Sidebar: I don't know what "tech-washing" means. When I see that a company is laundering some bias or some social advantage through a machine learning model I just call it money laundering, because the inputs and outputs are both money and I think we've coined enough new victimhood words per year every year for many years.
If a company is profiting off it's "open-source" contributions, getting out more than it's putting in, then it's washing money through GitHub I guess. That's fair.
But "tech-washing" has this implication that any computer hacker is in a bad way, which is just silly: back when we had to go to the office the freeway overpasses we drove on had tent encampments under them.
Take that up with the Ayn Rand idiots who are not uncommon in these parts.
By "techwashing" I mean using some of the money a company makes in its main business (which in the case of Meta and some other corporates has a bad impact on society) to make
a positive technical contribution to the public
, thus helping existing and prospective employees work there with less of a guilty conscience.
Similar, to e.g. a pharmaceutical company raising the price of a medicine excessively, but then donating some of the money to build a hospital.
It's just that in the case of tech companies, the reputation washing is done via technical contributions.
If a company is profiting off it's "open-source" contributions, getting out more than it's putting in, then it's washing money through GitHub I guess. That's fair.
But "tech-washing" has this implication that any computer hacker is in a bad way, which is just silly: back when we had to go to the office the freeway overpasses we drove on had tent encampments under them.
Take that up with the Ayn Rand idiots who are not uncommon in these parts.