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The memory of Zuckerberg blabbering about Facebook positive social impact and mission of "Making the world more open and connected" triggers strong cognitive di

by lta 10mo ago

The memory of Zuckerberg blabbering about Facebook positive social impact and mission of "Making the world more open and connected" triggers strong cognitive dissonance when reading this article. Same as when remembering the "Don't be evil" moto from Google. I'm wondering if at some level we always knew it would end up like this. What kind of moral shield can we claim from this mess ? I'm afraid it's actually very little

d--b 10mo ago
Well the "dumbfucks" comment date back a while. Zuck's always been an asshole.
cluckindan 10mo ago
As a state tends toward either communism or capitalism, it starts dictating the economy more and more, until it hits the ceiling and becomes a totally dictated war economy, where a fundamentally fascist ideology replaces previous values. At that point, war is inevitable, because a war economy requires active warfare, and war provides ample opportunies for pilfering at multiple levels, both home and abroad. Fascism is not to blame, it is a means to an end for the economy at large. Ultimately, the issue is uneven distribution of wealth and power.
- kuerbel 10mo ago
  You are downvoted, but correct. Fascism is one possible failure mode of capitalism. It is capitalism stripped of brakes, guardrails, and ethics. A kind of panic-driven hyper-authoritarian capitalism that pretends unity can solve material contradictions.
  - exasperaited 10mo ago
    > Fascism is one possible failure mode of capitalism. It is capitalism stripped of brakes, guardrails, and ethics. This is not a useful definition of fascism, if that is what you mean. Fascism can exist entirely independently of capitalism, and has done. Is it possible for fascism to thrive in a regulation-free capitalist world? Apparently yes. But they are not necessarily coupled. It's a common misperception that fascism necessarily involves a merger of state and corporate power. Rather in a fascist regime, companies have no more choice in whether they further the state's aims and align with its goals than individual citizens have; they just have more devastating impacts. As to whether Meta is aligning with the administration's goals, I don't know whether it is happening, consciously or unconsciously, in this case, but we know for certain there has been deliberate and conscious alignment elsewhere, because Zuckerberg made a big deal out of it.
    - eunoia 10mo ago
      Companies are not helpless dames in a fascist takeover. History has proven that the people on top of the capitalist hierarchy generally actively welcome fascist elements in government. It’s a lot easier to juice the profits of your megacorp when the power of government is vested in a single, friendly individual. Of course ten seconds of thinking exposes the fragility of such a system (they may turn on you, they may be replaced, they may destroy the entire country, etc). But Capitalism itself encourages short term, winner-takes-all all thinking. If you don’t cozy up to the wanna be autocrat and help them attain more power, you will be outcompeted by someone who does. The path of a greedy corporate executive is practically pre-ordained in such a situation. The only question is whether the wanna be autocrat succeeds to become the real deal.
    - cycomanic 10mo ago
      > > Fascism is one possible failure mode of capitalism. It is capitalism stripped of brakes, guardrails, and ethics. > This is not a useful definition of fascism, if that is what you mean. Fascism can exist entirely independently of capitalism, and has done. I think you should look up the definition and history of fascism. You're correct about totalitarism, but fascism is by definition capitalist.
      - dragonwriter 10mo ago
        Fascism is a reaction against capitalism-the-system in much the same way (but a different direction) than communism (it is "capitalist" in that, like most systems, including pre-capitalist ones, and including most claiming to be "Communist", it has a narrow self-perpetuating class controlling society by means including control of the means of production, but it does not feature the particular structure and features that defines capitalism as a system rather than a feature of other systems; fascist corporatism looks a lot, in practice, like the state capitalism that vanguardist "Communist" regimes tend to get stuck in.)
        cycomanic 10mo ago
        > but it does not feature the particular structure and features that defines capitalism as a system rather than a feature of other systems; What do you mean? The defining feature of capitalism is private/corporate ownership of the means of production which is a core part of fascism as well.
- embedding-shape 10mo ago
  You're saying this like it's some absolute truth, that any state naturally gravitates towards either communism or capitalism, but based on the amount of states in the world that haven't automatically turned into either communistic or capitalistic hell-holes, it seems like this only happens to a small fraction of the states in the world.
  - cluckindan 10mo ago
    > any state naturally gravitates towards either communism or capitalism That is not something I wrote.
    - embedding-shape 10mo ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraphrase https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraphrase VS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation I suppose.
      - cluckindan 10mo ago
        More like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
gary_0 10mo ago
And AFAIK Brin & Page and Zuckerberg still maintain majority voting control over their companies. They could enforce any policy they wanted from on high, and the worst that would happen is the number next to their name would go down a bit. Brin & Page could give the order to make Search work again or you're all fired, and Zuck could mandate no censorship of minorities or else, but they don't. There's nobody to shift blame to; this is just what billions of dollars does to "free-spirited hackers".
- cmrdporcupine 10mo ago
  Re-reading the Google IPO founders letter to prospective shareholders every once in a while is a sobering experience.
  - Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe 10mo ago
    https://www.thestreet.com/opinion/text-of-googles-letter-to-prospective-shareholders-10157519 https://www.thestreet.com/opinion/text-of-googles-letter-to-...
- usrusr 10mo ago
  "and the worst that would happen is the number next to their name would go down a bit." That's the thing, you can only have that kind of number for so many years before you start really not wanting it to get down. And chances are they have been buying quite a bit of lifestyle by borrowing against that number. Because selling would strip them of that voting control you pointed out. Then they can't really afford the number to go down, because the borrowing is effectively a cascade, so in reality they aren't anywhere close to free in their decisions. (but I'd imagine that they are quite capable of deluding themselves into believing that the decisions they have to take to keep the number up are what they actually want)
  - gary_0 10mo ago
    While I'm sure their finances are a bit more complicated than "they have infinite money", I find it hard to believe that people who can buy and sell small countries and ruin millions of lives with a few keystrokes are as powerless as you might be implying. "If you owe the bank $100, that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem."
the_af 10mo ago
The lesson, to me, is remembering company mottos like these are meaningless because corporations are fundamentally amoral. They are made of people, yes, and these people do have moral values, but the corporation as a whole doesn't. Whatever tagline, whatever "inclusivity commitment", whatever "anti-discrimination" policies, whatever "diversity makes us stronger" motto: all of those are shallow, meaningless taglines. The corporation will adopt them when it will help their business, and ditch them just as fast when it doesn't (e.g. when a powerful politician doesn't like it and can harm your business). Next time your company makes you sit through one of these trainings, for whatever so-called value, remember: the company doesn't believe in it. It only believes in making money.
- underlipton 10mo ago
  Pushing back for the sake of conversation: corporations are amoral, because they're containers for business activities. Those activities don't necessarily inherit that amorality, though. A business decision is made by a person, and so is a task undertaken or okayed by an employee; those can therefore be subject to measures of morality. Because people involved in a company have the capacity for moral or immoral action, it is in the company's best interest to monitor and correct behavior.
  - the_af 10mo ago
    You're right. I don't think it's a benefit to society that corporations behave like amoral sociopaths. It should be in their interest to correct that behavior. However, my point is this (slightly exaggerated) timeline: 1. "Diversity makes us stronger! Discrimination is bad! Power to women! Respect gender identities! Stop fake news!". 2. Go do all these trainings to improve yourself on those topics. We mandate this because we care, it's our inner moral fiber! 3. (election happens, government changes) 4. Actually, forget all of the above. The previous administration forced us, we now believe otherwise and we're decommissioning all those programs. Sorry we forced you! So in the end, no value a corporation espouses is genuine, unless it's making money. So all those trainings? Fake. All those "values"? Fake. Individuals within the company may care, but the company as a whole doesn't (and let's face it, the CEO and board don't either, and never did). If we're feeling charitable, we could argue any given company reflects the current (corporate) consensus about what's good/safe for business and for society, but always dressed in the language of "we genuinely believe this, it's heartfelt, and we're also trend setters because we care!". It's this last part that is 100% fake. At best they do what's safe for the current social/business climate; nothing is "heartfelt". If it was heartfelt, they would stand up to the bullies instead of saying "we never believed it, it was forced on us by the past evil administration!".
griffel 10mo ago
[flagged]
- exasperaited 10mo ago
  > grooming children into "queer" lifestyles … is a deliberate bad faith characterisation. Isn't bad faith argument immoral?
  - PunchyHamster 10mo ago
    [flagged]
    - Forgeties79 10mo ago
      Being exposed to the reality that gay people exist?
      - griffel 10mo ago
        [dead]
    - ceejayoz 10mo ago
      Do atheist parents get to ban other peoples’ youth church activities for the same reason?
  - griffel 10mo ago
    [flagged]
    - blitz_skull 10mo ago
      [flagged]
    - tallanvor 10mo ago
      You are entitled to your own opinion, not your own facts. And there's no reputable research to back up your claims. Your religious beliefs are not enough to make something true.
snickerbockers 10mo ago
Julian Assange wrote an excellent book on this topic called "when Google met wikileaks" about a decade ago which i found to be eye-opening. The backdrop is the "arab spring" uprisings of the early 10s, which were widely touted by leaders in both silicon Valley and Washington as an example of the positive impacts of social media, a mere five years before this opinion was suddenly reversed when some of these positive effects came home. The titular event is an account of when one of Google's executives came to britain to meet him in person (at this point he's fighting extradition to the United States but has not yet sequestered himself inside the Ecuadorian embassy). From the conversation Assange gets the impression that the Google exec is acting as an unofficial envoy of the US state department in hopes of convincing him to "play ball" by publishing more and more information which will advance the arab spring narrative. The rest of the book is his own personal investigation into the incestuous links between US foreign policy, social media corporations and the so-called "arab spring".
- DANmode 10mo ago
  There are great articles by him on these topics, too, for those without book-level time to commit to the topic.
- cmrdporcupine 10mo ago
  I didn't even have to go read it to immediately know that it was Eric Schmidt who was the Google executive in question. He's a notorious fan of unbridled American imperial power and "realpolitik" and brought Kissinger in multiple times to Google for "fireside chat" sessions. Which always went over very... poorly... with the broader set of employees who used to get seriously annoyed at this. The reception was never good.
- r721 10mo ago
  And after that he decided to become an ally of Russian government to help them spread conspiracy theories (about Seth Rich for example): >In the end, the most charitable interpretation of Assange’s “dissembling” as Mueller calls it, in the Seth Rich hoax is that he genuinely couldn’t rule out the possibility that Rich was his source. The Mueller report demolished that final moral refuge. Rich had been dead four days when Assange received the DNC files. https://archive.is/56RiI https://archive.is/56RiI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Seth_Rich#WikiLeaks_statements https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Seth_Rich#WikiLeaks_...
YcYc10 10mo ago
Same with OpenAI. There's no point in listening to any ethical mission statements coming from any big tech company - it's all corporate BS.
newsclues 10mo ago
It’s funny that some people think “positive social impact” should (only) reflect their views and morals.
dfxm12 10mo ago
I'm wondering if at some level we always knew it would end up like this. Persecuting marginalized people and supporting authoritarian regimes is the logical path for capitalism, yes.
- underlipton 10mo ago
  The parallels between today's techbros and the plantation magnates who pushed us towards the Civil War are unnerving, when you know that history (which is why they don't teach it).
bell-cot 10mo ago
> I'm wondering if at some level we always knew ... Roughly speaking, the folks who truly cared knew. Corporations have obvious market/regulatory incentives to say they're good guys. Most people want to believe such statements, with the immediate incentive being a happier worldview. Incentives for an extremely powerful corporation to actually be good are far weaker.
dogleash 10mo ago
>I'm wondering if at some level we always knew it would end up like this. Everyone always knew. The criticisms get lumped in with with the unreasonable nay-sayers because it makes them easier to dismiss. The honest people I know working for obvious evil will acknowledge it and say they're just doing it for a paycheck. But this gives most people cognitive dissonance and they'll find better rationalization. See also: every cope post on hacker news by someone defending a company they're pretending not to work for.
johnnyanmac 10mo ago
>I'm wondering if at some level we always knew it would end up like this A very deep level. The level that joked about "pride month" being thrown put like Christmas decorations on July 1st. The more positive sentiment back then is that bigotry wouldn't ever be profitable again as the world experienced more experiences and built more empathy. Of course, I can only laugh hysterically at poor 2014/2015 me.

by lta 10mo ago

d--b 10mo ago

Well the "dumbfucks" comment date back a while. Zuck's always been an asshole.

cluckindan 10mo ago

As a state tends toward either communism or capitalism, it starts dictating the economy more and more, until it hits the ceiling and becomes a totally dictated war economy, where a fundamentally fascist ideology replaces previous values. At that point, war is inevitable, because a war economy requires active warfare, and war provides ample opportunies for pilfering at multiple levels, both home and abroad. Fascism is not to blame, it is a means to an end for the economy at large. Ultimately, the issue is uneven distribution of wealth and power.

kuerbel 10mo ago
You are downvoted, but correct. Fascism is one possible failure mode of capitalism. It is capitalism stripped of brakes, guardrails, and ethics. A kind of panic-driven hyper-authoritarian capitalism that pretends unity can solve material contradictions.
- exasperaited 10mo ago
  > Fascism is one possible failure mode of capitalism. It is capitalism stripped of brakes, guardrails, and ethics. This is not a useful definition of fascism, if that is what you mean. Fascism can exist entirely independently of capitalism, and has done. Is it possible for fascism to thrive in a regulation-free capitalist world? Apparently yes. But they are not necessarily coupled. It's a common misperception that fascism necessarily involves a merger of state and corporate power. Rather in a fascist regime, companies have no more choice in whether they further the state's aims and align with its goals than individual citizens have; they just have more devastating impacts. As to whether Meta is aligning with the administration's goals, I don't know whether it is happening, consciously or unconsciously, in this case, but we know for certain there has been deliberate and conscious alignment elsewhere, because Zuckerberg made a big deal out of it.
  - eunoia 10mo ago
    Companies are not helpless dames in a fascist takeover. History has proven that the people on top of the capitalist hierarchy generally actively welcome fascist elements in government. It’s a lot easier to juice the profits of your megacorp when the power of government is vested in a single, friendly individual. Of course ten seconds of thinking exposes the fragility of such a system (they may turn on you, they may be replaced, they may destroy the entire country, etc). But Capitalism itself encourages short term, winner-takes-all all thinking. If you don’t cozy up to the wanna be autocrat and help them attain more power, you will be outcompeted by someone who does. The path of a greedy corporate executive is practically pre-ordained in such a situation. The only question is whether the wanna be autocrat succeeds to become the real deal.
  - cycomanic 10mo ago
    > > Fascism is one possible failure mode of capitalism. It is capitalism stripped of brakes, guardrails, and ethics. > This is not a useful definition of fascism, if that is what you mean. Fascism can exist entirely independently of capitalism, and has done. I think you should look up the definition and history of fascism. You're correct about totalitarism, but fascism is by definition capitalist.
    - dragonwriter 10mo ago
      Fascism is a reaction against capitalism-the-system in much the same way (but a different direction) than communism (it is "capitalist" in that, like most systems, including pre-capitalist ones, and including most claiming to be "Communist", it has a narrow self-perpetuating class controlling society by means including control of the means of production, but it does not feature the particular structure and features that defines capitalism as a system rather than a feature of other systems; fascist corporatism looks a lot, in practice, like the state capitalism that vanguardist "Communist" regimes tend to get stuck in.)
      - cycomanic 10mo ago
        > but it does not feature the particular structure and features that defines capitalism as a system rather than a feature of other systems; What do you mean? The defining feature of capitalism is private/corporate ownership of the means of production which is a core part of fascism as well.
embedding-shape 10mo ago
You're saying this like it's some absolute truth, that any state naturally gravitates towards either communism or capitalism, but based on the amount of states in the world that haven't automatically turned into either communistic or capitalistic hell-holes, it seems like this only happens to a small fraction of the states in the world.
- cluckindan 10mo ago
  > any state naturally gravitates towards either communism or capitalism That is not something I wrote.
  - embedding-shape 10mo ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraphrase https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraphrase VS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation I suppose.
    - cluckindan 10mo ago
      More like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

gary_0 10mo ago

And AFAIK Brin & Page and Zuckerberg still maintain majority voting control over their companies. They could enforce any policy they wanted from on high, and the worst that would happen is the number next to their name would go down a bit. Brin & Page could give the order to make Search work again or you're all fired, and Zuck could mandate no censorship of minorities or else, but they don't. There's nobody to shift blame to; this is just what billions of dollars does to "free-spirited hackers".

cmrdporcupine 10mo ago
Re-reading the Google IPO founders letter to prospective shareholders every once in a while is a sobering experience.
- Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe 10mo ago
  https://www.thestreet.com/opinion/text-of-googles-letter-to-prospective-shareholders-10157519 https://www.thestreet.com/opinion/text-of-googles-letter-to-...
usrusr 10mo ago
"and the worst that would happen is the number next to their name would go down a bit." That's the thing, you can only have that kind of number for so many years before you start really not wanting it to get down. And chances are they have been buying quite a bit of lifestyle by borrowing against that number. Because selling would strip them of that voting control you pointed out. Then they can't really afford the number to go down, because the borrowing is effectively a cascade, so in reality they aren't anywhere close to free in their decisions. (but I'd imagine that they are quite capable of deluding themselves into believing that the decisions they have to take to keep the number up are what they actually want)
- gary_0 10mo ago
  While I'm sure their finances are a bit more complicated than "they have infinite money", I find it hard to believe that people who can buy and sell small countries and ruin millions of lives with a few keystrokes are as powerless as you might be implying. "If you owe the bank $100, that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem."

the_af 10mo ago

The lesson, to me, is remembering company mottos like these are meaningless because corporations are fundamentally amoral. They are made of people, yes, and these people do have moral values, but the corporation as a whole doesn't. Whatever tagline, whatever "inclusivity commitment", whatever "anti-discrimination" policies, whatever "diversity makes us stronger" motto: all of those are shallow, meaningless taglines. The corporation will adopt them when it will help their business, and ditch them just as fast when it doesn't (e.g. when a powerful politician doesn't like it and can harm your business). Next time your company makes you sit through one of these trainings, for whatever so-called value, remember: the company doesn't believe in it. It only believes in making money.

underlipton 10mo ago
Pushing back for the sake of conversation: corporations are amoral, because they're containers for business activities. Those activities don't necessarily inherit that amorality, though. A business decision is made by a person, and so is a task undertaken or okayed by an employee; those can therefore be subject to measures of morality. Because people involved in a company have the capacity for moral or immoral action, it is in the company's best interest to monitor and correct behavior.
- the_af 10mo ago
  You're right. I don't think it's a benefit to society that corporations behave like amoral sociopaths. It should be in their interest to correct that behavior. However, my point is this (slightly exaggerated) timeline: 1. "Diversity makes us stronger! Discrimination is bad! Power to women! Respect gender identities! Stop fake news!". 2. Go do all these trainings to improve yourself on those topics. We mandate this because we care, it's our inner moral fiber! 3. (election happens, government changes) 4. Actually, forget all of the above. The previous administration forced us, we now believe otherwise and we're decommissioning all those programs. Sorry we forced you! So in the end, no value a corporation espouses is genuine, unless it's making money. So all those trainings? Fake. All those "values"? Fake. Individuals within the company may care, but the company as a whole doesn't (and let's face it, the CEO and board don't either, and never did). If we're feeling charitable, we could argue any given company reflects the current (corporate) consensus about what's good/safe for business and for society, but always dressed in the language of "we genuinely believe this, it's heartfelt, and we're also trend setters because we care!". It's this last part that is 100% fake. At best they do what's safe for the current social/business climate; nothing is "heartfelt". If it was heartfelt, they would stand up to the bullies instead of saying "we never believed it, it was forced on us by the past evil administration!".

griffel 10mo ago

[flagged]

exasperaited 10mo ago
> grooming children into "queer" lifestyles … is a deliberate bad faith characterisation. Isn't bad faith argument immoral?
- PunchyHamster 10mo ago
  [flagged]
  - Forgeties79 10mo ago
    Being exposed to the reality that gay people exist?
    - griffel 10mo ago
      [dead]
  - ceejayoz 10mo ago
    Do atheist parents get to ban other peoples’ youth church activities for the same reason?
- griffel 10mo ago
  [flagged]
  - blitz_skull 10mo ago
    [flagged]
  - tallanvor 10mo ago
    You are entitled to your own opinion, not your own facts. And there's no reputable research to back up your claims. Your religious beliefs are not enough to make something true.

snickerbockers 10mo ago

Julian Assange wrote an excellent book on this topic called "when Google met wikileaks" about a decade ago which i found to be eye-opening. The backdrop is the "arab spring" uprisings of the early 10s, which were widely touted by leaders in both silicon Valley and Washington as an example of the positive impacts of social media, a mere five years before this opinion was suddenly reversed when some of these positive effects came home. The titular event is an account of when one of Google's executives came to britain to meet him in person (at this point he's fighting extradition to the United States but has not yet sequestered himself inside the Ecuadorian embassy). From the conversation Assange gets the impression that the Google exec is acting as an unofficial envoy of the US state department in hopes of convincing him to "play ball" by publishing more and more information which will advance the arab spring narrative. The rest of the book is his own personal investigation into the incestuous links between US foreign policy, social media corporations and the so-called "arab spring".

DANmode 10mo ago
There are great articles by him on these topics, too, for those without book-level time to commit to the topic.
cmrdporcupine 10mo ago
I didn't even have to go read it to immediately know that it was Eric Schmidt who was the Google executive in question. He's a notorious fan of unbridled American imperial power and "realpolitik" and brought Kissinger in multiple times to Google for "fireside chat" sessions. Which always went over very... poorly... with the broader set of employees who used to get seriously annoyed at this. The reception was never good.
r721 10mo ago
And after that he decided to become an ally of Russian government to help them spread conspiracy theories (about Seth Rich for example): >In the end, the most charitable interpretation of Assange’s “dissembling” as Mueller calls it, in the Seth Rich hoax is that he genuinely couldn’t rule out the possibility that Rich was his source. The Mueller report demolished that final moral refuge. Rich had been dead four days when Assange received the DNC files. https://archive.is/56RiI https://archive.is/56RiI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Seth_Rich#WikiLeaks_statements https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Seth_Rich#WikiLeaks_...

YcYc10 10mo ago

Same with OpenAI. There's no point in listening to any ethical mission statements coming from any big tech company - it's all corporate BS.

newsclues 10mo ago

It’s funny that some people think “positive social impact” should (only) reflect their views and morals.

dfxm12 10mo ago

I'm wondering if at some level we always knew it would end up like this. Persecuting marginalized people and supporting authoritarian regimes is the logical path for capitalism, yes.

underlipton 10mo ago
The parallels between today's techbros and the plantation magnates who pushed us towards the Civil War are unnerving, when you know that history (which is why they don't teach it).

bell-cot 10mo ago

> I'm wondering if at some level we always knew ... Roughly speaking, the folks who truly cared knew. Corporations have obvious market/regulatory incentives to say they're good guys. Most people want to believe such statements, with the immediate incentive being a happier worldview. Incentives for an extremely powerful corporation to actually be good are far weaker.

dogleash 10mo ago

>I'm wondering if at some level we always knew it would end up like this. Everyone always knew. The criticisms get lumped in with with the unreasonable nay-sayers because it makes them easier to dismiss. The honest people I know working for obvious evil will acknowledge it and say they're just doing it for a paycheck. But this gives most people cognitive dissonance and they'll find better rationalization. See also: every cope post on hacker news by someone defending a company they're pretending not to work for.

johnnyanmac 10mo ago

>I'm wondering if at some level we always knew it would end up like this A very deep level. The level that joked about "pride month" being thrown put like Christmas decorations on July 1st. The more positive sentiment back then is that bigotry wouldn't ever be profitable again as the world experienced more experiences and built more empathy. Of course, I can only laugh hysterically at poor 2014/2015 me.