9 ms·

Why does big always become evil?

by bawana 6y ago

toomuchtodo 6y ago
Human nature organizing itself within a legal and economic framework. Don't like the result, fix the frameworks. A quote I never get tired of using is, "Apathy is the glove into which evil slips its hand." If you can, be the change.
- domador 6y ago
  Perverse incentives and people who have been perverted into pursuing such incentives. The main such incentive is "profit at any cost".
bt1a 6y ago
Because the people in charge are constrained to a narrow goal of bringing returns to shareholders
- kiba 6y ago
  What kind of return? Long term or short term? Destroying a company through mismanagement is decried as evil too.
  - acdha 6y ago
    Theoretically but there are far more examples of people getting extremely rich than suffering consequences, especially in a period where deregulation means the odds are overwhelmingly in favor of punishment being a tiny fraction of the profits.
kmbfjr 6y ago
My bet is that it was always evil, no one noticed because they were distracted by the amazing customer focus and service. Google may have touted the "do no evil" matra, but looking back, their plan was always to look over your shoulder. Nothing Google did was ever altruistic, and I think Amazon was and is the same way.
- Zaak 6y ago
  While Larry and Sergei were running Google, the company often (though not necessarily always) chose doing what was right over a more profitable wrong. A specific example was when they discovered the Chinese government was behind a major security breach targeting dissidents, they refused to continue to comply with Chinese censorship requirements. However, as the founders lost interest in the day-to-day operation of the company, any pretense of being more than just another soulless profit machine was discarded.
  - runawaybottle 6y ago
    It takes a village to raise a value based corporation. Many act like kids with no love, guidance.
brenden2 6y ago
This is just how capitalism works. It's about allocating capital in the most efficient way, and as far as Amazon is concerned workers are a dime a dozen. If workers complain, you can just fire them and hire someone else to do the job. This is especially true right now with the high unemployment rate. If workers really want to improve their situation they would all need to unionize. It would require a significant portion of the workers to join, or else Amazon can just keep firing and replacing people. While I'm certainly pro-worker and pro-union, I think most of the demonstrations have been a tiny number of workers relative to Amazon's whole workforce. Keep in mind that in the US there's a negative stigma attached to unionization thanks to many years of propaganda from "business leaders" who (obviously) are opposed to unionization because it eats into their profits.
- throwaway894345 6y ago
  It's not just propaganda. Many of us come from union backgrounds--either our parents, siblings, etc were blue collar workers or teachers or police. We've heard lots of stories of unions creating all kinds of nonsense inefficiencies and then when someone is being targeted by management, the union does little or nothing to protect them. My best friend taught in a low income school district, he was forced out because he wouldn't pass the basketball team when they wouldn't take tests or turn in homework; the union wouldn't protect him. My dad has a dozen such stories because he worked in factories since he left the family farm. This doesn't mean unions can't work or that things would be better without them or that we shouldn't trend toward more unionization; it only means that there are real problems with unions and it's hard to trust pro-union people when they won't even acknowledge as much. For me, I hear Europeans raving about their unions, so clearly unions can work, but if the pro-union side intends to get more political support, it needs to articulate what it is about American unions that aren't working very well and how they intend to address those issues. Chalking it up to "propaganda" comes off as patronizing and naive at best.
  - Thlom 6y ago
    American unions, from my understanding, are less democratic and you lack the legal framework we have in parts of Europe which facilitates negotiations between unions and industry. Mind you, that framework didn’t come for free. It was fought for with blood sweat and tears.
alexpetralia 6y ago
Child comments here are spot on. If you jam all of humanity through an economic blender, you will not come out with what you put in.
billfruit 6y ago
In someways small companies have more potential to be evil, because they often fly "under the radar". "We shouldn’t fetishize mom and pop operations. They offer lower wages, skimpier benefits, and inferior labor protections." See: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/01/small-businesses-workers-wages https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/01/small-businesses-workers-...
- willis936 6y ago
  Nobody "fetishizes" small business. This sounds like big corporation mouthpiece rhetoric. Big business is responsible for wealth concentration and irresponsible economics that hurt everyone. The alternative? Small business. It's easy to see why people might prefer a reality where small businesses continue to exist. Not everyone likes the Orwell novel we're writing.
  - leetcrew 6y ago
    "fetishize" is probably the wrong word, but people are certainly a lot more sympathetic towards small businesses. in my city, people are donating tens of thousands of dollars to local businesses that are closed due to coronavirus. can you imagine someone donating money to keep walmart afloat? as an aside, I've read that jacobin article before and I find it to be a bit myopic. a large part of why small businesses offer comparatively shitty pay and benefits is because they can't really afford to do better. part of this is just inherent efficiencies of scale (generally a good thing), but it's also because the biggest players get to rewrite the rules to make it very difficult to compete with them. it's not unreasonable to think that a friendlier environment for small businesses might lead to better compensation for their employees.
    - pixelatedindex 6y ago
      That’s because companies like Walmart shouldn’t need those donations - bigger operations like them bring in much higher revenue. They also tend to work around tax laws and find loopholes, which a small business can’t do (and even if they did, it would be chump change compared to the behemoths). So it makes sense for the small guys to get that kind of “grassroots” support.
shaunxcode 6y ago
Accountability. When humans turn into numbers for lack of personal interaction it is much easier to increment, decrement and decimate.
tehjoker 6y ago
Their interests are not aligned with ours. If we had more democracy inside of companies, their interests would be more aligned with ordinary people.
amiga_500 6y ago
Big is winning at the game of capitalism. Capitalists own capital. And they exploit labour.
tasuki 6y ago
It's not evil per se. They just have to serve the moloch: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
jrootabega 6y ago
If you don't do it, your competitors will, and then eat you alive.
Waterluvian 6y ago
Maybe it's that capitalism is incompatible with morality and the government isn't doing it's job to force behaviors that are necessary, but not aligned with capitalism.
- ethanwillis 6y ago
  It's not just capitalism. It's actually any society that is wholly reliant on subjugating individuals to produce goods and services for society.
  - runawaybottle 6y ago
    People often gloss over the overwhelming theme in human history of work being extracted with ruthless optimization. The pyramids got built for free, so did America, that whole Serf system, kids used to work, Colonization, and I think there’s people half way across the world making things for a few cents an hour as we speak. If you want to know what’s happening, then just look at what already happened. War, technological advancement, and worker bondage are pocket aces you must to bet on when it comes to humanity.
    - ethanwillis 6y ago
      Yep! Didn't mean to imply that there's necessarily any significant period where this wasn't happening. The opposite actually. When we organize into groups this is what happens.
- orestarod 6y ago
  Any written set of laws or system rules are incompatible with morality. Morality cannot be formally described - there will always be ways to be true to the letter of the rules and still act immorally.
naravara 6y ago
The virtues and vices of any large group of people sort of coalesce into a big gestalt "culture." Companies hire for very specific virtues, related to competence and effectiveness, that they then amplify or dampen with metrics and training and so on. Meanwhile, society and human nature have some baseline of pressures acting on them that amplify or dampen different sets of virtues and vices. Among these are a certain level of greed and cutthroatedness. Companies rarely actively select against cupidity or avarice, and insofar as they do it's usually fine as long as it flows downward and enriches the company overall. So, as the company scales up it scales up in its capacity for evil too. Though it's not as if "small" can't be evil as well. Small businesses are still part of a network of small businesses and subject to market forces that also select for and against different behaviors, many of which involve screwing over their workers.
zozbot234 6y ago
Big organizations (public or private) are always dominated by internal politicking - there's a lot of scope for opportunistic behavior and very little transparency of any sort. Sometimes a whistleblower throws some light on the dynamics of what's going on inside the organization, as we saw here - but this is incredibly rare. It's a marvel that large-scale profit-seeking companies even manage to be halfway functional, but that's usually because the technical benefits of coordinating effort on a large scale overwhelm the organizational drawbacks; Amazon's logistics operations are actually a case in point.
yters 6y ago
In the grand scheme of evil, I'm not sure Amazon's firings ranks very highly.
- orestarod 6y ago
  In the lesser sceme? There are many evils past whatever is rank 1 evil, and they are not invalidated nor disappear because of rank 1.
  - yters 6y ago
    In the lesser scheme of evils, Amazon firing employees who are unionizing to force the corporation to follow their environmental agenda, does not rank very high on the scale.
AndrewKemendo 6y ago
Because it's only "evil" when an organization is large enough to invest in self protection mechanisms that dull the ability of other organizations to hold them accountable. Most companies cut corners here and there, mess up something with compliance, accessibility or even break the law in small ways. But almost no companies can afford to defend themselves in court, pay settlements to make things go away, pay lobbyists/strategists to write laws etc...
ethanwillis 6y ago
"The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race." Ted Kaczynski would roughly say that Big becomes evil because Big means standardization. If you have a large corporation you need to standardize processes in order to be efficient enough to justify your existence. This is directly at odds with individual dignity and autonomy. Specifically see 111. onwards of Industrial Society and Its Future.
- gassius 6y ago
  Not to fail in an ad hominem but I kinda give low value to the thinking of the Unabomber
  - busterarm 6y ago
    He had a BA from Harvard and a PhD in Mathematics. He was the victim of 200 hours of brutal psychological experimentation by Henry Murray. It turns out you can torture people past their breaking point and they may not recover. It also turns out that doing this to people with greater-than-average intelligence can have proportionally greater-than-average consequences.
    - qpooqpoo 6y ago
      "200 hours of brutal psychological experimentation" This is a conspiracy theory and a myth.
      - busterarm 6y ago
        No it isn't. They were stress experiments and the goal was to humiliate him to see what his limits were and they're on the record. The (often claimed) part of the story that's conspiracy theory is that the experiments are tied to MKULTRA, which I didn't claim at all, because there's no evidence of that. If anything's a conspiracy theory, it's that the entirety of your comment history on Hacker News, spanning 2 years is to post solely on the topic of the Unabomber, and that you do the same thing on Reddit.
JumpCrisscross 6y ago
> Why does big always become evil? Diffusion of responsibility [1]. I hypothesise the frequency of deliberate evil is similar among companies big and small. What's more frequent with large companies is unchecked sporadic harm. Over time, that accumulates into uncoördinated patterns of behavior. These patterns would get called out in a smaller company. Social mores almost force us to. But those mores get washed out in large, corporate environments, where well-meaning people can turn a cheek to callous and even evil behavior. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_responsibility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_responsibility
- AndrewKemendo 6y ago
  I think more importantly is that there are legal and organizational structures (General Counsel, HR, lobbyists etc...) that are introduced at a certain point in a companies lifecycle that prevent external costs from being imposed.
- empath75 6y ago
  I've long thought that in many ways, a corporation is nothing but a system which shields people from the moral consequences of their actions. A company like Altria, for example, couldn't function if you were told your job was to give people lung cancer, so the company instead has layers and layers of bureaucracy and paper pushers so that each individual person takes actions which they're only slightly uncomfortable with at worst. When I was in my early 20s, I saw how it works first hand when I worked at a company that did market research surveys at a mall, and we had a survey from Phillip Morris, and I refused to do it, and my manager tried to say: "You're not doing anything wrong, you're just asking people their opinions, you're not giving away samples or advertising to them, etc..." It all sounded so convincing, but it eventually came down to me either doing it or being fired, so I quit. Easy to do when you're still living at home and don't need the job, a lot harder if you have a family.
  - pessimizer 6y ago
    I've always thought that modern corporate capitalism in general is a system that makes sure that you never actually meet the people whose weakness you are taking the most advantage of. Consumers and citizens encounter hourly-paid clerks and customer service reps who probably make less than they do, those clerks work under salaried managers who are overworked because they don't get overtime, those managers work under well-paid but even more overworked managers of managers, who work under well-paid, less-overworked, but more precariously-employed project/regional heads whose primary job is taking the blame for failures. Then you get to overpaid, overworked, secure people who dictate parts of the overall strategy of a company, the vastly-paid and secure people who run the place, and the people who passively own the place and take all the profits. At every step, you are surrounded by people roughly as put-upon and desperate as you are. While profit filters up and compromise filters down, the only people to appeal to are in roughly in the same situation you are, if not worse off. Not doing a survey for Philip Morris as one of those leaves of the corporate graph who faces the raw material of the consumer just means you don't eat, and they find another person who will.
outlace 6y ago
Why does everyone assume the actions of the little guy are always morally superior than the actions of the big corporation? I haven't delved into the details of this specific case but this reaction is typical regardless of the facts it seems. The big company is always the evil one and the employees are always little enslaved saints. Edit: Whoops this comment could have been made less controversially - I wish everyone well.
- throwanem 6y ago
  When one side has all the power and the other side has none, to pretend that the benefit of the doubt accrues equally to both is an act of moral cowardice.
  - gwright 6y ago
    How about considering the facts of the situation and not generalizing and applying a pre-conceived narrative?
    - throwanem 6y ago
      I don't really know how to address the kind of confusion that mistakes a statement of principle for an imposition of narrative.
      - modwest 6y ago
        There's no way to respond seriously to someone who is suggesting we ought not learn from history.
      - gwright 6y ago
        Perhaps I'm misunderstanding you, but how can you know if your principle ("one side has all the power and the other side has none") is relevant without understanding the specifics of the issue at hand? You seem to be suggesting that the only relevant information is that there is a "big" corporation involved and that the particulars of the situation are irrelevant. I'm just suggesting that the particulars of the case are important to deciding who is acting in a "morally superior way" (to use the phrasing from the earlier comment.
solidasparagus 6y ago
Economies of scale. 1000 people who were wronged by small companies are all complaining about different companies and it isn't newsworthy. 100 people who were wronged by a huge company are all part of the same protest and can make a lot more noise.
herodotus 6y ago
There is a very common pattern where many members of a group (or organization) believe that protection of the group overrides normal ethical or moral responses. It goes way beyond big.
baddox 6y ago
Surely it’s the other way around. The amount of evilness (or at least willingness to be evil) was probably baked in from the early history of each company. Then, the more evil ones tend to have advantages over the less evil ones, so the biggest companies are more likely to be evil.
keiferski 6y ago
I generally prefer small business, but the ‘big = becomes evil’ phenomenon just might be because of identity centralization. If your city has a hundred bakeries and one of the bakers turns out to be evil, it mostly just reflects back on him. Replace those hundred bakeries with a single large one, though, and suddenly one evil person reflects badly upon the entire organization. Edit: just a reminder to support local bakeries, because they are usually tastier than big ones. Bad example.
- ashwoods 6y ago
  Hmmm... I see a correlation between taste of bread and evilness here.
domador 6y ago
IMO, private companies do not necessarily become evil when they get big, but public companies cannot help but become evil, even when not all that big. (My impression is that public companies are essentially required to maximize profit and shareholder value at any cost... at least at any cost that's technically legal and which wouldn't create significant blowback from society--blowback which would cut into those profits. Private companies owners have the freedom to follow their conscience and not sell their company's soul even if doing so would greatly increase profits.) To sum it up, the imperative (or lack thereof) to maximize profits.
- filthycommunist 6y ago
  On what grounds do you say that public companies have to be unethical within legal limits? If there is any law which states that publicly owned companies have to maximise profit at any cost, then I am not aware of it.
abledon 6y ago
big always attracts the sociopaths [1] [1] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/
slowmovintarget 6y ago
Businesses don't have morals, or principles, or feelings. They have efficiencies and optimizations. Most businesses check that with culture. Business culture, when done well, is a reapplication of feelings (usually), principles (ideally), and morals (rarely) back atop the operating mechanisms of the business. The man or woman at the top usually sets the high bar for what culture pertains, and how stringently it is brought to the rest of the business. The bigger the business, the closer to baseline (just a machine) the business tends to drift. If the culture is not a strong one, or starts from a mostly mechanistic stance, then drifting to what we would consider evil in a person is easy. This has little to do with capitalism, and everything to do with people functioning in groups. Because it happens with every activity that has more than one individual acting to move it forward. Sports teams can be excellently principled, even moral, because their leadership applies these as a way to strengthen the team. (It's also a small group.) This applies to towns full of people, to social groups and clubs, to "movements" on social media. We see it everywhere. It's just particularly painful in circumstances like this one.
rexpop 6y ago
This is a false premise. There is plenty of horrific abuse happening in small businesses, and at the local level. There are murders, rapes, and an endless stream of violations by management of their underlings. Evil exists at all scales. However, the codification of certain motives–such as the alienating profit motive–encourages the otherwise less abusively included to collude in the ultimately exploitative program of their institution. The whole institution, then, resonates with this taint in outsiders' minds. So, it's not that big always becomes evil, it's that "the bigger it is, the more likely you, u/bawana, will have heard of it." Don't hesitate to read up on the ubiquity of "evil". I can get you started: 0. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/224552.Why_Does_He_Do_That_ https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/224552.Why_Does_He_Do_Th... 1. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17601.The_Will_to_Change https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17601.The_Will_to_Change
- rexpop 6y ago
  Also: 2. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34762552-algorithms-of-oppression https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34762552-algorithms-of-o...
hcarvalhoalves 6y ago
I think larger companies attract and depend on “yes people” to function. If everybody questioned everything, nothing would get done due to the increased coordination cost. In turn, that’s the kind of organization capable of executing on hard/amoral decisions, whereas a smaller company would probably just implode as critical people disagree and leave.

Why does big always become evil?

by bawana 6y ago

Why does big always become evil?

Human nature organizing itself within a legal and economic framework. Don't like the result, fix the frameworks. A quote I never get tired of using is, "Apathy is the glove into which evil slips its hand." If you can, be the change.

domador 6y ago
Perverse incentives and people who have been perverted into pursuing such incentives. The main such incentive is "profit at any cost".

bt1a 6y ago

Because the people in charge are constrained to a narrow goal of bringing returns to shareholders

kiba 6y ago
What kind of return? Long term or short term? Destroying a company through mismanagement is decried as evil too.
- acdha 6y ago
  Theoretically but there are far more examples of people getting extremely rich than suffering consequences, especially in a period where deregulation means the odds are overwhelmingly in favor of punishment being a tiny fraction of the profits.

kmbfjr 6y ago

My bet is that it was always evil, no one noticed because they were distracted by the amazing customer focus and service. Google may have touted the "do no evil" matra, but looking back, their plan was always to look over your shoulder. Nothing Google did was ever altruistic, and I think Amazon was and is the same way.

Zaak 6y ago
While Larry and Sergei were running Google, the company often (though not necessarily always) chose doing what was right over a more profitable wrong. A specific example was when they discovered the Chinese government was behind a major security breach targeting dissidents, they refused to continue to comply with Chinese censorship requirements. However, as the founders lost interest in the day-to-day operation of the company, any pretense of being more than just another soulless profit machine was discarded.
- runawaybottle 6y ago
  It takes a village to raise a value based corporation. Many act like kids with no love, guidance.

brenden2 6y ago

This is just how capitalism works. It's about allocating capital in the most efficient way, and as far as Amazon is concerned workers are a dime a dozen. If workers complain, you can just fire them and hire someone else to do the job. This is especially true right now with the high unemployment rate. If workers really want to improve their situation they would all need to unionize. It would require a significant portion of the workers to join, or else Amazon can just keep firing and replacing people. While I'm certainly pro-worker and pro-union, I think most of the demonstrations have been a tiny number of workers relative to Amazon's whole workforce. Keep in mind that in the US there's a negative stigma attached to unionization thanks to many years of propaganda from "business leaders" who (obviously) are opposed to unionization because it eats into their profits.

throwaway894345 6y ago
It's not just propaganda. Many of us come from union backgrounds--either our parents, siblings, etc were blue collar workers or teachers or police. We've heard lots of stories of unions creating all kinds of nonsense inefficiencies and then when someone is being targeted by management, the union does little or nothing to protect them. My best friend taught in a low income school district, he was forced out because he wouldn't pass the basketball team when they wouldn't take tests or turn in homework; the union wouldn't protect him. My dad has a dozen such stories because he worked in factories since he left the family farm. This doesn't mean unions can't work or that things would be better without them or that we shouldn't trend toward more unionization; it only means that there are real problems with unions and it's hard to trust pro-union people when they won't even acknowledge as much. For me, I hear Europeans raving about their unions, so clearly unions can work, but if the pro-union side intends to get more political support, it needs to articulate what it is about American unions that aren't working very well and how they intend to address those issues. Chalking it up to "propaganda" comes off as patronizing and naive at best.
- Thlom 6y ago
  American unions, from my understanding, are less democratic and you lack the legal framework we have in parts of Europe which facilitates negotiations between unions and industry. Mind you, that framework didn’t come for free. It was fought for with blood sweat and tears.

alexpetralia 6y ago

Child comments here are spot on. If you jam all of humanity through an economic blender, you will not come out with what you put in.

billfruit 6y ago

In someways small companies have more potential to be evil, because they often fly "under the radar". "We shouldn’t fetishize mom and pop operations. They offer lower wages, skimpier benefits, and inferior labor protections." See: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/01/small-businesses-workers-wages https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/01/small-businesses-workers-...

willis936 6y ago
Nobody "fetishizes" small business. This sounds like big corporation mouthpiece rhetoric. Big business is responsible for wealth concentration and irresponsible economics that hurt everyone. The alternative? Small business. It's easy to see why people might prefer a reality where small businesses continue to exist. Not everyone likes the Orwell novel we're writing.
- leetcrew 6y ago
  "fetishize" is probably the wrong word, but people are certainly a lot more sympathetic towards small businesses. in my city, people are donating tens of thousands of dollars to local businesses that are closed due to coronavirus. can you imagine someone donating money to keep walmart afloat? as an aside, I've read that jacobin article before and I find it to be a bit myopic. a large part of why small businesses offer comparatively shitty pay and benefits is because they can't really afford to do better. part of this is just inherent efficiencies of scale (generally a good thing), but it's also because the biggest players get to rewrite the rules to make it very difficult to compete with them. it's not unreasonable to think that a friendlier environment for small businesses might lead to better compensation for their employees.
  - pixelatedindex 6y ago
    That’s because companies like Walmart shouldn’t need those donations - bigger operations like them bring in much higher revenue. They also tend to work around tax laws and find loopholes, which a small business can’t do (and even if they did, it would be chump change compared to the behemoths). So it makes sense for the small guys to get that kind of “grassroots” support.

shaunxcode 6y ago

Accountability. When humans turn into numbers for lack of personal interaction it is much easier to increment, decrement and decimate.

tehjoker 6y ago

Their interests are not aligned with ours. If we had more democracy inside of companies, their interests would be more aligned with ordinary people.

amiga_500 6y ago

Big is winning at the game of capitalism. Capitalists own capital. And they exploit labour.

tasuki 6y ago

It's not evil per se. They just have to serve the moloch: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

jrootabega 6y ago

If you don't do it, your competitors will, and then eat you alive.

Waterluvian 6y ago

Maybe it's that capitalism is incompatible with morality and the government isn't doing it's job to force behaviors that are necessary, but not aligned with capitalism.

ethanwillis 6y ago
It's not just capitalism. It's actually any society that is wholly reliant on subjugating individuals to produce goods and services for society.
- runawaybottle 6y ago
  People often gloss over the overwhelming theme in human history of work being extracted with ruthless optimization. The pyramids got built for free, so did America, that whole Serf system, kids used to work, Colonization, and I think there’s people half way across the world making things for a few cents an hour as we speak. If you want to know what’s happening, then just look at what already happened. War, technological advancement, and worker bondage are pocket aces you must to bet on when it comes to humanity.
  - ethanwillis 6y ago
    Yep! Didn't mean to imply that there's necessarily any significant period where this wasn't happening. The opposite actually. When we organize into groups this is what happens.
orestarod 6y ago
Any written set of laws or system rules are incompatible with morality. Morality cannot be formally described - there will always be ways to be true to the letter of the rules and still act immorally.

naravara 6y ago

The virtues and vices of any large group of people sort of coalesce into a big gestalt "culture." Companies hire for very specific virtues, related to competence and effectiveness, that they then amplify or dampen with metrics and training and so on. Meanwhile, society and human nature have some baseline of pressures acting on them that amplify or dampen different sets of virtues and vices. Among these are a certain level of greed and cutthroatedness. Companies rarely actively select against cupidity or avarice, and insofar as they do it's usually fine as long as it flows downward and enriches the company overall. So, as the company scales up it scales up in its capacity for evil too. Though it's not as if "small" can't be evil as well. Small businesses are still part of a network of small businesses and subject to market forces that also select for and against different behaviors, many of which involve screwing over their workers.

zozbot234 6y ago

Big organizations (public or private) are always dominated by internal politicking - there's a lot of scope for opportunistic behavior and very little transparency of any sort. Sometimes a whistleblower throws some light on the dynamics of what's going on inside the organization, as we saw here - but this is incredibly rare. It's a marvel that large-scale profit-seeking companies even manage to be halfway functional, but that's usually because the technical benefits of coordinating effort on a large scale overwhelm the organizational drawbacks; Amazon's logistics operations are actually a case in point.

yters 6y ago

In the grand scheme of evil, I'm not sure Amazon's firings ranks very highly.

orestarod 6y ago
In the lesser sceme? There are many evils past whatever is rank 1 evil, and they are not invalidated nor disappear because of rank 1.
- yters 6y ago
  In the lesser scheme of evils, Amazon firing employees who are unionizing to force the corporation to follow their environmental agenda, does not rank very high on the scale.

AndrewKemendo 6y ago

Because it's only "evil" when an organization is large enough to invest in self protection mechanisms that dull the ability of other organizations to hold them accountable. Most companies cut corners here and there, mess up something with compliance, accessibility or even break the law in small ways. But almost no companies can afford to defend themselves in court, pay settlements to make things go away, pay lobbyists/strategists to write laws etc...

ethanwillis 6y ago

"The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race." Ted Kaczynski would roughly say that Big becomes evil because Big means standardization. If you have a large corporation you need to standardize processes in order to be efficient enough to justify your existence. This is directly at odds with individual dignity and autonomy. Specifically see 111. onwards of Industrial Society and Its Future.

gassius 6y ago
Not to fail in an ad hominem but I kinda give low value to the thinking of the Unabomber
- busterarm 6y ago
  He had a BA from Harvard and a PhD in Mathematics. He was the victim of 200 hours of brutal psychological experimentation by Henry Murray. It turns out you can torture people past their breaking point and they may not recover. It also turns out that doing this to people with greater-than-average intelligence can have proportionally greater-than-average consequences.
  - qpooqpoo 6y ago
    "200 hours of brutal psychological experimentation" This is a conspiracy theory and a myth.
    - busterarm 6y ago
      No it isn't. They were stress experiments and the goal was to humiliate him to see what his limits were and they're on the record. The (often claimed) part of the story that's conspiracy theory is that the experiments are tied to MKULTRA, which I didn't claim at all, because there's no evidence of that. If anything's a conspiracy theory, it's that the entirety of your comment history on Hacker News, spanning 2 years is to post solely on the topic of the Unabomber, and that you do the same thing on Reddit.

JumpCrisscross 6y ago

> Why does big always become evil? Diffusion of responsibility [1]. I hypothesise the frequency of deliberate evil is similar among companies big and small. What's more frequent with large companies is unchecked sporadic harm. Over time, that accumulates into uncoördinated patterns of behavior. These patterns would get called out in a smaller company. Social mores almost force us to. But those mores get washed out in large, corporate environments, where well-meaning people can turn a cheek to callous and even evil behavior. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_responsibility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_responsibility

AndrewKemendo 6y ago
I think more importantly is that there are legal and organizational structures (General Counsel, HR, lobbyists etc...) that are introduced at a certain point in a companies lifecycle that prevent external costs from being imposed.
empath75 6y ago
I've long thought that in many ways, a corporation is nothing but a system which shields people from the moral consequences of their actions. A company like Altria, for example, couldn't function if you were told your job was to give people lung cancer, so the company instead has layers and layers of bureaucracy and paper pushers so that each individual person takes actions which they're only slightly uncomfortable with at worst. When I was in my early 20s, I saw how it works first hand when I worked at a company that did market research surveys at a mall, and we had a survey from Phillip Morris, and I refused to do it, and my manager tried to say: "You're not doing anything wrong, you're just asking people their opinions, you're not giving away samples or advertising to them, etc..." It all sounded so convincing, but it eventually came down to me either doing it or being fired, so I quit. Easy to do when you're still living at home and don't need the job, a lot harder if you have a family.
- pessimizer 6y ago
  I've always thought that modern corporate capitalism in general is a system that makes sure that you never actually meet the people whose weakness you are taking the most advantage of. Consumers and citizens encounter hourly-paid clerks and customer service reps who probably make less than they do, those clerks work under salaried managers who are overworked because they don't get overtime, those managers work under well-paid but even more overworked managers of managers, who work under well-paid, less-overworked, but more precariously-employed project/regional heads whose primary job is taking the blame for failures. Then you get to overpaid, overworked, secure people who dictate parts of the overall strategy of a company, the vastly-paid and secure people who run the place, and the people who passively own the place and take all the profits. At every step, you are surrounded by people roughly as put-upon and desperate as you are. While profit filters up and compromise filters down, the only people to appeal to are in roughly in the same situation you are, if not worse off. Not doing a survey for Philip Morris as one of those leaves of the corporate graph who faces the raw material of the consumer just means you don't eat, and they find another person who will.

outlace 6y ago

Why does everyone assume the actions of the little guy are always morally superior than the actions of the big corporation? I haven't delved into the details of this specific case but this reaction is typical regardless of the facts it seems. The big company is always the evil one and the employees are always little enslaved saints. Edit: Whoops this comment could have been made less controversially - I wish everyone well.

throwanem 6y ago
When one side has all the power and the other side has none, to pretend that the benefit of the doubt accrues equally to both is an act of moral cowardice.
- gwright 6y ago
  How about considering the facts of the situation and not generalizing and applying a pre-conceived narrative?
  - throwanem 6y ago
    I don't really know how to address the kind of confusion that mistakes a statement of principle for an imposition of narrative.
    - modwest 6y ago
      There's no way to respond seriously to someone who is suggesting we ought not learn from history.
    - gwright 6y ago
      Perhaps I'm misunderstanding you, but how can you know if your principle ("one side has all the power and the other side has none") is relevant without understanding the specifics of the issue at hand? You seem to be suggesting that the only relevant information is that there is a "big" corporation involved and that the particulars of the situation are irrelevant. I'm just suggesting that the particulars of the case are important to deciding who is acting in a "morally superior way" (to use the phrasing from the earlier comment.

solidasparagus 6y ago

Economies of scale. 1000 people who were wronged by small companies are all complaining about different companies and it isn't newsworthy. 100 people who were wronged by a huge company are all part of the same protest and can make a lot more noise.

herodotus 6y ago

There is a very common pattern where many members of a group (or organization) believe that protection of the group overrides normal ethical or moral responses. It goes way beyond big.

baddox 6y ago

Surely it’s the other way around. The amount of evilness (or at least willingness to be evil) was probably baked in from the early history of each company. Then, the more evil ones tend to have advantages over the less evil ones, so the biggest companies are more likely to be evil.

keiferski 6y ago

I generally prefer small business, but the ‘big = becomes evil’ phenomenon just might be because of identity centralization. If your city has a hundred bakeries and one of the bakers turns out to be evil, it mostly just reflects back on him. Replace those hundred bakeries with a single large one, though, and suddenly one evil person reflects badly upon the entire organization. Edit: just a reminder to support local bakeries, because they are usually tastier than big ones. Bad example.

ashwoods 6y ago
Hmmm... I see a correlation between taste of bread and evilness here.

domador 6y ago

IMO, private companies do not necessarily become evil when they get big, but public companies cannot help but become evil, even when not all that big. (My impression is that public companies are essentially required to maximize profit and shareholder value at any cost... at least at any cost that's technically legal and which wouldn't create significant blowback from society--blowback which would cut into those profits. Private companies owners have the freedom to follow their conscience and not sell their company's soul even if doing so would greatly increase profits.) To sum it up, the imperative (or lack thereof) to maximize profits.

filthycommunist 6y ago
On what grounds do you say that public companies have to be unethical within legal limits? If there is any law which states that publicly owned companies have to maximise profit at any cost, then I am not aware of it.

abledon 6y ago

big always attracts the sociopaths [1] [1] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/

slowmovintarget 6y ago

Businesses don't have morals, or principles, or feelings. They have efficiencies and optimizations. Most businesses check that with culture. Business culture, when done well, is a reapplication of feelings (usually), principles (ideally), and morals (rarely) back atop the operating mechanisms of the business. The man or woman at the top usually sets the high bar for what culture pertains, and how stringently it is brought to the rest of the business. The bigger the business, the closer to baseline (just a machine) the business tends to drift. If the culture is not a strong one, or starts from a mostly mechanistic stance, then drifting to what we would consider evil in a person is easy. This has little to do with capitalism, and everything to do with people functioning in groups. Because it happens with every activity that has more than one individual acting to move it forward. Sports teams can be excellently principled, even moral, because their leadership applies these as a way to strengthen the team. (It's also a small group.) This applies to towns full of people, to social groups and clubs, to "movements" on social media. We see it everywhere. It's just particularly painful in circumstances like this one.

rexpop 6y ago

This is a false premise. There is plenty of horrific abuse happening in small businesses, and at the local level. There are murders, rapes, and an endless stream of violations by management of their underlings. Evil exists at all scales. However, the codification of certain motives–such as the alienating profit motive–encourages the otherwise less abusively included to collude in the ultimately exploitative program of their institution. The whole institution, then, resonates with this taint in outsiders' minds. So, it's not that big always becomes evil, it's that "the bigger it is, the more likely you, u/bawana, will have heard of it." Don't hesitate to read up on the ubiquity of "evil". I can get you started: 0. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/224552.Why_Does_He_Do_That_ https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/224552.Why_Does_He_Do_Th... 1. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17601.The_Will_to_Change https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17601.The_Will_to_Change

rexpop 6y ago
Also: 2. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34762552-algorithms-of-oppression https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34762552-algorithms-of-o...

hcarvalhoalves 6y ago

I think larger companies attract and depend on “yes people” to function. If everybody questioned everything, nothing would get done due to the increased coordination cost. In turn, that’s the kind of organization capable of executing on hard/amoral decisions, whereas a smaller company would probably just implode as critical people disagree and leave.