[lta]

The memory of Zuckerberg blabbering about Facebook positive social impact and mission of "Making the world more open and connected" triggers strong cognitive dissonance when reading this article.

Same as when remembering the "Don't be evil" moto from Google.

I'm wondering if at some level we always knew it would end up like this. What kind of moral shield can we claim from this mess ? I'm afraid it's actually very little

[gary_0]

And AFAIK Brin & Page and Zuckerberg still maintain majority voting control over their companies. They could enforce any policy they wanted from on high, and the worst that would happen is the number next to their name would go down a bit. Brin & Page could give the order to make Search work again or you're all fired, and Zuck could mandate no censorship of minorities or else, but they don't. There's nobody to shift blame to; this is just what billions of dollars does to "free-spirited hackers".

[cmrdporcupine]

Re-reading the Google IPO founders letter to prospective shareholders every once in a while is a sobering experience.

[underlipton]

The anecdote I love to give is that I didn't know that Brin went to my high school until after I'd graduated. It's a high-performing public school due to its proximity to several research institutions, but it was never exactly loaded, and certainly could have benefited from outside investment (say, to replace the 20ish "temporary" trailers with a new wing). Even just having him show up to give a talk to students would have been amazing. Not a peep from this man, though, let alone the pocket change to help out his alma mater.

[usrusr]

"and the worst that would happen is the number next to their name would go down a bit."

That's the thing, you can only have that kind of number for so many years before you start really not wanting it to get down.

And chances are they have been buying quite a bit of lifestyle by borrowing against that number. Because selling would strip them of that voting control you pointed out. Then they can't really afford the number to go down, because the borrowing is effectively a cascade, so in reality they aren't anywhere close to free in their decisions.

(but I'd imagine that they are quite capable of deluding themselves into believing that the decisions they have to take to keep the number up are what they actually want)

[the_af]

The lesson, to me, is remembering company mottos like these are meaningless because corporations are fundamentally amoral. They are made of people, yes, and these people do have moral values, but the corporation as a whole doesn't. Whatever tagline, whatever "inclusivity commitment", whatever "anti-discrimination" policies, whatever "diversity makes us stronger" motto: all of those are shallow, meaningless taglines. The corporation will adopt them when it will help their business, and ditch them just as fast when it doesn't (e.g. when a powerful politician doesn't like it and can harm your business).

Next time your company makes you sit through one of these trainings, for whatever so-called value, remember: the company doesn't believe in it. It only believes in making money.

[underlipton]

Pushing back for the sake of conversation: corporations are amoral, because they're containers for business activities. Those activities don't necessarily inherit that amorality, though. A business decision is made by a person, and so is a task undertaken or okayed by an employee; those can therefore be subject to measures of morality. Because people involved in a company have the capacity for moral or immoral action, it is in the company's best interest to monitor and correct behavior.

[HK-NC]

The corporation being legally a person sadly enables actual amoral people.

[johnnyanmac]

>I'm wondering if at some level we always knew it would end up like this

A very deep level. The level that joked about "pride month" being thrown put like Christmas decorations on July 1st.

The more positive sentiment back then is that bigotry wouldn't ever be profitable again as the world experienced more experiences and built more empathy. Of course, I can only laugh hysterically at poor 2014/2015 me.

[bell-cot]

> I'm wondering if at some level we always knew ...

Roughly speaking, the folks who truly cared knew.

Corporations have obvious market/regulatory incentives to say they're good guys.

Most people want to believe such statements, with the immediate incentive being a happier worldview.

Incentives for an extremely powerful corporation to actually be good are far weaker.

[dfxm12]

I'm wondering if at some level we always knew it would end up like this.

Persecuting marginalized people and supporting authoritarian regimes is the logical path for capitalism, yes.

[underlipton]

The parallels between today's techbros and the plantation magnates who pushed us towards the Civil War are unnerving, when you know that history (which is why they don't teach it).

[snickerbockers]

Julian Assange wrote an excellent book on this topic called "when Google met wikileaks" about a decade ago which i found to be eye-opening. The backdrop is the "arab spring" uprisings of the early 10s, which were widely touted by leaders in both silicon Valley and Washington as an example of the positive impacts of social media, a mere five years before this opinion was suddenly reversed when some of these positive effects came home.

The titular event is an account of when one of Google's executives came to britain to meet him in person (at this point he's fighting extradition to the United States but has not yet sequestered himself inside the Ecuadorian embassy). From the conversation Assange gets the impression that the Google exec is acting as an unofficial envoy of the US state department in hopes of convincing him to "play ball" by publishing more and more information which will advance the arab spring narrative. The rest of the book is his own personal investigation into the incestuous links between US foreign policy, social media corporations and the so-called "arab spring".

[cmrdporcupine]

I didn't even have to go read it to immediately know that it was Eric Schmidt who was the Google executive in question.

He's a notorious fan of unbridled American imperial power and "realpolitik" and brought Kissinger in multiple times to Google for "fireside chat" sessions.

Which always went over very... poorly... with the broader set of employees who used to get seriously annoyed at this. The reception was never good.

[robocat]

Great summary article from Assange's POV about meeting Schmidt et al :

https://www.newsweek.com/assange-google-not-what-it-seems-27...

[DANmode]

There are great articles by him on these topics, too, for those without book-level time to commit to the topic.

[r721]

And after that he decided to become an ally of Russian government to help them spread conspiracy theories (about Seth Rich for example):

>In the end, the most charitable interpretation of Assange’s “dissembling” as Mueller calls it, in the Seth Rich hoax is that he genuinely couldn’t rule out the possibility that Rich was his source. The Mueller report demolished that final moral refuge. Rich had been dead four days when Assange received the DNC files.

https://archive.is/56RiI

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Seth_Rich#WikiLeaks_...

[YcYc10]

Same with OpenAI. There's no point in listening to any ethical mission statements coming from any big tech company - it's all corporate BS.

[d--b]

Well the "dumbfucks" comment date back a while. Zuck's always been an asshole.

[dogleash]

>I'm wondering if at some level we always knew it would end up like this.

Everyone always knew. The criticisms get lumped in with with the unreasonable nay-sayers because it makes them easier to dismiss.

The honest people I know working for obvious evil will acknowledge it and say they're just doing it for a paycheck. But this gives most people cognitive dissonance and they'll find better rationalization. See also: every cope post on hacker news by someone defending a company they're pretending not to work for.

[embedding-shape]

Rather than trying to find things we disagree on, why don't we try to find things we agree on?

Do you think people should be allowed to control their own body? Why/why not?

[jfindper]

>grooming children into "queer" lifestyles

This isn't how being queer works!

[exasperaited]

> grooming children into "queer" lifestyles

… is a deliberate bad faith characterisation.

Isn't bad faith argument immoral?

[cluckindan]

As a state tends toward either communism or capitalism, it starts dictating the economy more and more, until it hits the ceiling and becomes a totally dictated war economy, where a fundamentally fascist ideology replaces previous values. At that point, war is inevitable, because a war economy requires active warfare, and war provides ample opportunies for pilfering at multiple levels, both home and abroad.

Fascism is not to blame, it is a means to an end for the economy at large. Ultimately, the issue is uneven distribution of wealth and power.

[embedding-shape]

You're saying this like it's some absolute truth, that any state naturally gravitates towards either communism or capitalism, but based on the amount of states in the world that haven't automatically turned into either communistic or capitalistic hell-holes, it seems like this only happens to a small fraction of the states in the world.

[kuerbel]

You are downvoted, but correct. Fascism is one possible failure mode of capitalism. It is capitalism stripped of brakes, guardrails, and ethics. A kind of panic-driven hyper-authoritarian capitalism that pretends unity can solve material contradictions.

[newsclues]

It’s funny that some people think “positive social impact” should (only) reflect their views and morals.