order: the development of mobile apps, cryptocurrencies, COVID-19, the metaverse, high interest rates, and A.I. were all used as excuses to enter a “wartime” approach).
But wartime framing is also an effective tool to undermine an employee’s sense of professional ethics. When our bosses bombard us with messaging that we are fighting for our literal survival, they condition us to implement plans without question. The unintended consequences or negative externalities of our decisions are not appropriate to discuss because they are not in service to the mission. Wartime framing absolves workers of responsibility for problems that are unrelated to profit. It creates a culture where decisions from authority cannot be challenged.
The last decade has seen wartime framing applied to social media, transportation, and various consumer segments. Uber and Airbnb regarded themselves as “at war” with local regulators, so employees developed techniques to deceive and bribe them. Facebook was “at war” with anything that took attention away from its users, so its product managers allowed harmful but engaging content to flourish on its platform. Amazon engineers developed technology to enable competitive delivery times that compromised the safety of its human labor force.
In all these cases, we find examples of employees who set aside their own ethical concerns in pursuit of achieving their company’s mission, in part because they operated in an environment where “mission success” supposedly had do-or-die stakes. Even employees who did not fully subscribe to this framing became complicit in a culture that made it clear that failure to fulfill leadership’s goals would not be tolerated.
My FASPE fellowship has opened my eyes to the extent that an “at-all-costs” environment that relies on hierarchy and inflammatory rhetoric can result in moral calamity.
I fear that the wartime culture in startups, whether through its desensitizing use of language, its insistence on the absolute authority of company leadership, or its maniacal focus on mission success, has created a class of workers that do not value their own sense of right and wrong, because that sense presents itself as a liability to their careers.
Such a class of workers is primed for complicity.
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Chris Bolton was a 2025 FASPE Design & Technology Fellow. He is currently a software engineer at an AI technology startup.
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Notes
1.https://a16z.com/peacetime-ceo-wartime-ceo/.
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