If you missed the first posts of this series, you’ll find them here:

• Using Technology To Oppose Tyranny: Part 1
• Using Technology To Oppose Tyranny: Part 2
• Using Technology To Oppose Tyranny: Part 3
• Using Technology To Oppose Tyranny: Part 4

Holding the Line: The Role of Professional Ethics

Timothy Snyder reminds us that professionals play a critical role in resisting tyranny. Lawyers, doctors, journalists, engineers—these are the people who keep systems running and, ideally, keep them honest. But when professionals cave under pressure, institutions lose their integrity, and corruption spreads like a bad case of malware.

If you missed the first posts of this series, you’ll find them here:

• Using Technology To Oppose Tyranny: Part 1
• Using Technology To Oppose Tyranny: Part 2
• Using Technology To Oppose Tyranny: Part 3

Using Technology To Oppose Tyranny: Part 4 – Taking Responsibility for Our Online World

In his book “On Tyranny,” historian Timothy Snyder challenges us to “take responsibility for the face of the world” by removing hate symbols. But in 2025, nasty stuff doesn’t just show up as swastikas spray-painted on walls — it’s embedded in our feeds, comments, and search results.

If you missed the first posts of this series, you’ll find them here:

• Using Technology To Oppose Tyranny: Part 1
• Using Technology To Oppose Tyranny: Part 2

Timothy Snyder’s third lesson is:

Beware The One Party State

This one is especially important for all Americans to pay attention to right now.

Donald Trump made the following statement during a speech on Friday, July 26, 2024, at an event organized by the conservative group Turning Point Action in West Palm Beach, Florida:

If you missed the first post of this series, you’ll find it here: Using Technology To Oppose Tyranny: Part 1

Timothy Snyder’s second lesson is:

Defend Institutions

Since this series is about using Technology To Oppose Tyranny, I thought this section would be a good place to demonstrate how you can use AI, in this case the Deep Research model provided by Perplexity.ai, to assist you in figuring out what you can do. Which institutions should you defend, if you want to oppose tyranny?

Timothy Snyder’s excellent little book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From The Twentieth Century is a must-read for anyone who would like to live in a free and fair society.

(By “little” I mean that it’s smaller than my hand and only 126 pages long, so anyone can read it in an hour or two.)

I have a theory that doing anything, no matter how small, is better than doing nothing. This is the first of a few tiny posts on how to use technology to do your part to oppose tyranny.

According to the Stack Overflow’s Workplace Satisfaction Survey, 80% of professional programmers are unhappy. But the problem isn’t AI, and it’s not coding.

Many developers start off their day with a “stand-up” meeting, which is considered a standard part of an Agile development methodology.

Unfortunately, many companies do a pale cargo-cultish shadow of a stand-up, which wastes everyone’s time and saps the energy out of the team.

The problem with stand-ups as practiced by many companies is that people don’t actually know what the stand-up is for. They’re treated like a daily personal status report. If that’s what they were for, a message in a slack channel would be more than enough, and there wouldn’t be any reason for a stand-up.