8 ms·

> while megacorps aren't fundamentally "evil" (for some definitions of evil), I think megacorps being evil is universal. It tends to be corrupt cop evil vs se

by Retric 2y ago

> while megacorps aren't fundamentally "evil" (for some definitions of evil), I think megacorps being evil is universal. It tends to be corrupt cop evil vs serial killer evil, but being willing to do anything for money has historically been categorized as evil behavior. That doesn’t mean society would be better or worse off without them, but it would be interesting to see a world where companies pay vastly higher taxes as they grow.

zelon88 2y ago
You're taking about pre-Clinton consumerism. That system is dead. It used to dictate that the company who could offer the best value deserved to take over most of the market. That's old thinking. Now we have servitization. Now the business who can most efficiently offer value deserves the entire market. Basically, iterate until you're the only one left standing and then never "sell" anything but licenses ever again.
- Ekaros 2y ago
  The bait-and-switch model is absolutely amazing as well. Start by offering a service covered with ads. Then add paid tier to get rid of ads. Next add tier with payment and ads. And finally add ads back to every possible tier. Not to forget about keeping them in content all the time.
  - CrimsonCape 2y ago
    If you have ever seen the prank interview between Elijah Wood and Dominic Monaghan, "Do you wear wigs? Have you worn wigs? Will you wear wigs?" and Elijah breaks down laughing in total shock at how hilariously bad the interview is... ...I just picture a similar conversation with a CEO going: "Sir, shareholders want to see more improvement this quarter." CEO: "Do we run ads? Have we run ads? Will we run ads this time?" (The answer is inevitably yes to all of these)
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - smgit 2y ago
      Some one has to pay for those Ads. That creates limits to growth of an Ad based ecosystem. So the thing to pay attention too is not Revenue growth or Profit growth of a Platform but Price of an Ad, Price to increase reach, price to Pay to Boost your post, price of a presidential campaign etc etc. These prices cant grow forever just like with housing prices or we get the equivalent of a Housing Bubble. Want to destabilize the whole system pump up ad prices.
      - the_other 2y ago
        This doesn’t make sense to me. Ads on the main networks are sold by auction. Price pumping is built into the system.
  - normalaccess 2y ago
    Advertising is just the surface layer—the excuse. Digital ads rely on collecting as much personal data as possible, but that data is the real prize. This creates a natural partnership with intelligence agencies: they may not legally collect the data themselves, but they can certainly buy access. This isn’t new. Facebook, for example, received early funding from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm, and its origins trace back to DARPA’s canceled LifeLog project—a system designed to track and catalog people’s entire lives. Big Tech and government surveillance have been intertwined from the start. That’s why these companies never face real consequences. They’ve become quasi-government entities, harvesting data on billions under the guise of commerce.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - zeroq 2y ago
      Years ago a friend working in security told me that every telco operator in Elbonia has to have a special room in their HQ that's available 24/7 to some goverment officials. Men in black come and go as they please, and while what is actually happening in that room remains a mystery, they can tap straight to the system from within with no restrictions or traceability. Growing up in soviet bloc I took that story at face value. After all democracy was still a new thing, and people haven't invented privacy concerns yet. Since then I always thought that some sort of cooperation between companies like Facebook or Google and CIA/DOD was an obvious thing to everyone.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - somenameforme 2y ago
        PRISM [1] is the best evidence of how short-lived most people's memories are. Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook were the first 4 members. It makes it pretty funny when companies like Apple (who also joined more than a decade ago) speak about trying to defend customer's privacy against government intrusion. There's so much completely cynical corporate LARPing for PR. And if one wants to know why big tech from China isn't welcome, be it phones or social media, it's not because fear of them spying on Americans, but because of the infeasibility of integrating Chinese companies into our own domestic surveillance systems. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM
  - int_19h 2y ago
    To quote the email from Hulu that recently dropped into my inbox: > We are clarifying that, as we continue to increase the breadth and depth of the content we make available to you, circumstances may require that certain titles and types of content include ads, even in our 'no ads' or 'ad free' subscription tiers. So at this point they aren't even bothering to rename the tier from "ad free" even as they put ads in it. Or maybe it's supposed to mean "the ads come free with it" now? Newspeak indeed.
    - majormajor 2y ago
      This goes back to the release of the no-ads Hulu plan. Due at the time to fun shenanigans and weirdness around the exact licensing deals for a few shows. (At least one of those shows is VERY long-running now https://www.reddit.com/r/greysanatomy/comments/12prhpf/no_ads_on_hulu/ https://www.reddit.com/r/greysanatomy/comments/12prhpf/no_ad... - not sure if there have been any new ones through the years or currently )
    - dustingetz 2y ago
      are they talking about trailers?
    - mikestew 2y ago
      Oh, it has been that way with Hulu for at least a decade. Source: I paid money for their OG “ad-free” tier back in the day, only to end up seeing ads.
    - mikrotikker 2y ago
      Arrr matey climb aboard yer don't need Hulu where we're going
    - webspinner 2y ago
      Yes that's definitely newspeak! It's also the reason why I run adblock. It's gotten me in trouble a few times with streaming services, they don't love it. I still run it.
      - Snowfield9571 2y ago
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- _DeadFred_ 2y ago
  Don't forget get your stock on and index that almost all retirement funds are required to put money into every month versus the old school stock market where it was a market not a cable bill (you have to pay for the whole bundle if you want it or not).
  - nradov 2y ago
    It's easy to set up an IRA where you can trade individual securities instead of index funds if that's what you want. Most people aren't competent traders and will underperform the index funds.
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
  I prefer the angle that describes this as a shift from value production to value extraction. Value production means coming up with new goods or services, or new/better ways to make existing ones. Value extraction means looking at existing economic exchanges, and figuring out how to get X percent of some of them.
  - idle_zealot 2y ago
    It was always a game of maximizing captured value. In such a game, creating value and capturing some portion of what you're producing is far less effective than value extraction, moving value around such that it's you capturing it, not someone else. A market, then, will by default encourage the latter strategy over the former. However, if the society in charge of a market observes value extraction occurring, it can respond by outlawing the particular extraction strategy being employed, and punish the parties participating. Then, for some time, market participants will turn to producing value instead, making more humble profits, until another avenue for extraction becomes available and quickly becomes the dominant strategy again. This cycle continues until the market eats the forces that would seek to regulate it and reign in extractive practices. That is what we're seeing here, at least in the US there is basically no political will behind identifying and punishing any new forms of harmful behavior, and we barely enforce existing laws regarding eg monopolies. Common wisdom among neoliberals and conservatives both is that big companies are good for the economy, and it's best to tread lightly in terms of regulating their behaviors, lest we interrupt their important value production process. One wonders if there are perhaps financial incentives to be so pro-corporate.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
      I would argue that since the dawn of capitalism (whenever you place that), there have been moral structures in place to promote value production and stigmatize value extraction. The precise balance between the two moral verdicts changes back and forth over time. In the USA in the 21st century we seem to have entered a period where the promotion of value production is unusually low and simultaneously the stigmatization of value extraction has dropped close to zero.
- HeavyStorm 2y ago
  Licenses == Rent That's why it's being tentatively called "Technofeudalism".
mananaysiempre 2y ago
Most suggestions of this nature fail to explain how they will deal with the problem of people just seeing there’s no point in trying for more. On a personal level, I’ve heard people from Norway describe this problem for personal income tax—at some point (notably below a typical US senior software engineer’s earnings) the amount of work you need to put in for the marginal post-tax krone is so high it’s just demotivating, and you either coast or emigrate. Perhaps that’s not entirely undesirable, but I don’t know if people have contemplated the consequences of the existence of such a de facto ceiling seriously.
- BrenBarn 2y ago
  > Most suggestions of this nature fail to explain how they will deal with the problem of people just seeing there’s no point in trying for more. On a personal level, I’ve heard people from Norway describe this problem for personal income tax—at some point (notably below a typical US senior software engineer’s earnings) the amount of work you need to put in for the marginal post-tax krone is so high it’s just demotivating, and you either coast or emigrate. Perhaps that’s not entirely undesirable, but I don’t know if people have contemplated the consequences of the existence of such a de facto ceiling seriously. I think if you look at quality of life and happiness ratings in Norway it's pretty clear it's far from "entirely undesirable". It's good for people to do things for reasons other than money.
  - dec0dedab0de 2y ago
    And the middle ground is to only enforce it on corporations in exchange for the protections given to the owners. Want to make more? then take personal risk.
    - ilbeeper 2y ago
      Great, so we only want the real high risk takers, the top gamblers,to play in the big league. Those who are so rich they no way to lose their personal comfort and are blind to the personal risk - and probably are careless about anyone's else just as well
ericmay 2y ago
My problem with this take is that you forget, the corporations are made up of people, so in order for the corporation to be evil you have to take into account the aggregate desires and decision making of the employees and shareholders and, frankly, call them all evil. Calling them evil is kind of a silly thing to do anyway, but you can not divorce the actions of a company from those who run and support it, and I would argue you can't divorce those actions from those who buy the products the company puts out either. So in effect you have to call the employees and shareholders evil. Well those are the same people who also work and hold public office from time to time, or are shareholders, or whatever. You can't limit this "evilness" to just an abstract corporation. Not only is it not true, you are setting up your "problem" so that it can't be addressed because you're only moralizing over the abstract corporation and not the physical manifestation of the corporation either. What do you do about the abstract corporation being evil if not taking action in the physical world against the physical people who work at and run the corporation and those who buy its products? I've noticed similar behavior with respect to climate change advocacy and really just "government" in general. If you can't take personal responsibility, or even try to change your own habits, volunteer, work toward public office, organize, etc. it's less than useless to rail about these entities that many claim are immoral or need reform if you are not personally going to get up and do something about it. Instead you (not you specifically) just complain on the Internet or to friends and family, those complaints do nothing, and you feel good about your complaining so you don't feel like you need to actually do anything to make change. This is very unproductive because you have made yourself feel good about the problem but haven't actually done anything. With all that being said, I'm not sure how paying vastly higher taxes would make Google (or any other company) less evil or more evil. What if Google pays more taxes and that tax money does (insert really bad thing you don't like)? Paying taxes isn't like a moral good or moral bad thing.
- Retric 2y ago
  > made up of people People making meaningful decisions at mega corporations aren’t a random sample of the population, they are self selected to care a great deal about money and or power. Honestly if you wanted to filter the general population to quietly discover who was evil I’d have a hard time finding something more effective. It doesn’t guarantee everyone is actually evil, but actually putting your kids first is a definite hindrance. The morality of the average employee on the other hand is mostly irrelevant. They aren’t setting policies and if they dislike something they just get replaced.
z2 2y ago
Historically, unchecked corporate power tends to mirror the flaws of the systems that enable it. For example, the Gilded Age robber barons exploited weak regulations, while tech giants thrive on data privacy gray areas. Maybe the problem isn’t size itself, but the lack of guardrails that scale with corporate influence (e.g., antitrust enforcement, environmental accountability, or worker protections), but what do I know! I guess corrupt cop vs serial killer is like amorality (profit-driven systems) vs immorality (active malice)? A company is a mix of stakeholders, some of whom push for ethical practices. But when shareholders demand endless growth, even well-intentioned actors get squeezed.
- nonrandomstring 2y ago
  > amorality That word comes with a lot of boot-up code and dodgy dependencies. I don't like it. Did Robert Louis Stevenson make a philosophical error in 1882 supposing that a moral society (with laws etc) can contain within itself a domain outside of morals [0]? What if coined the word "alegal"? Oh officer... what I'm doing is neither legal nor illegal, it's simply alegal " [0] https://edrls.wordpress.com/2021/02/16/a-moral/ https://edrls.wordpress.com/2021/02/16/a-moral/
sudoshred 2y ago
As scale grows the moral ambiguity does also. Megacorps default to “evil” because action in a large number of circumstances for a large number of events does as well, particularly when economic factors are motivating behavior (implicitly or explicitly). Essentially being “non-evil” becomes more expensive than the value it adds. There is always someone on the other end of a transaction, by definition.
jongjong 2y ago
Agreed, I think part of it boils down to the concept of 'limited liability' itself which is a euphemism for 'the right to carry out some degree of evil without consequence.' Also, scale plays a significant part as well. Any high-exposure organization which operates on a global scale has access to an extremely large pool of candidates to staff its offices... And such candidate pools necessarily include a large number of any given personas... Including large numbers of ethically-challenged individuals and criminals. Without an interview process which actively selects for 'ethics', the ethically-challenged and criminal individuals have a significant upper-hand in getting hired and then later wedging themselves into positions of power within the company. Criminals and ethically-challenged individuals have a bigger risk appetite than honest people so they are more likely to succeed within a corporate hierarchy which is founded on 'positive thinking' and 'turning a blind eye'. On a global corporate playing field, there is a huge amount of money to be made in hiding and explaining away irregularities. A corporate employee can do something fraudulent and then hold onto their jobs while securing higher pay, simply by signaling to their employer that they will accept responsibility if the scheme is exposed; the corporate employer is happy to maintain this arrangement and feign ignorance while extracting profits so long as the scheme is kept under wraps... Then if the scheme is exposed, the corporations will swiftly throw the corporate employee under the bus in accordance to the 'unspoken agreement'. The corporate structure is extremely effective at deflecting and dissipating liability away from itself (and especially its shareholders) and onto citizens/taxpayers, governments and employees (as a last layer of defense). The shareholder who benefits the most from the activities of the corporation is fully insulated from the crimes of the corporation. The scapegoats are lined up, sandwiched between layers of plausible deniability in such a way that the shareholder at the end of the line can always claim complete ignorance and innocence.
h0l0cube 2y ago
> being willing to do anything for money has historically been categorized as evil behavior Even megacorps will do categorically good things if it helps their bottom line.
- Retric 2y ago
  We judge morality when there’s some meaningful downside and people at their worst, because a little unpleasantness can dramatically outweigh a lot of nice behavior. “I love hanging out with Tim he’s a funny guy helped me move a couch last week, kind of which he hadn’t pushed me in front of that bus that one time but ehh I doubt he’d do that again…”
  - h0l0cube 2y ago
    Being pushed in front of a bus would be rather unpleasant.
webspinner 2y ago
Right! I was going to say something like that. Google is in all honesty, corrupt. Then again, most big corporations are this way. Google and Microsoft seem to be a bit more than others, though.

by Retric 2y ago

zelon88 2y ago

You're taking about pre-Clinton consumerism. That system is dead. It used to dictate that the company who could offer the best value deserved to take over most of the market. That's old thinking. Now we have servitization. Now the business who can most efficiently offer value deserves the entire market. Basically, iterate until you're the only one left standing and then never "sell" anything but licenses ever again.

Ekaros 2y ago
The bait-and-switch model is absolutely amazing as well. Start by offering a service covered with ads. Then add paid tier to get rid of ads. Next add tier with payment and ads. And finally add ads back to every possible tier. Not to forget about keeping them in content all the time.
- CrimsonCape 2y ago
  If you have ever seen the prank interview between Elijah Wood and Dominic Monaghan, "Do you wear wigs? Have you worn wigs? Will you wear wigs?" and Elijah breaks down laughing in total shock at how hilariously bad the interview is... ...I just picture a similar conversation with a CEO going: "Sir, shareholders want to see more improvement this quarter." CEO: "Do we run ads? Have we run ads? Will we run ads this time?" (The answer is inevitably yes to all of these)
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - smgit 2y ago
    Some one has to pay for those Ads. That creates limits to growth of an Ad based ecosystem. So the thing to pay attention too is not Revenue growth or Profit growth of a Platform but Price of an Ad, Price to increase reach, price to Pay to Boost your post, price of a presidential campaign etc etc. These prices cant grow forever just like with housing prices or we get the equivalent of a Housing Bubble. Want to destabilize the whole system pump up ad prices.
    - the_other 2y ago
      This doesn’t make sense to me. Ads on the main networks are sold by auction. Price pumping is built into the system.
- normalaccess 2y ago
  Advertising is just the surface layer—the excuse. Digital ads rely on collecting as much personal data as possible, but that data is the real prize. This creates a natural partnership with intelligence agencies: they may not legally collect the data themselves, but they can certainly buy access. This isn’t new. Facebook, for example, received early funding from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm, and its origins trace back to DARPA’s canceled LifeLog project—a system designed to track and catalog people’s entire lives. Big Tech and government surveillance have been intertwined from the start. That’s why these companies never face real consequences. They’ve become quasi-government entities, harvesting data on billions under the guise of commerce.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - zeroq 2y ago
    Years ago a friend working in security told me that every telco operator in Elbonia has to have a special room in their HQ that's available 24/7 to some goverment officials. Men in black come and go as they please, and while what is actually happening in that room remains a mystery, they can tap straight to the system from within with no restrictions or traceability. Growing up in soviet bloc I took that story at face value. After all democracy was still a new thing, and people haven't invented privacy concerns yet. Since then I always thought that some sort of cooperation between companies like Facebook or Google and CIA/DOD was an obvious thing to everyone.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - somenameforme 2y ago
      PRISM [1] is the best evidence of how short-lived most people's memories are. Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook were the first 4 members. It makes it pretty funny when companies like Apple (who also joined more than a decade ago) speak about trying to defend customer's privacy against government intrusion. There's so much completely cynical corporate LARPing for PR. And if one wants to know why big tech from China isn't welcome, be it phones or social media, it's not because fear of them spying on Americans, but because of the infeasibility of integrating Chinese companies into our own domestic surveillance systems. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM
- int_19h 2y ago
  To quote the email from Hulu that recently dropped into my inbox: > We are clarifying that, as we continue to increase the breadth and depth of the content we make available to you, circumstances may require that certain titles and types of content include ads, even in our 'no ads' or 'ad free' subscription tiers. So at this point they aren't even bothering to rename the tier from "ad free" even as they put ads in it. Or maybe it's supposed to mean "the ads come free with it" now? Newspeak indeed.
  - majormajor 2y ago
    This goes back to the release of the no-ads Hulu plan. Due at the time to fun shenanigans and weirdness around the exact licensing deals for a few shows. (At least one of those shows is VERY long-running now https://www.reddit.com/r/greysanatomy/comments/12prhpf/no_ads_on_hulu/ https://www.reddit.com/r/greysanatomy/comments/12prhpf/no_ad... - not sure if there have been any new ones through the years or currently )
  - dustingetz 2y ago
    are they talking about trailers?
  - mikestew 2y ago
    Oh, it has been that way with Hulu for at least a decade. Source: I paid money for their OG “ad-free” tier back in the day, only to end up seeing ads.
  - mikrotikker 2y ago
    Arrr matey climb aboard yer don't need Hulu where we're going
  - webspinner 2y ago
    Yes that's definitely newspeak! It's also the reason why I run adblock. It's gotten me in trouble a few times with streaming services, they don't love it. I still run it.
    - Snowfield9571 2y ago
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
_DeadFred_ 2y ago
Don't forget get your stock on and index that almost all retirement funds are required to put money into every month versus the old school stock market where it was a market not a cable bill (you have to pay for the whole bundle if you want it or not).
- nradov 2y ago
  It's easy to set up an IRA where you can trade individual securities instead of index funds if that's what you want. Most people aren't competent traders and will underperform the index funds.
PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
I prefer the angle that describes this as a shift from value production to value extraction. Value production means coming up with new goods or services, or new/better ways to make existing ones. Value extraction means looking at existing economic exchanges, and figuring out how to get X percent of some of them.
- idle_zealot 2y ago
  It was always a game of maximizing captured value. In such a game, creating value and capturing some portion of what you're producing is far less effective than value extraction, moving value around such that it's you capturing it, not someone else. A market, then, will by default encourage the latter strategy over the former. However, if the society in charge of a market observes value extraction occurring, it can respond by outlawing the particular extraction strategy being employed, and punish the parties participating. Then, for some time, market participants will turn to producing value instead, making more humble profits, until another avenue for extraction becomes available and quickly becomes the dominant strategy again. This cycle continues until the market eats the forces that would seek to regulate it and reign in extractive practices. That is what we're seeing here, at least in the US there is basically no political will behind identifying and punishing any new forms of harmful behavior, and we barely enforce existing laws regarding eg monopolies. Common wisdom among neoliberals and conservatives both is that big companies are good for the economy, and it's best to tread lightly in terms of regulating their behaviors, lest we interrupt their important value production process. One wonders if there are perhaps financial incentives to be so pro-corporate.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
    I would argue that since the dawn of capitalism (whenever you place that), there have been moral structures in place to promote value production and stigmatize value extraction. The precise balance between the two moral verdicts changes back and forth over time. In the USA in the 21st century we seem to have entered a period where the promotion of value production is unusually low and simultaneously the stigmatization of value extraction has dropped close to zero.
HeavyStorm 2y ago
Licenses == Rent That's why it's being tentatively called "Technofeudalism".

mananaysiempre 2y ago

Most suggestions of this nature fail to explain how they will deal with the problem of people just seeing there’s no point in trying for more. On a personal level, I’ve heard people from Norway describe this problem for personal income tax—at some point (notably below a typical US senior software engineer’s earnings) the amount of work you need to put in for the marginal post-tax krone is so high it’s just demotivating, and you either coast or emigrate. Perhaps that’s not entirely undesirable, but I don’t know if people have contemplated the consequences of the existence of such a de facto ceiling seriously.

BrenBarn 2y ago
> Most suggestions of this nature fail to explain how they will deal with the problem of people just seeing there’s no point in trying for more. On a personal level, I’ve heard people from Norway describe this problem for personal income tax—at some point (notably below a typical US senior software engineer’s earnings) the amount of work you need to put in for the marginal post-tax krone is so high it’s just demotivating, and you either coast or emigrate. Perhaps that’s not entirely undesirable, but I don’t know if people have contemplated the consequences of the existence of such a de facto ceiling seriously. I think if you look at quality of life and happiness ratings in Norway it's pretty clear it's far from "entirely undesirable". It's good for people to do things for reasons other than money.
- dec0dedab0de 2y ago
  And the middle ground is to only enforce it on corporations in exchange for the protections given to the owners. Want to make more? then take personal risk.
  - ilbeeper 2y ago
    Great, so we only want the real high risk takers, the top gamblers,to play in the big league. Those who are so rich they no way to lose their personal comfort and are blind to the personal risk - and probably are careless about anyone's else just as well

ericmay 2y ago

My problem with this take is that you forget, the corporations are made up of people, so in order for the corporation to be evil you have to take into account the aggregate desires and decision making of the employees and shareholders and, frankly, call them all evil. Calling them evil is kind of a silly thing to do anyway, but you can not divorce the actions of a company from those who run and support it, and I would argue you can't divorce those actions from those who buy the products the company puts out either. So in effect you have to call the employees and shareholders evil. Well those are the same people who also work and hold public office from time to time, or are shareholders, or whatever. You can't limit this "evilness" to just an abstract corporation. Not only is it not true, you are setting up your "problem" so that it can't be addressed because you're only moralizing over the abstract corporation and not the physical manifestation of the corporation either. What do you do about the abstract corporation being evil if not taking action in the physical world against the physical people who work at and run the corporation and those who buy its products? I've noticed similar behavior with respect to climate change advocacy and really just "government" in general. If you can't take personal responsibility, or even try to change your own habits, volunteer, work toward public office, organize, etc. it's less than useless to rail about these entities that many claim are immoral or need reform if you are not personally going to get up and do something about it. Instead you (not you specifically) just complain on the Internet or to friends and family, those complaints do nothing, and you feel good about your complaining so you don't feel like you need to actually do anything to make change. This is very unproductive because you have made yourself feel good about the problem but haven't actually done anything. With all that being said, I'm not sure how paying vastly higher taxes would make Google (or any other company) less evil or more evil. What if Google pays more taxes and that tax money does (insert really bad thing you don't like)? Paying taxes isn't like a moral good or moral bad thing.

Retric 2y ago
> made up of people People making meaningful decisions at mega corporations aren’t a random sample of the population, they are self selected to care a great deal about money and or power. Honestly if you wanted to filter the general population to quietly discover who was evil I’d have a hard time finding something more effective. It doesn’t guarantee everyone is actually evil, but actually putting your kids first is a definite hindrance. The morality of the average employee on the other hand is mostly irrelevant. They aren’t setting policies and if they dislike something they just get replaced.

z2 2y ago

Historically, unchecked corporate power tends to mirror the flaws of the systems that enable it. For example, the Gilded Age robber barons exploited weak regulations, while tech giants thrive on data privacy gray areas. Maybe the problem isn’t size itself, but the lack of guardrails that scale with corporate influence (e.g., antitrust enforcement, environmental accountability, or worker protections), but what do I know! I guess corrupt cop vs serial killer is like amorality (profit-driven systems) vs immorality (active malice)? A company is a mix of stakeholders, some of whom push for ethical practices. But when shareholders demand endless growth, even well-intentioned actors get squeezed.

nonrandomstring 2y ago
> amorality That word comes with a lot of boot-up code and dodgy dependencies. I don't like it. Did Robert Louis Stevenson make a philosophical error in 1882 supposing that a moral society (with laws etc) can contain within itself a domain outside of morals [0]? What if coined the word "alegal"? Oh officer... what I'm doing is neither legal nor illegal, it's simply alegal " [0] https://edrls.wordpress.com/2021/02/16/a-moral/ https://edrls.wordpress.com/2021/02/16/a-moral/

sudoshred 2y ago

As scale grows the moral ambiguity does also. Megacorps default to “evil” because action in a large number of circumstances for a large number of events does as well, particularly when economic factors are motivating behavior (implicitly or explicitly). Essentially being “non-evil” becomes more expensive than the value it adds. There is always someone on the other end of a transaction, by definition.

jongjong 2y ago

Agreed, I think part of it boils down to the concept of 'limited liability' itself which is a euphemism for 'the right to carry out some degree of evil without consequence.' Also, scale plays a significant part as well. Any high-exposure organization which operates on a global scale has access to an extremely large pool of candidates to staff its offices... And such candidate pools necessarily include a large number of any given personas... Including large numbers of ethically-challenged individuals and criminals. Without an interview process which actively selects for 'ethics', the ethically-challenged and criminal individuals have a significant upper-hand in getting hired and then later wedging themselves into positions of power within the company. Criminals and ethically-challenged individuals have a bigger risk appetite than honest people so they are more likely to succeed within a corporate hierarchy which is founded on 'positive thinking' and 'turning a blind eye'. On a global corporate playing field, there is a huge amount of money to be made in hiding and explaining away irregularities. A corporate employee can do something fraudulent and then hold onto their jobs while securing higher pay, simply by signaling to their employer that they will accept responsibility if the scheme is exposed; the corporate employer is happy to maintain this arrangement and feign ignorance while extracting profits so long as the scheme is kept under wraps... Then if the scheme is exposed, the corporations will swiftly throw the corporate employee under the bus in accordance to the 'unspoken agreement'. The corporate structure is extremely effective at deflecting and dissipating liability away from itself (and especially its shareholders) and onto citizens/taxpayers, governments and employees (as a last layer of defense). The shareholder who benefits the most from the activities of the corporation is fully insulated from the crimes of the corporation. The scapegoats are lined up, sandwiched between layers of plausible deniability in such a way that the shareholder at the end of the line can always claim complete ignorance and innocence.

h0l0cube 2y ago

> being willing to do anything for money has historically been categorized as evil behavior Even megacorps will do categorically good things if it helps their bottom line.

Retric 2y ago
We judge morality when there’s some meaningful downside and people at their worst, because a little unpleasantness can dramatically outweigh a lot of nice behavior. “I love hanging out with Tim he’s a funny guy helped me move a couch last week, kind of which he hadn’t pushed me in front of that bus that one time but ehh I doubt he’d do that again…”
- h0l0cube 2y ago
  Being pushed in front of a bus would be rather unpleasant.

webspinner 2y ago

Right! I was going to say something like that. Google is in all honesty, corrupt. Then again, most big corporations are this way. Google and Microsoft seem to be a bit more than others, though.