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> "Connectivity is at the heart of our mission to give people the power to build community." This is what the parent is referring to. There is nothing bad in d

> "Connectivity is at the heart of our mission to give people the power to build community." This is what the parent is referring to. There is nothing bad in doing business, but I agree that it is sickening to sell it as a humanitarian endeavor. Facebook is cynical, devaluates the work of real humanitarian organizations and misleads the public on the collateral consequences of their actions. Market economies are good, I agree. Monopolistic companies like Facebook put the markets and the economy at risk.

skybrian 6y ago
You seem to want a black-and-white world where monopoly and humanitarianism are always separate and easily distinguished. But often they are intermingled. This can be confusing at times, but unfortunately for our understanding the world isn't helpfully divided up into clear moral categories. This cable will carry a lot of Internet traffic and that's going to have complicated effects. On the whole, more Internet access does benefit people, though.
malandrew 6y ago
> devaluates the work of real humanitarian organizations Ultimately what matters is how much good you do in the world by improving the lives of those who have it worse. That's all that matters to those that have it worse and that's the only metric that matters here. If you have to choose between, working for a humanitarian organization and helping out N people and working for a for profit enterprise and helping out 2N people, all other things being equal, you should choose the latter every since time because that makes all the difference for the additional N people helped out. The N people that don't get helped out because someone went to work for a real humanitarian organization get no benefit from the purity of motivation. Anyone who chooses otherwise isn't actually motivated by helping people. They are motivated by their ego and feeding what they think is the ideologically pure thing to do. There are few things sadder that I've witnessed than a talented person with the capacity to make the world a better place, fritter away their talent in endeavors that don't allow them to maximize the good they can do.

skybrian 6y ago

You seem to want a black-and-white world where monopoly and humanitarianism are always separate and easily distinguished. But often they are intermingled. This can be confusing at times, but unfortunately for our understanding the world isn't helpfully divided up into clear moral categories. This cable will carry a lot of Internet traffic and that's going to have complicated effects. On the whole, more Internet access does benefit people, though.

malandrew 6y ago

> devaluates the work of real humanitarian organizations Ultimately what matters is how much good you do in the world by improving the lives of those who have it worse. That's all that matters to those that have it worse and that's the only metric that matters here. If you have to choose between, working for a humanitarian organization and helping out N people and working for a for profit enterprise and helping out 2N people, all other things being equal, you should choose the latter every since time because that makes all the difference for the additional N people helped out. The N people that don't get helped out because someone went to work for a real humanitarian organization get no benefit from the purity of motivation. Anyone who chooses otherwise isn't actually motivated by helping people. They are motivated by their ego and feeding what they think is the ideologically pure thing to do. There are few things sadder that I've witnessed than a talented person with the capacity to make the world a better place, fritter away their talent in endeavors that don't allow them to maximize the good they can do.