> Google and Facebook .. provide a lot of value to a lot of people, invest in R&D, and contribute to the open source community. VS > Facebook is attempting t

> Google and Facebook .. provide a lot of value to a lot of people, invest in R&D, and contribute to the open source community. VS > Facebook is attempting to kill all open communication protocols and force everyone to communicate through their platform with powerful network effects. There's no contradiction here. Both can be true at the same time. Large organisations (government & commercial alike) have even less of a fixed & permanent nature than do individuals, and can carry out huge numbers of activities in parallel, some harmful, some beneficial. You can try some sort of rough consequentialist calculus on an organisation's overall benefits / harms to society, which is complex and subjective to an extent that gives almost completely free play to prejudice. Alternatively you can look at the systems within which organisations grow and assess the functioning of the whole thing. I think this is the more powerful approach, having more potential for sidelining empty moralising. Personally I believe that for fundamental reasons, hypergrowth-oriented technological society inevitably leads to the destruction of everything of value (in truth a subject for a book, not a forum comment). Facebook & Google are natural & unwitting agents of these fundamental forces. At the same time, decent & capable humans work for them in large numbers, so inevitably make positive countervailing contributions.