend trash like Kiwi Farms, and so on, are commiting. The CEOs of these companies barely know how to use their computers or even how their companies’ main product work. OpenAI’s Sam Altman is perhaps the most famous public example of this, yet they sure are the only ones benefiting from all these demonic products.

These people don’t know how to make all of this. You know who does? Yep, you, programmer who builds them or sysadmin who keeps them up and running securely. And so far we have been perfectly willing to, literally and metaphorically, destroy the world for our short-lived paychecks, because, surprise, we aren’t actually the insiders set to make multi-generational fortunes from the end of the world, as demonstrated by all the layoffs specially in the US’ tech industry.

You can see it around you, these companies, with their energy guzzling datacenters used for everything I mentioned, specially AI, powered by non-renewables, are destroying the world directly via their emissions, and indirectly via all the evil enabled by the technology that runs there. And everything is starting to have consequences: all the layoffs, all the concentration of wealth, all of it that has been enabled by us directly is having an effect, although delayed because of many financial shenanigans being pulled that makes the economy look good while people start to starve and wonder how they’re going to make it to the end of the month (lookup k-shaped economy on your favorite search engine for more). Did you know buy-now-pay-later is being increasingly used for groceries?.

While the bosses of the companies that are destroying the world for money definitely bear blame, we, the IT workers that enabled all of this for them, also do. Don’t think you’ll be able to keep collecting paychecks and stay unscathed when hungry, miserable workers left behind by the world start wondering what happened. They’ll knock on your door as well.

I believe it is too late to prevent the crisis that is to come. But what there’s still time for is for IT workers to decide who they’ll stand with, the CEOs of these companies or our fellow working man. How can you help them, you ask? Well, you can help the anti-GenAI effort by flooding the Internet with data meant to poison their training data they scrape from the Internet, see for example Nightshade. You can try to advocate against AI and boycotting all these evil companies at your job should you hold any kind of decision-making power, although good luck with that, given you’re against the speculative bubble of this era in this case. Finally, you can deprive this evil industry of your skills by leaving it, which I intend to do soon as I pursue training for non-IT fields (I’m seeking to become a car mechanic, if you’re looking for inspiration). The point is do something other than keep enabling evil. If nothing else, it will help you reconcile with yourself knowing that, when everything blows up, you did what you could to stand alongside regular people against the Antichrist.