Yet you participate in society. Curious.
We Should Improve Society Somewhat via Know Your Meme
I am the peasant with the sticks.
I work in tech. I’ve worked in tech for most of my adult life. I’ve been paid well by the standards of most humans alive today - better than most humans who have ever lived. My work runs on infrastructure built by companies I have significant criticisms of. I use tools made by people whose politics I find somewhere between uncomfortable and actively dangerous. I have a LinkedIn profile. I go to conferences. I talk to vendors. Open source tools I’ve built are in use at organizations whose work I believe causes real harm. Some portion of my employer’s revenue - and therefore my paycheck - comes from companies I’ve publicly criticized.
And I think the tech industry, taken as a whole, is one of the more significant forces accelerating the conditions for fascism in the United States right now. I’ve written about this directly. I’m not being hyperbolic.
So.
The gotcha that isn’t
The meme’s punchline is that critique-while-participating is hypocrisy. That if you really believed the system was broken, you’d opt out. And if you haven’t opted out, you must not really believe it - or you lack the courage of your convictions - or you’re performing criticism while cashing the checks.
This argument sounds clever. It isn’t.
I would genuinely love to opt out of capitalism. I have thought about this. The problem is that I have bills to pay. I need to eat. I need health insurance. I have a dog to put through college. Opting out of the tech industry specifically - if you have a background in tech and need to pay rent - means taking a significant financial hit that most people with dependents, health conditions, or debt can’t absorb. The system isn’t structured to make exit easy. That’s sort of the point.
More importantly: the argument confuses systemic critique with individual purity. These are different things. I am not claiming to be personally clean. I’m claiming the system has problems that need to be addressed at a systemic level. When you can’t meaningfully opt out of a system, participating in it isn’t the same as endorsing it. If it were, no one inside any institution could ever legitimately call for its reform.
The “yet you participate” gotcha is, at its core, an argument for complacency. It says: unless you’ve found a way to fully exit, your criticism doesn’t count. Which conveniently means the people most harmed by a system - the ones who can least afford to exit - have the least standing to complain about it. That’s not an argument. That’s a trap.
It also treats change as zero-sum - as if participation cancels out criticism, and the only valid position is full withdrawal. That’s not how change works. It never has been. People improve things from inside broken systems. That’s most of how things have ever gotten better.
The dissonance that actually is real
I’m not going to pretend there’s no tension. There is. Every day.
There are cases where “yet you participate” has a real answer, and that answer is: actually, don’t. I’ve written about why I think people and companies should leave X entirely. That’s not a hypothetical - it’s a position I acted on because the case for staying had collapsed. When the question has a clear answer, I try to act on it.
But the broader tech industry isn’t X. I can’t just leave and blog about it.
There’s a phrase that gets thrown around in these conversations: there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism. It’s usually deployed as either a cop-out or a condemnation. I think it’s just true - and it’s neither. It’s a description of structural reality. Every purchase, every job, every tool you build exists inside a system that implicates all of us in things we’d rather not be implicated in. That doesn’t mean choices don’t matter. It means individual moral purity is the wrong frame for systemic problems. You can’t shop or abstain your way out of this. You have to actually change the system.
I’ve written separately about what happens when tools you build get used in ways you didn’t intend. I don’t have clean answers there either. What I know is that I’ve tried to be honest about it rather than look away. The dissonance doesn’t go away by ignoring it. It just metastasizes.
This isn’t contempt. It’s love.
I’m not criticizing the tech industry because I hate it. I’m criticizing it because I love it - or at least what I believed it could be - and I’m watching it become something I don’t recognize.
I got into tech because I’m a problem solver. Because I wanted to build things that made people’s lives less frustrating. Because I believed, and still believe, that well-built tools can genuinely help people. That belief is still intact. It’s why I still do this work.
What I didn’t fully understand when I started was that the same industry capable of building remarkable things is also capable of concentrating extraordinary power in very few hands, of optimizing for engagement over safety, of treating surveillance as a business model, of building infrastructure that authoritarians can rent. These aren’t inevitable features of technology. They’re choices - made by people, shaped by incentives, locked in by market structures that reward scale and punish restraint.
The critique isn’t “tech is bad.” The critique is “tech could be so much better than this, and the gap between what it is and what it could be is being paid for by people who have very little say in the matter.”
That’s not contempt. That’s grief, mostly. And a refusal to pretend otherwise.
Why the criticism matters more from inside
The smug kid in the meme has a tell. He’s not making an argument. He’s dismissing the peasant’s premise without engaging it. “You participate in society” is not a rebuttal to “we should improve society somewhat.” It’s a subject change.
The tech industry version of this move is well-worn: point at the critic’s participation as evidence the criticism isn’t sincere, and avoid engaging with the criticism itself. It works because there is something genuinely uncomfortable about critiquing systems you benefit from. But the discomfort doesn’t make the critique wrong. If anything, it makes it more necessary.
The peasant participates because they have to. They’re still right about the society.
And “we should improve it somewhat” is the least you can ask for from people who helped build it.