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it is weird to me that you imply facebook and google have morals in your comparison to the amoral wall street. what is stranger to me is that i agree, but only

it is weird to me that you imply facebook and google have morals in your comparison to the amoral wall street. what is stranger to me is that i agree, but only because i believe facebook and google to have distorted or warped moralities. i think they truly believe they are making the world a better place, but i hold the opinion they both have contributed a net negative on society at large. to me, amorality is preferable over warped morality. it is clear what wall street wants: money. it isn’t clear to me what facebook and google actually want. i fear they strive for control.

beaconstudios 8y ago
I can't buy into the idea that these companies have contributed a net negative to society. Their existence has vastly improved communication over the internet for billions of people. Weighed against their cons, I still think it's a net positive.
- uep 8y ago
  Although it's kind of silly trying to make these judgements, I'd say Google has been a net-positive, Facebook is a little murkier. Google's net positive has almost certainly been search. I believe this has probably had a huge net-productivity improvement across the world. I don't even use their search engine anymore, but they started the modern search engine and made a great deal of information more easy to find. I don't think they've improved communication otherwise. I don't believe Gmail or Hangouts have improved communication. I don't think buying Android and mostly giving the OS away has been a net-positive either. Facebook is much harder to say. They've definitely connected many, many people via their service, but it has also been shown that the more someone uses Facebook the less happy they are. Now, this could easily be conflating causation with correlation (sad people use Facebook more), but they've also been caught doing bad things. It's fun to think about, but there are so many what-ifs. How long would it have been before modern search came about without Google? If we had a federation of smaller social networks, would that have limited the damage that a single company could have done?

beaconstudios 8y ago

I can't buy into the idea that these companies have contributed a net negative to society. Their existence has vastly improved communication over the internet for billions of people. Weighed against their cons, I still think it's a net positive.

uep 8y ago
Although it's kind of silly trying to make these judgements, I'd say Google has been a net-positive, Facebook is a little murkier. Google's net positive has almost certainly been search. I believe this has probably had a huge net-productivity improvement across the world. I don't even use their search engine anymore, but they started the modern search engine and made a great deal of information more easy to find. I don't think they've improved communication otherwise. I don't believe Gmail or Hangouts have improved communication. I don't think buying Android and mostly giving the OS away has been a net-positive either. Facebook is much harder to say. They've definitely connected many, many people via their service, but it has also been shown that the more someone uses Facebook the less happy they are. Now, this could easily be conflating causation with correlation (sad people use Facebook more), but they've also been caught doing bad things. It's fun to think about, but there are so many what-ifs. How long would it have been before modern search came about without Google? If we had a federation of smaller social networks, would that have limited the damage that a single company could have done?