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Bresenham | 5 years ago

> Reporters literally can't believe it when founders making piles of money say that they started their companies to make the world better. The situation seems made for mockery. How can these founders be so naive as not to realize how implausible they sound?

I can't speak for someone like Kara Swisher, but attempting to channel her, I don't think she would think it is beyond belief that some hacker teenager who dropped out of a good college to work on X was earnest that they were trying to make the world better.

The mockery over naivete and implausibility comes from that those teenagers will walk into a VC office on Sand Hill Road, where they will sign over various rights for the future. They will then form a Delaware corporation. With plans to raise more VC, after that an IPO, and finally dividends. Which means what? What came from those who did this in the past?

- The Steve Jobs orchestrated formerly secret cabal, that included Eric Schmidt and others, to drive down engineer salaries in the Bay.

- Social networks amplifying traffic saying Covid is a hoax, and here we are with 3000 dying of Covid in the US on Wednesday.

- The widespread spying and surveillance of people that almost all these companies have a hand in - even Adobe has become a surveillance company.

It's the thinking that the corporations that will be the IBMs, Oracles and Microsofts of the future are there to "make the world better". It is risible.

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andrewmutz|5 years ago

> What came from those who did this in the past?

You're only listing the bad things that came from people who did this in the past.

An intellectually honest approach would be to look at the net effect instead, which has been overwhelmingly positive.

walleeee|5 years ago

> An intellectually honest approach would be to look at the net effect instead, which has been overwhelmingly positive.

Care to elaborate your analysis?

dcx|5 years ago

Do you remember life before iPhones? Before Google and universal knowledge, YouTube guides on every subject under the sun, Microsoft Excel, personal computers, international video calls, remote work? (Plus the indirect benefits to you economically from every industry adopting the above)

The world has added 3.4 billion people since 1980. We're in a life-or-death struggle for carrying capacity, so daily life naturally gets worse over time. It's easy to pin that on the whipping boy of the day.

There's no question that the next generation of technology has come with deep, systemic issues. But on balance the existence of these companies has clearly made the entire world better and brighter.

One case study - the Spanish Flu killed 50 million people. A pessimistic estimate for total deaths from COVID-19 after the vaccine(s) are fully rolled out might be 10 million. There are 4.3x more people in the world today. Disinformation is absolutely killing people. But how many more lives might our industry be credited with saving?

randomsearch|5 years ago

Totes agree with the “yeah but actually tech companies have done amazing things” argument but do you ever wonder why so many examples are now quite old? I mean I was raving about Google in 2001 and here we are near 20 years later saying how great their impact on search is...

graeme|5 years ago

Your argument jumps around. By the time Steve Jobs returned to Apple he had near total control: yet a central point of your argument was that idealistic founders have trouble when they sign away rights.

And Job, though he did many wonderful things, had sociopathic tendencies from even before he founded Apple.

As for Facebook, Zuckerberg has maintained a very large amount of control. How does this square with your thesis that the trouble comes from VC’s?

Bresenham|5 years ago

My thesis is that for the earnest young founders mentioned in the essay who want to make the world a better place and to work on X, the trouble starts when they sign a deal with VCs, super seeds etc.

If they are not earnest, but sociopathic, then the thesis does not apply to them. The essay was about earnestness.

Tangentially - if you read the emails, texts etc. found in discovery for Brin, Schmidt etc., they are secretly entering a cartel the DOJ would break up to forbid direct recruitment of their own workers. Even the people who are doing all of the work to supposedly "make the world a better place" are being screwed by the effort, never mind people outside the company and the externalities on the way to that greater profit.