The vegan who serves your steak (a parable about work, technology, and morality)

I’ve been vegan for more than twenty years. I went vegan as a teenager and never looked back. Sure, I’ve engaged in debates about the veganness of certain kinds of sugar, I had a moment when I thought bee products were okay, and I’ll still wear second-hand wool in order to avoid an over-reliance on microplastic-shedding synthetic fibres. But I’ve been vegan for a long damn time, and in my own habits, I’m fairly intense about it.

For a few summers in my twenties, I worked at my aunt’s restaurant in a touristy part of Northern Ontario. This is a bit of a rite of passage in my family. Seasonal labour was always needed, and any given niece or nephew was always welcome to travel up and spend a couple months working. I’m a pretty okay waitress when I need to be, and the hikes in that area are unbeatable. So I spent a decent chunk of time working for my aunt. I’m not aware of any fully-vegan restaurants on the north shore of Lake Superior. Suffice it to say, I was not serving vegan food when I was waitressing. In essence, I was earning my living by giving people chunks of meat in exchange for money. Despite the title of this essay, it wasn’t mostly steak – that was a special we only had sometimes. But I did move a heck of a lot of prime rib.

As you might imagine, serving meat and bussing dishes covered in meat juice is neither the nicest, nor the most morally-coherent activity for a vegan. So how is someone whose veganism is at least partially ideologically-motivated supposed to square the moral circle? The basic answer is that I didn’t. During the time I was serving meat for money, I lived in a complicated kind of cognitive dissonance, holding myself at a distance from what I was doing and gratefully accepting the couple exemptions offered to me, so that I could avoid directly touching meat myself. I balanced the benefits of the work – getting to be in a beautiful place and spending my spare time in nature, earning good tips, feeling that I was able to provide reliable and dedicated labour to a relative – against the downsides, namely that meat. I helped the kitchen manager develop a vegan item for the menu. I encouraged people to buy prime rib in the same way I encouraged dessert, or a whole bottle of wine instead of a glass. The higher the bill, the better the tip, and tips are important for restaurant staff in Canada. In short, while waitressing, I encouraged patrons to do things I didn’t personally find moral, and I profited from this violation of my own morals not just financially, but in getting to do a job that I otherwise enjoyed, in a place I valued.

Working your morals

By now, you’re probably thinking either “Okay, what’s your point?” or “Yes, yes, stop being so heavy-handed.” I wrote in the title that this essay is about work, technology, and morality. A vegan serving a steak is a painfully obvious example of work and morals conflicting. But how often, in your own work, do you find yourself doing something you don’t fully believe in? For me, it’s every day. As an advocate of Free/Libre and Open Source Software, I do something I don’t believe in when I open my email, which is provided by Microsoft. I also cross my own moral boundaries when I accede to using MS Sharepoint, the approved mode of internally sharing files. (Caveat: There is a wonderful initiative involving some Dutch universities and their shared technology cooperative to host at least research-related files outside of the Microsoft ecosystem.) Worse, like the vegan waitress encouraging the prime rib order, I cajole other people into a system I don’t believe in. If I tell a student that they need to email me from their institutional address, I’m doing it. If I encourage a colleague to use software on our university’s “allow” list in place of something unauthorized but potentially more ethical, I’m doing it. I am once again the vegan waitress selling meat, because I work in an institutional setting which incentivizes or or requires me to use software and systems I don’t believe in.

But that’s just me, right? Or at best, the other F/LOSS advocates, or the people who object to Microsoft doing business with the IDF. There aren’t such a lot of us – we’re probably edge cases. Everyone tolerates moral ambiguity and cognitive dissonance to some degree in life. So where do we draw the lines? How do we decide which of our morals and values are important enough to make a fuss about, or at least base our life choices on? This is, of course, a personal decision and can vary greatly depending on factors like material circumstances, background, the socio-political climate in which you live, and all kinds of others. If, for example, I live in a country where almost all higher educational institutions are locked into the Microsoft ecosystem, then I can either go looking for the rare institution that isn’t, look abroad and hope that somewhere, there’s a university still running its own mailserver, or I can consider a change of profession and hope that the technological grass really is greener in another field. My other option would be to move onto an activism and advocacy footing. I could encourage my institution to drop Microsoft, work on organizing with my colleagues, or try to otherwise put pressure on those making the decisions. These are two basic options when we find that parts of our work don’t align with our morals: go somewhere else that’s a better moral fit, or try to make change where you are. Which of those two decisions we make is influenced by a lot of factors, not least of which is how our work positively aligns with our morals and values. I grumble and tolerate an all-Microsoft shop on a daily basis because I otherwise find my work valuable, meaningful, and socially useful.

But isn’t it a little ridiculous to be having this conversation at all? Being served a steak by a vegan waitress is a lot easier to parse as a moral question than “a whole class of institutions relies on software and systems that are increasingly morally suspect.” When I was the waitress, I had a clear choice. The meat is arguably the subject of the job. If I don't want to engage with it, I can get a different summer job. I made my own very clear moral reckoning when I decided to be that waitress. This is not the case with pervasive and mandatory software ecosystems. Because of the non-optionality of those systems in certain fields, we’re in a sort of post-conviction moment – when it comes to Microsoft specifically, but also many other big tech companies providing integral services in problematic ways. This is a very special time, in that making jokes about big tech lock-in is a thing, but trying to implement more principled alternatives is less popular. We’re willing to have slightly salty opinions, but we don’t seem to believe in our power to make change. This is roughly where my own moral lines have landed for the time being. My institutional email address is tied to a Microsoft server, as is the calendar most people I work with expect to be able to use to arrange meetings. I cannot check work email without encountering Microsoft, and I am hard pressed to avoid at least minimal interaction with features I would not choose for myself, and which I find suspect. Beyond what I’m actively required to use, I do my best to be creative, finding wiggle room in between what is mandatory and what is not allowed. These are ways of sufficing and coping, but they also have a cost. When our expectation of technology used in work processes is that it should make those processes easier and more seamless, being the person who continually causes a slowdown by not wanting to use the tools used by others can have a reputational or efficiency cost, as long as the majority of people in the organization continue to be on board with the use of those tools.

Is action possible?

The reason this essay is about technology and morality, not just about morality at work, is because we are often presented with technological solutions as enablers for the things that are supposed to be our core function. The technology itself is not something we are meant to object to or endorse, but is instead simply provided as the expedient by which we do our work. In work environments where technology is a basic enabler, rather than a subject of discussion or the object of a desired skill, it can be treated with a degree of transparency that hides its importance. The enabling technologies are not treated as one of the reasons one does the work, or as one of the ethical barriers to selecting the work or workplace. One consideration may be that certain tools are now so ubiquitous that their use goes without saying. It is a deviation from the norm to use a word processor other than the one provided by Microsoft. If one is processing words, the base assumption may simply be that there is only one widely-used tool for the job. Or at least, this could be a thought process occurring in the minds of those who treat particular tools as enablers rather than discussions. An organization may provide Windows on all its computers, with the belief that Windows is simply the only viable solution in the given problem space.

What can we do, then, if we find our work conflicting with our values? The parable of the vegan waitress offers half an answer: get the proverbial vegan item onto the menu. Systemic change doesn’t happen all at once. We may wish wholeheartedly for our work to be entirely consistent with our morals. That is not always possible, and we need to draw our own lines of acceptability, both personally and collectively. More important than complete moral consistency, I argue, is to aim for some change, as and when it is possible to achieve, and with a continuing drive to make it happen. I’ve argued this before, but now is an excellent time for change in the software space. There are geopolitical and economic factors which make it a very good moment to try to push changes to the tools used to enable work. In terms of the ethics of software used in the workplace, small wins, like that one vegan item on the menu, can be the beginning of bigger things. Proving that there’s an appetite for change is a first step in making the space for bigger change in the long term.