I hope you don't wear t-shirts made by slave kids in Honduran sweatshops, eat food fertilized by Monsanto, or buy anything that gives money to the Koch brothers. I hope you never drink Coke, since they kill unionizers in Colombia and Guatemala. While you're at it, I hope you never use Eclipse, since IBM supplied the Nazis.
Every company is dirty. Every single one. Even your YC-startup is taking money from VCs taking money from east coast money guys making money from all of the above. Capitalism is a dirty game.
Realizing this, you have a few alternatives. You can try to smart-consume your way out of the situation, which is laughably futile; you can turn libertarian and start justifying it in terms of economic efficiency; or you can realize that we have no option but to play a rigged game while there isn't another game in town and start creating something better.
That's defeatist and dismissive. On a marginal level we should be exposing immoral decisions made by companies so that they at least try to give the perception of being moral, which a lot of the time means having to make a moral decision. On our spare time we should be agitating and propagandising and what not, but just because the most efficient and affordable companies are usually the most exploitative, it doesn't mean we should act like there's nothing we can do about it.
I've spent a large part of my life doing various pro-union anti-corporate-misbehavior etc activism and have come to the conclusion there is literally nothing us plebs can do at this point. The MEND/AQI style asymmetric warfare is literally the only option left, and that only works on the periphery, not the core. Consumer and traditional activism is entirely toothless because the economy has shrunk to the point where concessions can no longer be made. The labor-capital relationship of the 50's and 60's is dead now.
Uber is certainly not the least moral company and being upset about them prank-calling Lyft is just laughable. When was the last time you drank Coke or wore a Gildan t-shirt? Hell, look at the tags on the clothes you're wearing right now and try to come up with the moral authority to chide Uber.
I hope you don't wear t-shirts made by slave kids in Honduran sweatshops, eat food fertilized by Monsanto, or buy anything that gives money to the Koch brothers. I hope you never drink Coke, since they kill unionizers in Colombia and Guatemala. While you're at it, I hope you never use Eclipse, since IBM supplied the Nazis.
Every company is dirty. Every single one. Even your YC-startup is taking money from VCs taking money from east coast money guys making money from all of the above. Capitalism is a dirty game.
Realizing this, you have a few alternatives. You can try to smart-consume your way out of the situation, which is laughably futile; you can turn libertarian and start justifying it in terms of economic efficiency; or you can realize that we have no option but to play a rigged game while there isn't another game in town and start creating something better.
Choose wisely.