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There are people inside Google who can put a stop to this, if they merely stand up and say "this is wrong" including their CEO. It simply requires bravery and f
by 23B1 2y ago
There are people inside Google who can put a stop to this, if they merely stand up and say "this is wrong" including their CEO. It simply requires bravery and faith in Google's institutional ability to continue to profit doing different things.
Big companies have pivoted before on the heels of brave executives. This applies as much to search as it does to privacy, AI, their transparency, their support of open source, and their weaponization of their browser.
It's a crying shame to see how enshittified a company that could be changing the world has become.
- immibis 2y agoAnd a willingness to be fired the next day. Even the CEO can be fired.
- mcmcmc 2y agoSo it’s the shareholders and the board who are at fault then. I’d posit that anyone holding Google stock is part of the problem and responsible for their continued pattern of anti-user and anti-consumer behavior.
- DrillShopper 2y agoIt's actually late stage capitalism that is at fault. Line must always be going up, and if it doesn't go up as fast as someone thought it would then we make it go down. If line goes sideways we sell and make it go down. It must go up. Always up. Or it will go down.
- mcmcmc 2y agoYou can’t blame the system and pretend none of that lands at the feet of people willingly engaging with it for their own benefit.
- DrillShopper 2y agoSome of it absolutely lands at the feet of the people willingly engaging with it, but there are far, far more people who are caught up in and and only go along with it to have a roof over their head. I don't think the burger flipper at McDonalds, the stocker at Walmart, the barista at Starbucks, the bartender at the bar down the street, the person working the register at the gas station, or the picker at Amazon (just to name a few) share in this blame. They're all trying to eke out an existence for themselves and their families.
- Nasrudith 2y agoHas nobody heard of paying dividends? It is a perfectly acceptable way to have a company with stable profits. But no, anti-capitalism cliches combined with warmed-over rapture logic and Marx's idiotic teleological view of history.
- 23B1 2y agoI'm a fairly libertarian moderate but tyranny-by-proxy is still tyranny.
- immibis 2y agoShareholders who don't want to maximize their share value are very strongly incentivized to fire themselves.
- 23B1 2y agoYes. That's the bravery part.