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Everyone in this industry should be required to read Careless People by Sara Wynn-Williams about her tenure at Facebook. Not because the book is about how evil

by Ritewut 6mo ago

Everyone in this industry should be required to read Careless People by Sara Wynn-Williams about her tenure at Facebook. Not because the book is about how evil Meta/Facebook is as a company but because you get to see the lengths people go to mentally convince themselves they are the good guy. Repeatedly in the book she tries to assure herself she's making the world better and that there's actually an ethical, positive company inside Facebook and she just had to navigate the politics to make it known despite all evidence to the contrary.

ien24sdq 6mo ago
This is a really important thing that people on the left in particular seem to consistently overlook: local incentives, emergent corporate behaviors, and the unconscious need to believe you’re “right” have way more explanatory power than “X is actually evil”.
- alex1138 6mo ago
  Yeah but keep in mind what Zuck specifically has done. He copied Snapchat multiple times, Facebook overwrote people's public-facing emails, "dumb fucks" in IMs
  - Ritewut 6mo ago
    Zuckerberg is awful person but he alone is not "Meta." It is a company made up of thousands of employees and each of those people play their role in enshittifying the internet. Some of do it gleefully and others do it because they think the battle is better fought in the company than out of it. The large salary also doesn't hurt.
- jdgoesmarching 6mo ago
  If your incentives and emerging behaviors land at an evil result, it is evil. I’d argue the problem is everyone who constantly generates these “well actually” reasons to excuse the consequences. Marx wrote about people being simultaneously perpetrators and victims of capitalism over 150 years ago, I assure you the left isn’t overlooking this very obvious mechanism. It’s also a little funny to turn a thread about the blatant failures of a neoliberal “success” story into a weird criticism of the left.
- _moof 6mo ago
  The need for belonging is also really powerful, and companies actively try to fulfill that need. Not, generally speaking, for nefarious purposes, but because people do better work when they feel a sense of belonging. If you decide that your work is against your values, you're also deciding to separate yourself from the group, even if you don't actually leave the company. That's painful. It's not an excuse, but it is a powerful motivator.
- jltsiren 6mo ago
  The banality of evil is a well-known idea. That evil is often done by people who are just doing their jobs and see themselves as decent people. Words are cheap, thoughts are cheap, and voting is cheap. A full-time job, on the other hand, is a substantial contribution towards something, and it comes with a huge opportunity cost. The job you have is a major factor in determining your moral character. Determining what kind of a person you actually are, as opposed to the kind of a person you believe to be, or wish you'd be.
  - altmanaltman 6mo ago
    I don't think its reasonable to use the whole "banality of evil" for people working FAANG jobs unless they are on trial for war crimes and genocide. The Nazi officers were not standard grunts but rather key executives of the regime and then they tried to throw Hitler under the bus by claiming they were just following orders. When in reality, they were all pyschopaths and truly believed in what they were doing to minorities was right. Extrapolating that to Meta or Google is a fundamental misunderstanding of history and insenstive.
- anigbrowl 6mo ago
  Yes, but once you're aware of these factors and leverage them for personal gain anyway, it's evil. It's not like it's impossible to make out the bigger picture on many issues, or to ask oneself if the upsides are really so great that it's worth being responsible for the downsides. This is equally true for leftist projects. If one is dedicated to the cause of improving the general welfare and creating economic and social opportunities for as many as possible, that's laudable, but you can't use it as an excuse to just ignore the human rights whenever you run into a problem or a tricky ethical situation.
orochimaaru 6mo ago
There is no “ethical” company. They will tend towards making money by means that can be interpreted as being legal. Sometimes they will do things not legal - but those are calculated decisions based on how much the profit from said actions is compared to how much they will pay out as fines. Ethics and laws are for chumps like us. Because we don’t have the financial and legal muscle to challenge the state.
- ajkjk 6mo ago
  this take is irritating because it implies that people at companies don't have to bother being ethical or holding the people around them accountable at a personal level for being ethical, as if it's somehow predetermined by the environment, being at a corporation, how you behave. Certainly it's true that the incentives of corporations push you to ignore ethics. But that's why they're ethics: they're precisely the things you should do that you don't have to do. That's what morality is. Sure, for the purposes of doing things about unethical companies, it might be best to view all corporations as fundamentally unethical because that implies that the right place to make society better is by opposing their behavior with laws. But at an everyday human level everyone is responsible for exactly the things that they do and being at a corporation in no way changes it at all.
  - IneffablePigeon 6mo ago
    Thank you for putting into words what I dislike about that refrain so eloquently. It’s a cop out.
  - _factor 6mo ago
    Being at a corporation normalizes sociopathy to some extent. The phrase: “It’s business, not personal”, outlines it well. It is ok to harm another group of people financially and even personally because that’s what “business does”. Degradation being a ratchet that calcifies unethical behavior doesn’t help. Companies tend to get less ethical the older and larger they become.
    - JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
tdb7893 6mo ago
My experience is that people will be able to justify anything that is "normal". I went vegan after learning too much of how the literal sausage is made and the amount of people who have unprompted (people are weird about it so I try to avoid talking about being vegan except for mentioning it quickly while declining food) said something along the lines of "factory farming is awful but I just love bacon" and laugh is legitimately terrifying. It seems like if it's normal enough people will say something is bad and will happily do it anyway. It's made me rethink my life and how I do the same thing and was the impetus for me leaving tech.
- Ritewut 6mo ago
  They are letting perfect be the enemy of good. If they respond with "I love bacon" then tell them to eat plant-based + bacon. It's still a vast improvement environmentally than what they were doing previously.
  - OneMorePerson 6mo ago
    Yeah there's some kind of absolutism aspect tied into identity. Also the funny tendency humans have to dislike the people who are most similar to them. Someone who is at least recognizing factory farming is bad and willing to even think that far is more similar to a vegetarian than the people who don't give a shit and never even think about where their food is coming from. Obviously there's the cognitive dissonance aspect to point out, but we are all doing that to some extent.
    - alterom 6mo ago
      >Obviously there's the cognitive dissonance aspect to point out, but we are all doing that to some extent. Not necessarily. I mean, the people who give out an uncomfortable laugh do exhibit signs of cognitive dissonance. I don't have an issue with accepting both statements: factory farming is awful, and I still eat meat. There is no cognitive dissonance. The logic is straightforward: I do not believe that me, an individual, abstaining from meat is going to do much to factory farming, while it will make a huge, adverse impact on my life. Government regulation is how this problem would be solved (the only way it can get solved), and I'm all for voting for bans on factory farming, heavy taxes on meat products, etc. One's gotta pick their battles. I pick ones where my participation won't amount to martyrdom.
jmyeet 6mo ago
To quote Upton Sinclair: > “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” But there's something bigger that you allude to, which is that very few peoplel think of themselves as the bad guys. People separate themselves from the harm they contribute to or they dehumanize the targets of that harm and then argue they deserve it somehow or simply that this is necessary for some reason (eg lesser evil arguments). I eschew the concept of "bad guys" in general because it's a non-argument. Philosophically and politically it's known as "idealism" [1][2]. It's saying "we are the good guys because we are the good guys" and everyone think they're the good guys. The alternative to this is materialism [3] and historical materialism [4]. There is no metaphysical or inherent goodness (or badness). You are the sum of your actions and their impact on the world. Likewise you are a product of your material world. So we don't really need to go down the rabbit hole of figuring out if, say, FB/Meta or Palantir is a "good" company or if the employees are or feel "good". We can simply look at the impact and whether that impact was intentional or otherwise foreseeable. And that record for Meta really isn't good eg Myanmar and the Rohingya genocide [5] or FB's real world harm from spreading misinformation [6]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idealism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idealism [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idealism_in_international_relations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idealism_in_international_rela... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_materialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_materialism [5]: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-facebooks-systems-promoted-violence-against-rohingya-meta-owes-reparations-new-report/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb... [6]: https://theconversation.com/facebook-data-reveal-the-devastating-real-world-harms-caused-by-the-spread-of-misinformation-265742 https://theconversation.com/facebook-data-reveal-the-devasta...
rpdillon 6mo ago
I'm in the middle of this book right now, and I agree. It's a fantastic read to get inside the psychology of the folks that are making huge decisions about how society works.
snarf21 6mo ago
This just another example of Sinclair's Law.
- IAmBroom 6mo ago
  “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
PunchyHamster 6mo ago
I think Mitchell and Webb sketch is enough. It's not some slow descent to badness in case of Palantir, it's obvious from the PR materials alone
favflam 6mo ago
I have an irrational hatred of someone who believes in "reality distortion fields". Over the last 10 years, I also have come away with an intense impression that Silicon Valley is full of the self-delusional type, as evidenced by Sara's book, Palantir's weird advertising and CEO, and the insane Nimbyism. I believe it is in the best interest of the United States if the center of power shifts back from West Coast "tech bros" to the East coast. I and many others had enough of Silicon Valley. Side note: I find it illuminating that one of the most popular social apps that birth social trends did not come from Silicon Valley, but China. I don't think Silicon Valley can drive social trends at all (anti-humanity types are too prevalent).
- guzfip 6mo ago
  Silicon Valley must be destroyed to save America. Gladly more are waking up to this. There’s been a surge on both the right and left in my state of people wanting to reject the place and it’s disgusting “culture”.
- corky_buchek 6mo ago
  > I believe it is in the best interest of the United States if the center of power shifts back from West Coast "tech bros" to the East coast. Yes, because Wall Street is a paragon of ethical corporate behavior.
  - cucumber3732842 6mo ago
    The fact that they're at least honest about what they care about (money) makes them far simpler to deal with than these entities (both private and public) that spin complex webs of half truths about how they're making the world better by implementing 1984.
- davisr 6mo ago
  That power, today, is expressed through technology, and these overlords hold their control via proprietary software and anticompetitive business practices. To seize power back, you need to relinquish their shackles by using technology that is designed with user freedom in mind, not "lock-in", and support businesses constituted of that ethos.
ModernMech 6mo ago
They would read it and just say to themselves "Wow, how could anyone fall into that trap? Certainly I never would!"
seattle_spring 6mo ago
I'll never forget this spot on NPR where they interviewed a machine learning engineer working on AI videos. The engineer was purely focused on how cool the technology is, how real it looks, etc. The interviewer asked, "aren't you worried about this getting into the hands of the wrong people, and creating deepfakes for extortion and things like that?" The engineer paused for a few seconds, and then said, "gosh I never even considered that." She created this monster and all she could think about was how neat it was technologically.
- npunt 6mo ago
  Yeah engineering as a discipline tends to be pretty naïve to the consequences of what they build, and sociopaths take advantage of it. Norbert Wiener [1] observed this about the engineers working on nukes in the 1940s-1950s: “Push-button warfare... possible for a limited group of people to threaten the absolute destruction of millions, without any immediate risk to themselves.... Behind all this I sensed the desires of the gadgeteer to see the wheels go round.” [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norbert_Wiener https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norbert_Wiener
- ryandrake 6mo ago
  Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I was in university, we used to have at least one engineering ethics class in undergrad. Have they stopped those? It sure seems like it, given how many engineers are out there who only seem to care about how technically cool and interesting their projects are.
  - pesus 6mo ago
    I took one back in 2018 or so, and I assume it's still a degree requirement. If most are like the one I took, however, very few people seriously engaged with the class, and it's just viewed as a filler class. It didn't help that the workload was a joke. I believe the entirety of our assignments were 5 single page "essay" responses to some ethical scenarios, and the professor seemed to hand out As just for writing enough. It probably took me less than 2 hours of total writing. I imagine most of the students these days are just having ChatGPT write it for them. We absolutely need to take ethics more seriously though, even if it involves adding more/more rigorous courses to the curriculum.
Aurornis 6mo ago
From what I've seen the focus on a few big companies can have a backwards effect on some people's sense of morals. I've heard a few people justify their work for unethical companies as "At least it's not as bad as what Facebook does". It can also have the opposite of the intended effect when it encourages beliefs that bad behavior is normalized in the industry. I've heard an executive try to drum up support for a program to sell customer data by saying that everyone does it, from Facebook to Google. When others explained that Facebook and Google didn't sell customer data, they didn't believe it. They had read so much about big companies collecting customer data to sell that they thought everyone did it and therefore it was okay.
- geodel 6mo ago
  Indeed. It would be difficult to make person understand something if their salary depends on not understanding it.
- ineedasername 6mo ago
  "When others explained that Facebook and Google didn't sell customer data, they didn't believe it" I'm not sure there's a significant meaningful difference between direct selling and what they actually do, which is to make it available to target and manipulate people with extreme granularity. This is a huge part of why a person may not want their data to be held much less purchased to begin with, meaning it's "doesn't sell your data... but does or facilitates all of the things you do not want a group, in buying it from them, able to do." It's a distinction without much practical difference. Also: They buy your data from other brokers who do sell it, vastly enriching the degree to which customers of their ad platforms can make use of the data you already know they have far, far beyond your ability to know their full capabilities and the profile they have on you. Again, it's not actually selling your data, but it's worth noting that when "they didn't believe it", that misconception was possibly helped along by Facebook or Google being on of the potential customers for that data either directly or via the proxy of a data broker whose largest customers are companies like that.
  - Aunche 6mo ago
    Selling your data means that anyone can have access your data forever. On the other hand, anyone can turn off ad personalization and delete their data on Google and Facebook.
floren 6mo ago
The very first chapter was actually excellent in setting my relationship to the book going forward, because stuff like this twanged against my brain and made me think, "Oh, she just really wanted to be powerful and influential and chased whatever she thought would give her that" > [after surviving a shark attack] why did this happen to me? If I survived against the odds, surely there had to be a reason? [...] After becoming an attorney, I ended up in the foreign service because it seemed like a way to change the world, and I wanted an adventure. I ended up at the UN because I genuinely believed it was the seat of global power. The place you go when you want to change the world. > It seemed obvious that politics was going to happen on Facebook, and when it did, when it migrated to this enormous new gathering place, Facebook and the people who ran it would be at the center of everything. They’d be setting the rules for this global conversation. I was in awe of its ineffable potential. > The vastness of the information Facebook would be collecting was unprecedented. Data about everything. Data that was previously entirely private. Data on the citizens of every country. A historic amount of data and so incredibly valuable. Information is power. > After years of looking for things that would change the world, I thought I’d found the biggest one going. Like an evangelist, I saw Facebook’s power confirmed in every part of everyday life. Whatever Facebook decided to do—what it did with the voices that were gathering there—would change the course of human events. I was sure of it. > This is a revolution. > What do you do when you see a revolution is coming? I decide I will stop at nothing to be part of it. At the center of the action. Once you see it, you can’t sit on the sidelines. I’m desperate to be part of it. I can’t remember ever wanting anything more.
- amanaplanacanal 6mo ago
  She sounds horrifying.
  - noisy_boy 6mo ago
    And exactly the type to be in power. Explains everything that is fucked up about our world.
  - Baljhin 6mo ago
    Consider that she's one of 'the good guys'-- someone who self-reflected on her ambition, saw the 'evil' in hers and other's, called it out publicly, and assumedly regrets hers, and is trying to do better. Sadly, terrifyingly, for every one of her, there are hundreds who might also self-reflect - but >choose< to be comix-book villains.
kakacik 6mo ago
Everybody need to be a hero of their own story. Even concentration camp guards had this mental model, apart from outright sadists (I know I know, Godwin is cheap but it fits so well when talking about sociopathic traits and/or lack of morality when convenient).
tlobes 6mo ago
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” -Upton Sinclair
theturret 6mo ago
You’re probably right about the book either way, but I think the comparison has an obvious limitation. At best, Meta’s mission is “social connection.” Held up in an equally charitable light, a defense contractor is “protecting American interests.” The positive case is so much more stark that it’s probably easier to convince yourself of. But I also think that’s partly because it’s actually true. (I concede I work in defense and am biased.) There’s certainly a necessary debate to be had about whether these companies are doing the right things, whether they’re going about it the right way, and whether the United States’ actions are moral and legal. But it’s very hard to argue that national security itself isn’t necessary. Whereas you can much more easily argue that a social-media-based ad company has no reason to exist in the first place.
asdfman123 6mo ago
This quote immediately stood out: > Are you tracking Palantir’s descent into fascism? Their framing is wrong. The beliefs and internal politics of the people making the surveillance tools don't matter. The fact is they're making tools to assist government overreach, and anyone with any political awareness (or maybe more importantly here, objectivity) could have seen that. They're just the enablers.
- red-iron-pine 6mo ago
  lol what? "it's not that corporations could be evil, it's the gubermnt!" meanwhile large corporations literally bribe trump -- they're the ones calling the shots, and the government is just the organ
  - asdfman123 6mo ago
    Nah, it's not like that. It's not defending them. I'm more saying they never DESCENDED into fascism -- their ideas about how things should go in the world don't really matter. They are merely enabling fascism, regardless of their attitudes towards politics or their work, and they should have known that from the beginning. They're literally saying "people are using the weapons we make to hurt people." No shit, what business did you think you were in?
Lerc 6mo ago
How do you determine if they are mentally convincing themselves they are the good guy, when in fact it is you who is the good guy. From either perspective, if the roles were reversed, wouldn't it look the same? Both parties thinking they are doing the right thing. There are a lot of legitimate criticisms out there, they seem to be vastly outnumbered by illegitimate criticisms, no matter what position you hold. It's easy to hold your opinion when you are inundated with a constant stream of invalid arguments that say little more than "I don't like the tribe you chose". Any valid argument is easily overlooked without a sense of guilt in that environment.
throw54321 6mo ago
People do anything for money
jaspervanderee 6mo ago
Confessions of an Economic Hitman is a book with a similar theme. A guy trained by NSA to be sent to poor countries, making deals through false projections with the goal to extract their natural resources.
UqWBcuFx6NV4r 6mo ago
I got very far into this book, but didn’t finish it, in large part because the author clearly needed to work through her problems a little more before publishing it. The biggest “I’m not ACTUALLY like them” complex ever.

by Ritewut 6mo ago

ien24sdq 6mo ago

This is a really important thing that people on the left in particular seem to consistently overlook: local incentives, emergent corporate behaviors, and the unconscious need to believe you’re “right” have way more explanatory power than “X is actually evil”.

alex1138 6mo ago
Yeah but keep in mind what Zuck specifically has done. He copied Snapchat multiple times, Facebook overwrote people's public-facing emails, "dumb fucks" in IMs
- Ritewut 6mo ago
  Zuckerberg is awful person but he alone is not "Meta." It is a company made up of thousands of employees and each of those people play their role in enshittifying the internet. Some of do it gleefully and others do it because they think the battle is better fought in the company than out of it. The large salary also doesn't hurt.
jdgoesmarching 6mo ago
If your incentives and emerging behaviors land at an evil result, it is evil. I’d argue the problem is everyone who constantly generates these “well actually” reasons to excuse the consequences. Marx wrote about people being simultaneously perpetrators and victims of capitalism over 150 years ago, I assure you the left isn’t overlooking this very obvious mechanism. It’s also a little funny to turn a thread about the blatant failures of a neoliberal “success” story into a weird criticism of the left.
_moof 6mo ago
The need for belonging is also really powerful, and companies actively try to fulfill that need. Not, generally speaking, for nefarious purposes, but because people do better work when they feel a sense of belonging. If you decide that your work is against your values, you're also deciding to separate yourself from the group, even if you don't actually leave the company. That's painful. It's not an excuse, but it is a powerful motivator.
jltsiren 6mo ago
The banality of evil is a well-known idea. That evil is often done by people who are just doing their jobs and see themselves as decent people. Words are cheap, thoughts are cheap, and voting is cheap. A full-time job, on the other hand, is a substantial contribution towards something, and it comes with a huge opportunity cost. The job you have is a major factor in determining your moral character. Determining what kind of a person you actually are, as opposed to the kind of a person you believe to be, or wish you'd be.
- altmanaltman 6mo ago
  I don't think its reasonable to use the whole "banality of evil" for people working FAANG jobs unless they are on trial for war crimes and genocide. The Nazi officers were not standard grunts but rather key executives of the regime and then they tried to throw Hitler under the bus by claiming they were just following orders. When in reality, they were all pyschopaths and truly believed in what they were doing to minorities was right. Extrapolating that to Meta or Google is a fundamental misunderstanding of history and insenstive.
anigbrowl 6mo ago
Yes, but once you're aware of these factors and leverage them for personal gain anyway, it's evil. It's not like it's impossible to make out the bigger picture on many issues, or to ask oneself if the upsides are really so great that it's worth being responsible for the downsides. This is equally true for leftist projects. If one is dedicated to the cause of improving the general welfare and creating economic and social opportunities for as many as possible, that's laudable, but you can't use it as an excuse to just ignore the human rights whenever you run into a problem or a tricky ethical situation.

orochimaaru 6mo ago

There is no “ethical” company. They will tend towards making money by means that can be interpreted as being legal. Sometimes they will do things not legal - but those are calculated decisions based on how much the profit from said actions is compared to how much they will pay out as fines. Ethics and laws are for chumps like us. Because we don’t have the financial and legal muscle to challenge the state.

ajkjk 6mo ago
this take is irritating because it implies that people at companies don't have to bother being ethical or holding the people around them accountable at a personal level for being ethical, as if it's somehow predetermined by the environment, being at a corporation, how you behave. Certainly it's true that the incentives of corporations push you to ignore ethics. But that's why they're ethics: they're precisely the things you should do that you don't have to do. That's what morality is. Sure, for the purposes of doing things about unethical companies, it might be best to view all corporations as fundamentally unethical because that implies that the right place to make society better is by opposing their behavior with laws. But at an everyday human level everyone is responsible for exactly the things that they do and being at a corporation in no way changes it at all.
- IneffablePigeon 6mo ago
  Thank you for putting into words what I dislike about that refrain so eloquently. It’s a cop out.
- _factor 6mo ago
  Being at a corporation normalizes sociopathy to some extent. The phrase: “It’s business, not personal”, outlines it well. It is ok to harm another group of people financially and even personally because that’s what “business does”. Degradation being a ratchet that calcifies unethical behavior doesn’t help. Companies tend to get less ethical the older and larger they become.
  - JumpCrisscross 6mo ago

tdb7893 6mo ago

My experience is that people will be able to justify anything that is "normal". I went vegan after learning too much of how the literal sausage is made and the amount of people who have unprompted (people are weird about it so I try to avoid talking about being vegan except for mentioning it quickly while declining food) said something along the lines of "factory farming is awful but I just love bacon" and laugh is legitimately terrifying. It seems like if it's normal enough people will say something is bad and will happily do it anyway. It's made me rethink my life and how I do the same thing and was the impetus for me leaving tech.

Ritewut 6mo ago
They are letting perfect be the enemy of good. If they respond with "I love bacon" then tell them to eat plant-based + bacon. It's still a vast improvement environmentally than what they were doing previously.
- OneMorePerson 6mo ago
  Yeah there's some kind of absolutism aspect tied into identity. Also the funny tendency humans have to dislike the people who are most similar to them. Someone who is at least recognizing factory farming is bad and willing to even think that far is more similar to a vegetarian than the people who don't give a shit and never even think about where their food is coming from. Obviously there's the cognitive dissonance aspect to point out, but we are all doing that to some extent.
  - alterom 6mo ago
    >Obviously there's the cognitive dissonance aspect to point out, but we are all doing that to some extent. Not necessarily. I mean, the people who give out an uncomfortable laugh do exhibit signs of cognitive dissonance. I don't have an issue with accepting both statements: factory farming is awful, and I still eat meat. There is no cognitive dissonance. The logic is straightforward: I do not believe that me, an individual, abstaining from meat is going to do much to factory farming, while it will make a huge, adverse impact on my life. Government regulation is how this problem would be solved (the only way it can get solved), and I'm all for voting for bans on factory farming, heavy taxes on meat products, etc. One's gotta pick their battles. I pick ones where my participation won't amount to martyrdom.

jmyeet 6mo ago

To quote Upton Sinclair: > “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” But there's something bigger that you allude to, which is that very few peoplel think of themselves as the bad guys. People separate themselves from the harm they contribute to or they dehumanize the targets of that harm and then argue they deserve it somehow or simply that this is necessary for some reason (eg lesser evil arguments). I eschew the concept of "bad guys" in general because it's a non-argument. Philosophically and politically it's known as "idealism" [1][2]. It's saying "we are the good guys because we are the good guys" and everyone think they're the good guys. The alternative to this is materialism [3] and historical materialism [4]. There is no metaphysical or inherent goodness (or badness). You are the sum of your actions and their impact on the world. Likewise you are a product of your material world. So we don't really need to go down the rabbit hole of figuring out if, say, FB/Meta or Palantir is a "good" company or if the employees are or feel "good". We can simply look at the impact and whether that impact was intentional or otherwise foreseeable. And that record for Meta really isn't good eg Myanmar and the Rohingya genocide [5] or FB's real world harm from spreading misinformation [6]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idealism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idealism [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idealism_in_international_relations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idealism_in_international_rela... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_materialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_materialism [5]: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-facebooks-systems-promoted-violence-against-rohingya-meta-owes-reparations-new-report/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb... [6]: https://theconversation.com/facebook-data-reveal-the-devastating-real-world-harms-caused-by-the-spread-of-misinformation-265742 https://theconversation.com/facebook-data-reveal-the-devasta...

rpdillon 6mo ago

I'm in the middle of this book right now, and I agree. It's a fantastic read to get inside the psychology of the folks that are making huge decisions about how society works.

snarf21 6mo ago

This just another example of Sinclair's Law.

IAmBroom 6mo ago
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

PunchyHamster 6mo ago

I think Mitchell and Webb sketch is enough. It's not some slow descent to badness in case of Palantir, it's obvious from the PR materials alone

favflam 6mo ago

I have an irrational hatred of someone who believes in "reality distortion fields". Over the last 10 years, I also have come away with an intense impression that Silicon Valley is full of the self-delusional type, as evidenced by Sara's book, Palantir's weird advertising and CEO, and the insane Nimbyism. I believe it is in the best interest of the United States if the center of power shifts back from West Coast "tech bros" to the East coast. I and many others had enough of Silicon Valley. Side note: I find it illuminating that one of the most popular social apps that birth social trends did not come from Silicon Valley, but China. I don't think Silicon Valley can drive social trends at all (anti-humanity types are too prevalent).

guzfip 6mo ago
Silicon Valley must be destroyed to save America. Gladly more are waking up to this. There’s been a surge on both the right and left in my state of people wanting to reject the place and it’s disgusting “culture”.
corky_buchek 6mo ago
> I believe it is in the best interest of the United States if the center of power shifts back from West Coast "tech bros" to the East coast. Yes, because Wall Street is a paragon of ethical corporate behavior.
- cucumber3732842 6mo ago
  The fact that they're at least honest about what they care about (money) makes them far simpler to deal with than these entities (both private and public) that spin complex webs of half truths about how they're making the world better by implementing 1984.
davisr 6mo ago
That power, today, is expressed through technology, and these overlords hold their control via proprietary software and anticompetitive business practices. To seize power back, you need to relinquish their shackles by using technology that is designed with user freedom in mind, not "lock-in", and support businesses constituted of that ethos.

ModernMech 6mo ago

They would read it and just say to themselves "Wow, how could anyone fall into that trap? Certainly I never would!"

seattle_spring 6mo ago

I'll never forget this spot on NPR where they interviewed a machine learning engineer working on AI videos. The engineer was purely focused on how cool the technology is, how real it looks, etc. The interviewer asked, "aren't you worried about this getting into the hands of the wrong people, and creating deepfakes for extortion and things like that?" The engineer paused for a few seconds, and then said, "gosh I never even considered that." She created this monster and all she could think about was how neat it was technologically.

npunt 6mo ago
Yeah engineering as a discipline tends to be pretty naïve to the consequences of what they build, and sociopaths take advantage of it. Norbert Wiener [1] observed this about the engineers working on nukes in the 1940s-1950s: “Push-button warfare... possible for a limited group of people to threaten the absolute destruction of millions, without any immediate risk to themselves.... Behind all this I sensed the desires of the gadgeteer to see the wheels go round.” [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norbert_Wiener https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norbert_Wiener
ryandrake 6mo ago
Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I was in university, we used to have at least one engineering ethics class in undergrad. Have they stopped those? It sure seems like it, given how many engineers are out there who only seem to care about how technically cool and interesting their projects are.
- pesus 6mo ago
  I took one back in 2018 or so, and I assume it's still a degree requirement. If most are like the one I took, however, very few people seriously engaged with the class, and it's just viewed as a filler class. It didn't help that the workload was a joke. I believe the entirety of our assignments were 5 single page "essay" responses to some ethical scenarios, and the professor seemed to hand out As just for writing enough. It probably took me less than 2 hours of total writing. I imagine most of the students these days are just having ChatGPT write it for them. We absolutely need to take ethics more seriously though, even if it involves adding more/more rigorous courses to the curriculum.

Aurornis 6mo ago

From what I've seen the focus on a few big companies can have a backwards effect on some people's sense of morals. I've heard a few people justify their work for unethical companies as "At least it's not as bad as what Facebook does". It can also have the opposite of the intended effect when it encourages beliefs that bad behavior is normalized in the industry. I've heard an executive try to drum up support for a program to sell customer data by saying that everyone does it, from Facebook to Google. When others explained that Facebook and Google didn't sell customer data, they didn't believe it. They had read so much about big companies collecting customer data to sell that they thought everyone did it and therefore it was okay.

geodel 6mo ago
Indeed. It would be difficult to make person understand something if their salary depends on not understanding it.
ineedasername 6mo ago
"When others explained that Facebook and Google didn't sell customer data, they didn't believe it" I'm not sure there's a significant meaningful difference between direct selling and what they actually do, which is to make it available to target and manipulate people with extreme granularity. This is a huge part of why a person may not want their data to be held much less purchased to begin with, meaning it's "doesn't sell your data... but does or facilitates all of the things you do not want a group, in buying it from them, able to do." It's a distinction without much practical difference. Also: They buy your data from other brokers who do sell it, vastly enriching the degree to which customers of their ad platforms can make use of the data you already know they have far, far beyond your ability to know their full capabilities and the profile they have on you. Again, it's not actually selling your data, but it's worth noting that when "they didn't believe it", that misconception was possibly helped along by Facebook or Google being on of the potential customers for that data either directly or via the proxy of a data broker whose largest customers are companies like that.
- Aunche 6mo ago
  Selling your data means that anyone can have access your data forever. On the other hand, anyone can turn off ad personalization and delete their data on Google and Facebook.

floren 6mo ago

The very first chapter was actually excellent in setting my relationship to the book going forward, because stuff like this twanged against my brain and made me think, "Oh, she just really wanted to be powerful and influential and chased whatever she thought would give her that" > [after surviving a shark attack] why did this happen to me? If I survived against the odds, surely there had to be a reason? [...] After becoming an attorney, I ended up in the foreign service because it seemed like a way to change the world, and I wanted an adventure. I ended up at the UN because I genuinely believed it was the seat of global power. The place you go when you want to change the world. > It seemed obvious that politics was going to happen on Facebook, and when it did, when it migrated to this enormous new gathering place, Facebook and the people who ran it would be at the center of everything. They’d be setting the rules for this global conversation. I was in awe of its ineffable potential. > The vastness of the information Facebook would be collecting was unprecedented. Data about everything. Data that was previously entirely private. Data on the citizens of every country. A historic amount of data and so incredibly valuable. Information is power. > After years of looking for things that would change the world, I thought I’d found the biggest one going. Like an evangelist, I saw Facebook’s power confirmed in every part of everyday life. Whatever Facebook decided to do—what it did with the voices that were gathering there—would change the course of human events. I was sure of it. > This is a revolution. > What do you do when you see a revolution is coming? I decide I will stop at nothing to be part of it. At the center of the action. Once you see it, you can’t sit on the sidelines. I’m desperate to be part of it. I can’t remember ever wanting anything more.

amanaplanacanal 6mo ago
She sounds horrifying.
- noisy_boy 6mo ago
  And exactly the type to be in power. Explains everything that is fucked up about our world.
- Baljhin 6mo ago
  Consider that she's one of 'the good guys'-- someone who self-reflected on her ambition, saw the 'evil' in hers and other's, called it out publicly, and assumedly regrets hers, and is trying to do better. Sadly, terrifyingly, for every one of her, there are hundreds who might also self-reflect - but >choose< to be comix-book villains.

kakacik 6mo ago

Everybody need to be a hero of their own story. Even concentration camp guards had this mental model, apart from outright sadists (I know I know, Godwin is cheap but it fits so well when talking about sociopathic traits and/or lack of morality when convenient).

tlobes 6mo ago

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” -Upton Sinclair

theturret 6mo ago

You’re probably right about the book either way, but I think the comparison has an obvious limitation. At best, Meta’s mission is “social connection.” Held up in an equally charitable light, a defense contractor is “protecting American interests.” The positive case is so much more stark that it’s probably easier to convince yourself of. But I also think that’s partly because it’s actually true. (I concede I work in defense and am biased.) There’s certainly a necessary debate to be had about whether these companies are doing the right things, whether they’re going about it the right way, and whether the United States’ actions are moral and legal. But it’s very hard to argue that national security itself isn’t necessary. Whereas you can much more easily argue that a social-media-based ad company has no reason to exist in the first place.

asdfman123 6mo ago

This quote immediately stood out: > Are you tracking Palantir’s descent into fascism? Their framing is wrong. The beliefs and internal politics of the people making the surveillance tools don't matter. The fact is they're making tools to assist government overreach, and anyone with any political awareness (or maybe more importantly here, objectivity) could have seen that. They're just the enablers.

red-iron-pine 6mo ago
lol what? "it's not that corporations could be evil, it's the gubermnt!" meanwhile large corporations literally bribe trump -- they're the ones calling the shots, and the government is just the organ
- asdfman123 6mo ago
  Nah, it's not like that. It's not defending them. I'm more saying they never DESCENDED into fascism -- their ideas about how things should go in the world don't really matter. They are merely enabling fascism, regardless of their attitudes towards politics or their work, and they should have known that from the beginning. They're literally saying "people are using the weapons we make to hurt people." No shit, what business did you think you were in?

Lerc 6mo ago

How do you determine if they are mentally convincing themselves they are the good guy, when in fact it is you who is the good guy. From either perspective, if the roles were reversed, wouldn't it look the same? Both parties thinking they are doing the right thing. There are a lot of legitimate criticisms out there, they seem to be vastly outnumbered by illegitimate criticisms, no matter what position you hold. It's easy to hold your opinion when you are inundated with a constant stream of invalid arguments that say little more than "I don't like the tribe you chose". Any valid argument is easily overlooked without a sense of guilt in that environment.

throw54321 6mo ago

People do anything for money

jaspervanderee 6mo ago

Confessions of an Economic Hitman is a book with a similar theme. A guy trained by NSA to be sent to poor countries, making deals through false projections with the goal to extract their natural resources.

UqWBcuFx6NV4r 6mo ago

I got very far into this book, but didn’t finish it, in large part because the author clearly needed to work through her problems a little more before publishing it. The biggest “I’m not ACTUALLY like them” complex ever.