Keep your business not neutral
You know who else has an audience? Every. Single. Business. Nothing (but greed) prevents companies from telling us where they stand on ethical issues that affect us all. Yet, the common attitude is to ‘keep the politics out of it’. I always found that odd. I mean corporations are perhaps the single biggest influencer of politics, and yet we treat them like a holy sanctuary of neutrality. — Kai Brach in DenseDiscovery 56
This is a stance I took for quite a while now.
It’s the reason why I don’t have double the amount of subscribers for my WDRL—at least I received also enough feedback from people who don’t like that I put my opinion in there. On the other hand, I’m grateful for that. I have more people than I ever dreamed of that love my writings, that say they’re so glad that this exists and many of them even give me some money for it to support me. My readers are very active and grateful for what I do and this is what drives my motivation.
It’s the reason why I don’t have many of the famous big clients in my portfolio. I simply don’t want to spend my energy into helping bad business that exploit other people of their privacy or our environment. Instead, I live and work a life of responsibility which you can find an outline of here.
I do believe individual action is important, not just for the (relatively minor) impact of the action itself, but as a starting point for raising public awareness which, over time, hopefully contributes to a change in policy. — Kai Brach in DenseDiscovery 76
I run my business with ethics in mind since a long time now (I would lie if I say that I hadn’t dreamt of working for Google when I was still very young) and am happy to have great clients. This will stay my 60% time job.
The rest of the time I’ll be a farmer and grow vegetables, fruits and flowers. Producing my own food and now being able to share it with other people feels great, nothing of my computer work so far compares to it.