5 ms·

This sounds like early industrialization in England. The way they approach their workers. It's awful and ridiculous that Facebook don't want to pay them 2.2$. C

This sounds like early industrialization in England. The way they approach their workers. It's awful and ridiculous that Facebook don't want to pay them 2.2$. Corporations are really necessarily evil. The depersonalization of people which came with these big structures generally is making most of the problems. People usually are not psychos when dealing with people. Usually.

jampekka 3y ago
Corporations are not evil. They just don't care at all about e.g. human suffering or destruction of environment they cause to maximize return on capital. From human perspective they are amoral or chaotic neutral. Like Cthulhu.
- kayodelycaon 3y ago
  > They just don't care at all about e.g. human suffering or destruction of environment they cause to maximize return on capital. I think you have just described evil.
  - jampekka 3y ago
    Is an asteroid hitting Earth evil?
    - acdha 3y ago
      Is an asteroid made of people making the decision to hit the earth? Corporations are.
      - jampekka 3y ago
        People are not free to make decisions in a corporation. If their decisions are against interests of the corporation (the stockholders) they are typically fired.
        broscillator 3y ago
        Are stockholders not people?
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - hsuduebc2 3y ago
      Were concentration camps in Nazi Germany evil?
      - jampekka 3y ago
        Did the people running the camps think themselves as evil?
        I_Am_Nous 3y ago
        Must you think you are evil to actually be evil?
        jampekka 3y ago
        I don't believe it's very useful to categorize people or things as evil if they don't themselves think this is their motive. The "evil" category often makes people think that the "evil" entities have some motives and logic of operation that "good" people just can't understand or relate to at all. There was a sort of internally coherent logic and motivation for Nazi death camps (and to many similar horrors). I don't agree with it at all and I find the results of it extremely harmful and such logic must be vigorously resisted. And to vigorously resist it, it has to be understood. However, I'm not at all sure that I would have resisted the death camps if I were to formulate my views in the same situation as Nazi germans were. I could well be a Putinist in current Russia. And I probably wouldn't think I was evil.
        broscillator 3y ago
        If nazis aren't evil, then what is evil?
        I_Am_Nous 3y ago
        In that case, no one is evil as they can subjectively justify every decision. I don't believe subjective justification makes something intrinsically evil like child abuse acceptable, tolerable, or ignorable.
    - core_dumped 3y ago
      An asteroid does not have the ability to care about those things, it’s a rock. It can’t choose to leave the earth alone in the name of empathy. Corporations are made of humans, who, it’s been shown, care about other humans a lot of the time. I think the more we rely on these power structures for our own self preservation, the more we start to weaponize them against weaker forms (normal people) as a form of active defense. I like the reference to Cthulhu, it really is like a higher order life form. Workers are the cells, infrastructure the body, and the c-suite is of course the ravenous mind. You as a human don’t care what happens to a cell in a Petri dish, the same way corporations don’t care about what happens to individual people. As a human, I find this evil, and wonder if there are perhaps other higher order life forms (economic systems) we can construct that aren’t as harmful to their own composition.
      - jampekka 3y ago
        When acting on behalf of a corporation (e.g. as an employee), humans are quite limited in what they can choose. This is very commonly used to justify actions that even the human themselves may find immoral. E.g. "just doing my job", "have bills to pay", "just following orders", "if I wouldn't do it, somebody else would". Not only are the corporations psychopaths (i.e. amoral), they are structures that turn humans psychopaths when they are on the clock. We seem to agree that structures like corporations are best seen as something that transcend the individuals that they comprise. And I think there are less harmful forms of organization, or at least what corporations can do should be limited by e.g. states and unions significantly more. I avoid (and criticize) the use of "evil" because it usually muddies more than clarifies, and has weird metaphysical connotations. "Harmful" I think captures it better.
        hsuduebc2 3y ago
        I agree with you. I was hyperbolic to make a point. Instead "necessarily evil", "harmful necessity" would be more appropriate.
- hsuduebc2 3y ago
  It was I used the term "necessary evil" deliberately because they are as you implying basically just a tools. "Necessary" because we need them, they are efficient way to drive progress and production using competition. Also using just profit as your main goal is very straightforward and therefore efficient. "Evil" because it can allow you to dismiss any moral values and basically be completely selfish without even noticing. You are just a small gear in the machine doing it's job. Even if it is doing some lousy paperwork, hauling some cargo to the port and then finally dropping toxic waste into the ocean. Reason for this is that corporation is a tool for "atomization of work" when everything is blended into small tasks and people are completely detached from the consequences of their actions. So we as a human individuals profit from them greatly but also it can harm us because "they" act as cynical sociopaths. By they I mean corporations. With the use of "necessary evil" I was being hyperbolic But it is still double edged sword.
- johnfonesca 3y ago
  >Like Cthulhu Cthulhu is definitely less evil than Meta.
- Nevermark 3y ago
  I agree with you. Large corporate structures diffuse both responsibility and ability for coherent action. Dealing with a corporation is like trying to communicate with some neurons in a brain. You might encounter helpful units, but the total sum of units operates at completely different levels. C level execs deal with many issues directly, but inevitably have to delegate (to many levels) most of what they are responsible for. The ability of corporations to multitask in the thousands of threads (human tasks) comes with a price of lost coherence. The structure of an organization becomes the overriding entity, one without any moral impulses, and highly insensitive to the details of myriads of problematic exceptional situations that individually seem very simple to solve. But all the exception handling required to properly handle every problematic event would turn the organization to goo. Especially talented & moral leaders can make a huge difference, bending the organization to prioritize a few important issues over others. But even they can’t close the gap overall. And of course, many successful leaders we might think of as normal healthy people as individuals, are not the unusually talented moral leaders needed to deal with this complexity.

jampekka 3y ago

Corporations are not evil. They just don't care at all about e.g. human suffering or destruction of environment they cause to maximize return on capital. From human perspective they are amoral or chaotic neutral. Like Cthulhu.

kayodelycaon 3y ago
> They just don't care at all about e.g. human suffering or destruction of environment they cause to maximize return on capital. I think you have just described evil.
- jampekka 3y ago
  Is an asteroid hitting Earth evil?
  - acdha 3y ago
    Is an asteroid made of people making the decision to hit the earth? Corporations are.
    - jampekka 3y ago
      People are not free to make decisions in a corporation. If their decisions are against interests of the corporation (the stockholders) they are typically fired.
      - broscillator 3y ago
        Are stockholders not people?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - hsuduebc2 3y ago
    Were concentration camps in Nazi Germany evil?
    - jampekka 3y ago
      Did the people running the camps think themselves as evil?
      - I_Am_Nous 3y ago
        Must you think you are evil to actually be evil?
        jampekka 3y ago
        I don't believe it's very useful to categorize people or things as evil if they don't themselves think this is their motive. The "evil" category often makes people think that the "evil" entities have some motives and logic of operation that "good" people just can't understand or relate to at all. There was a sort of internally coherent logic and motivation for Nazi death camps (and to many similar horrors). I don't agree with it at all and I find the results of it extremely harmful and such logic must be vigorously resisted. And to vigorously resist it, it has to be understood. However, I'm not at all sure that I would have resisted the death camps if I were to formulate my views in the same situation as Nazi germans were. I could well be a Putinist in current Russia. And I probably wouldn't think I was evil.
        broscillator 3y ago
        If nazis aren't evil, then what is evil?
        I_Am_Nous 3y ago
        In that case, no one is evil as they can subjectively justify every decision. I don't believe subjective justification makes something intrinsically evil like child abuse acceptable, tolerable, or ignorable.
  - core_dumped 3y ago
    An asteroid does not have the ability to care about those things, it’s a rock. It can’t choose to leave the earth alone in the name of empathy. Corporations are made of humans, who, it’s been shown, care about other humans a lot of the time. I think the more we rely on these power structures for our own self preservation, the more we start to weaponize them against weaker forms (normal people) as a form of active defense. I like the reference to Cthulhu, it really is like a higher order life form. Workers are the cells, infrastructure the body, and the c-suite is of course the ravenous mind. You as a human don’t care what happens to a cell in a Petri dish, the same way corporations don’t care about what happens to individual people. As a human, I find this evil, and wonder if there are perhaps other higher order life forms (economic systems) we can construct that aren’t as harmful to their own composition.
    - jampekka 3y ago
      When acting on behalf of a corporation (e.g. as an employee), humans are quite limited in what they can choose. This is very commonly used to justify actions that even the human themselves may find immoral. E.g. "just doing my job", "have bills to pay", "just following orders", "if I wouldn't do it, somebody else would". Not only are the corporations psychopaths (i.e. amoral), they are structures that turn humans psychopaths when they are on the clock. We seem to agree that structures like corporations are best seen as something that transcend the individuals that they comprise. And I think there are less harmful forms of organization, or at least what corporations can do should be limited by e.g. states and unions significantly more. I avoid (and criticize) the use of "evil" because it usually muddies more than clarifies, and has weird metaphysical connotations. "Harmful" I think captures it better.
      - hsuduebc2 3y ago
        I agree with you. I was hyperbolic to make a point. Instead "necessarily evil", "harmful necessity" would be more appropriate.
hsuduebc2 3y ago
It was I used the term "necessary evil" deliberately because they are as you implying basically just a tools. "Necessary" because we need them, they are efficient way to drive progress and production using competition. Also using just profit as your main goal is very straightforward and therefore efficient. "Evil" because it can allow you to dismiss any moral values and basically be completely selfish without even noticing. You are just a small gear in the machine doing it's job. Even if it is doing some lousy paperwork, hauling some cargo to the port and then finally dropping toxic waste into the ocean. Reason for this is that corporation is a tool for "atomization of work" when everything is blended into small tasks and people are completely detached from the consequences of their actions. So we as a human individuals profit from them greatly but also it can harm us because "they" act as cynical sociopaths. By they I mean corporations. With the use of "necessary evil" I was being hyperbolic But it is still double edged sword.
johnfonesca 3y ago
>Like Cthulhu Cthulhu is definitely less evil than Meta.
Nevermark 3y ago
I agree with you. Large corporate structures diffuse both responsibility and ability for coherent action. Dealing with a corporation is like trying to communicate with some neurons in a brain. You might encounter helpful units, but the total sum of units operates at completely different levels. C level execs deal with many issues directly, but inevitably have to delegate (to many levels) most of what they are responsible for. The ability of corporations to multitask in the thousands of threads (human tasks) comes with a price of lost coherence. The structure of an organization becomes the overriding entity, one without any moral impulses, and highly insensitive to the details of myriads of problematic exceptional situations that individually seem very simple to solve. But all the exception handling required to properly handle every problematic event would turn the organization to goo. Especially talented & moral leaders can make a huge difference, bending the organization to prioritize a few important issues over others. But even they can’t close the gap overall. And of course, many successful leaders we might think of as normal healthy people as individuals, are not the unusually talented moral leaders needed to deal with this complexity.