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Googling for Sociopaths

105 points by mattyb 17y ago

tonystubblebine 17y ago
I've been having a thought recently that Google is Microsoft done right. Sure, they have massive influence. But I never find myself switching to a new Google product because I have to--I switch because they're better products.
- diego 17y ago
  That was the case with MS at the beginning as well. I switched from the Sinclair Spectrum to a PC with DOS because it was better, and it became even better over time. If you pay attention you will see that Google, just like MS, is making an effort to be better than its competitors in order to disrupt and dominate their markets. Where there are no competitors, Google is letting its products languish. If they end up a virtual monopoly for the main markets, they won't be much different than MS.
- sfk 17y ago
  I don't agree. Nowadays I'm practically forced to communicate with people using Gmail accounts, which means that my mail is scanned at Google against my will. This is not much different from being forced to communicate with people using Word documents.
  - slig 17y ago
    It's very different: you don't have to own a gmail account to send an email to a persons gmail account.
    - jff 17y ago
      You're right. His complaint, on the other hand, is that although you can use whatever "word processor" you want, you know that at the other end Microsoft will have full access when your colleague reads the document in Word. Substitute "word processor", Microsoft, and Word with email client, Google, and Gmail as appropriate.
tonystubblebine 17y ago
Also, I've always enjoyed this GapingVoid cartoon on sociopaths and the corporate hierarchy: http://gapingvoid.com/2004/06/27/company-hierarchy/ http://gapingvoid.com/2004/06/27/company-hierarchy/
- theorique 17y ago
  If you like that, you might also like http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-o...
aristus 17y ago
The implicit claim is that the people running Google are not sociopaths, yet he presents no evidence to support this claim. He attributes these upheavals to the "march of technology" and expects the reader to swallow this without objection. What exactly makes Eisner a "sociopath" and Brin & Page "normal decent people"? It's apparently that Google makes things people want and Disney does not. I'm not sure this holds up. Disney doesn't make desirable things?
- RyanMcGreal 17y ago
  Disney got its start by taking content out of the public domain, making it proprietary and selling it. Google got its start doing pretty much the opposite.
- NathanKP 17y ago
  Also the proof that Google is "good" is that they haven't banned their competitors from search results? That seems like a pretty weak argument to me. Perhaps Google is more ethical that some of other companies. At least they aren't like Microsoft, ripping off Plurk, but that doesn't make them "good".
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
- novum 17y ago
  Can you imagine the deafeningly loud outcry, wailing, and gnashing of teeth that would surely follow any attempt by Google to selectively censor search results for competitors or their products? I think this is one of those times when "don't be evil" is conveniently the same thing as "build the best (or most profitable) search engine". That Google is not censoring search results says nothing of whether they're "good" or "evil"; it just seems like a smart business move.
- drats 17y ago
  "The thing that’s hard for the sociopaths to get their head around is that this isn’t because one of their rivals has outsmarted them — it’s just the march of technology. " I don't get this quote. It's quite clear Brin and Page did outsmart them. Murdoch's latest rantings clearly show he doesn't understand we live in a world of algorithms now and just having a team of content producers has nothing on having a team of programmers, a host of servers and the capacity to find people the content they need in the vast expanse of the Internet/long tail. Newspapers are second best at almost everything now, world news (vs. the top blogs or state-funded like BBC), local news (vs. long tail of blogs), dating (vs. numerous sites, craigslist), classifieds (vs. ebay, craigslist), book reviews/sales (vs. amazon), reviews (vs. tons of sites), advertising (vs. algorithmically placed ads). A bundle of second bests, the newspaper, was the best when it was the only thing you could buy. It was a very effective delivery mechanism that far exceeded trying to subscribe to multiple newsletters/pamphlets/zines to cover each base. But tabbed browsing (or even sequential browsing untabbed) just slaughters that delivery mechanism in specialization/choice, cost and cost of delivery, time of delivery and place of delivery. Murdoch will be able to charge for some financial news, perhaps even some political news for a while, he will be able to put some sports he gets the exclusive rights to on mobile pay-per-view (banning twittering sportsmen/women and banning video/enforcing "IP rights" at sports events). But in the end he can't beat the fact that a newspaper or a TV station is just a bundle of second bests and isn't customized. He probably knows this deep down and is just looking to "hide the decline" until he retires (which has to be in the next 10 years given how old he is) so that his legacy is intact. But my will he be biting his fingernails in retirement. And frankly, this is how it should be in any somewhat capitalist system. I don't want to hear a journalist expound on economic matters when they don't have a degree in economics, only in journalism (or no degree at all). I can just go onto one of the many economic blogs, quite a few run by professors of economics. Ditto political news. Ditto tech news on reddit, HN or slashdot where there are multiple commentators who often have graduate degrees in the subject matter and certainly many links posted to peer reviewed articles or at least Wikipedia. So often tech journalism is just the recycling of press releases, or science journalism pops up with, yet again, a correlation/causation fallacy with all of the interesting details cropped out for a mass audience. I am glad journalism is dying, the bailouts were insane enough, but there was actually a stage where some journalists tried to float the idea of bailouts for all the big newspapers and media groups. Absolutely disgusting. Hopefully they will never get any more "IP" rules passed or sabotage net neutrality and the world of information plenty that we happy few live in can be expanded to the rest of the population on the planet (half of whom have yet to make a phonecall, which is humbling when you see the resources at our fingertips).
xinsight 17y ago
A nice summary of why Google is different. How refreshing for a company to ask themselves, "How can we create more value?" instead of scheming how to extract more value from the existing market.
ryanwaggoner 17y ago
Google gets a lot of criticism (often deserved), but it’s worth taking a moment to think of all the things they haven’t done. If Microsoft had Google’s market share in search, is there any doubt that they’d be systematically demoting or even banning their competitors in the search results? Demoting someone in Google is a virtual death sentence, and yet not only has Google ever been accused of using this vast power, the idea itself is almost unimaginable. Oh please. This is so weak that it's laughable. First, Google hasn't always had this much market share in search and the other big search providers (to my knowledge) didn't ban their competitors. Microsoft didn't ban other office suite products from working on Windows. They didn't ban other browsers. Yeah, IE might have been more tightly integrated, but please explain how this is different from the incestuous pile of Google products that promote Google search at every turn? Instead of glossing over how Google gets some criticism and then beating your anti-Microsoft strawman, maybe we should take a look at some of the questionable things Google has done (China). It'd be nice if I was wrong, but in my opinion, Google isn't some special orgy of love and kindness towards humankind. It's a multi-billion dollar company with millions of shareholders and it'll do whatever it thinks is best for turning a profit. If that happens to be stuff that isn't "evil", so much the better. If not (China), so be it. Let's revisit when Google is as old as Microsoft or Disney or News Corp. is now and see how it all turned out. I'm betting the only difference is that now articles like this will make Google out to be the big bad corporation filled with sociopaths trying to destroy the world. EDIT: added a closing thought
- mynameishere 17y ago
  other big search providers (to my knowledge) didn't ban their competitors Yahoo had links to Altavista, lycos, google, etc, at the bottom of its search results years ago. I'm not sure where he's coming from. If the internet was a book, the text would be companies like Disney and the index would be google. It would seem strange that the author would be paid less and be held in less esteem than the guy who compiled the index.
  - ryanwaggoner 17y ago
    Agreed. I don't really understand people's mindless adulation of Google, which is at heart an advertising company. I find Google tremendously useful and I admire them as a business, but the reality is that we've swapped one barrier to entry (publishing, tv, cable, etc) for another (Google). As the author pointed out, if you get yanked from Google, you're dead. Is this really a better situation than what we had before? Instead of power being consolidated in a handful of powerful companies, it's now consolidated into one very young and very unproven company whose sole motivation in life appears to be selling ads against other people's original content. Terrific. Of course the vanguard of the media industry doesn't like Google. They've spent billions creating content and Google's entire business model is to lower the value of that content to free so they can sell more ads against it. And we cheer Google on because we want shit for free, meanwhile complaining about how Demand Media and Aol and TechCrunch are pumping out incredible quantities of shitty content to get more ad views. The middle of media is dying, and it's partly thanks to Google. You can go niche / high quality and produce artisanal content that small groups are willing to pay for, or you can mass produce piles of shit and make pennies at scale. But I'm not sure you can produce good content for a large audience anymore. /rant To be clear, I'm not really blaming Google, or Demand or anyone. This is what the market wants, and I'm not sure it's evil to give it to them. If they hadn't done it, someone else would have. My point is just that Google isn't some altruistic genie.
tarkin2 17y ago
This is a little too sycophantic. Both Google and other firms want their products to succeed, which means an increase in market share, or an "Alexander the great" share of the market, if you will. Both Google and other firms believe they are bringing value to the market. It's hard to believe Rupert Murdoch, for example, believes his companies bring nothing of value. You may not like what he produces, but it's hard to accept he doesn't in some way, and his customers certainly do. It's pleasing to believe Google is full of salt o' the earth types out to make the world a better place, and Newscorp, for example, and its like is full of evil men and women--but this is a picture far too black and white to be taken seriously. Essentially assuming two giant companies are so different to the extent that one wishes to make people lives happier, and has the success of the business as a second priority, and the other is inversed seems very fantastical, and without evidence.
potatolicious 17y ago
Alarmist and self-congratulatory tripe to the max. And without much backup to boot. Alarmist: Big corporations are run by sociopaths! What this means is never really defined (are we using the lay or clinical definition of sociopathy? If lay, then what definition?), but more tossed about as a straw man for why big companies are Bad(tm). Self-congratulatory: Big companies are Bad(tm), but us feisty startups are so awesome. We're a force of good in this world! Us technical folk sure are more moral and just plain better than them durned "sociopaths"! I find the constant overuse (and lack of definition or apparent understanding) of the word "sociopath" to be particularly stomach-churning, and it reads of alarmist hate-scribe not much unlike the racist, sexist, and other reprehensible things extremists tend to write about "them" (where "them" is a convenient, sometimes made up, demographic to blame). The consistent attempt to dehumanize these "sociopaths" (again, never defined) is really kind of sickening.
mattmaroon 17y ago
Ah good old fashioned tech-industry elitism. Our guys are brilliant engineers changing the world for the better. Everyone in every other industry is a mere sociopath exploiting customers for their own selfish gains.
- camccann 17y ago
  Well, technically, "brilliant engineer changing the world for the better" and "sociopath exploiting customers" aren't actually mutually exclusive categories...
gojomo 17y ago
Demoting someone in Google is a virtual death sentence, and yet not only has Google ever been accused of using this vast power, the idea itself is almost unimaginable. A total ban of an obvious competitor would clearly raise so much controversy that it is "almost unimaginable", I agree. But Google's smaller-scale bans and reorderings, always for ostensibly legitimate purposes, have sometimes caused accusations about Google's real goals by the webmasters affected. That's not to say their paranoia is correct -- but "[n]ever been accused" and "unimaginable" is a bit strong given the real history. And they are 'demoting' other content incrementally all the time -- whenever they promote their own content in the first few vertical positions. Tried any health-related search on Google recently? As of a couple months ago, 'Google Health', with an image, is almost always the top hit. Do non-YouTube videos get as prominent placement as YouTube videos?
- SwellJoe 17y ago
  I've never once seen a website owner complaining about Google that wasn't operating an obvious (to me) spam, or otherwise nefarious, site of some sort. I've even seen a few HN users commenting on such Google evils, and when I looked at the "innocent" site they were talking about, it was inarguably blog spam, content spam, used black hat SEO techniques, or some other nasty type of thing that provided no or negative value for users, and was carefully engineered to maximize ad or referral revenue at the expense of all else. I'm sure somewhere, sometime, some actually innocent website has moved downward in the search rankings, but I've never once seen a complaint about it that was legitimate (it's probably just lost in the noise of all the black hats that complain loudest, since I've never looked for innocent site owners with stories to tell...I just come upon the assholes who scream loudest).
  - tptacek 17y ago
    Patrick McKenzie complains about Google here with some regularity, and it's not all just about customer service (lack of transparency another one).
sdrinf 17y ago
A referral upsale channel for Amazon's affiliate sales program -let's count them tricks of trade: misleading title (checked), inflammatory content (checked) targeted at a controversial topic (traditional pattern-matching makes people want to see google as the enemy by now); claims without proof, or evidence to back it up (checked), with a small hint of techno-superiority, that makes the target audience feel good (increased clickthrough&checkout of the book: checked). Deterministic geek-buzzing about content (triggering the network-reading effect): checked. Oh, yes, someone's going to have a marry christmas.
pwnstigator 17y ago
Technically speaking, most corporate leaders are psychopaths, not sociopaths. A sociopath has conscience, empathy, and ethics but his differ radically from those of mainstream society. For example, a gang member who'll kill someone in a rival gang-- breaking the law in most societies-- but would take a bullet to save his mother, is a sociopath-- not a psychopath. Psychopaths are selfish and devoid of any conscience or empathy. However, they're very manipulative and often skilled at playing within society's rules, which sociopaths rarely do (because they have so much contempt for society). Dr. House might be considered a very mild sociopath, but he's not a psychopath: he's never cruel, and he has very strong ethics, but absolutely no regard for the ethical principles society expects him to hold. The difference is that sociopaths reject society's superego and conscience but still have their own. Psychopaths have none. So the corporate barons and media moguls are correctly typed as psychopaths, not sociopaths. Otherwise, good article.
- hnhg 17y ago
  Doesn't this depend on where your definition is taken from? I remember reading in something reputable (or it might have been a BBC Radio documentary) that at one time they were synonyms for the same thing, but that one was used in the USA and other was used elsewhere. This has to be taken with a pinch of salt as my memory appears to be very vague on this. I'm sure though that historically they have been used to describe the same condition and that differences in their usage have only appeared recently.
  - dasil003 17y ago
    According to this: http://www.mental-health-matters.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=94 http://www.mental-health-matters.com/index.php?option=com_co... Psychopath is not a technical term.
    - warfangle 17y ago
      Addendum: http://allpsych.com/disorders/personality/antisocial.html http://allpsych.com/disorders/personality/antisocial.html (Actual DSM-IV reference)
defen 17y ago
Wherein Aaron Swartz further confirms his status as a petty intellectual tyrant, pathologically obsessed with setting up nonexistent us-vs-them, good-vs-evil dichotomies.
- ajju 17y ago
  Uh..I don't agree fully with what he is saying here but 'tyrant'? When did Aaron acquire dictatorial powers?
ericb 17y ago
I was hoping this article would be a list of keywords search terms, like people use to find webcams.
crucini 17y ago
I'm afraid Aaronsw has gone too far. But there is an element of truth here. The men who created the media empires were incredibly aggressive. Many of their business practices were rooted in organized crime. For instance, Lew Wasserman, creator of MCA and Universal. He inspired terror throughout Los Angeles. No, he was not going to have you killed (despite one minor flirtation with the real mafia) but he could kill your career or your company. Wasserman was every bit a latter-day Genghis Khan. And I think it's true that capitalism directed his energies into making movies rather than building a mountain of skulls. There is an undeniable style difference between MCA/Wasserman and Google/Schmidt.
pg 17y ago
A lot of these comments are pretty harsh, but there is truth in what he says. There is a difference between Google and most preceding big companies. Google wins more by doing good work and less by deals and scheming that most big companies have in the past. When they crush competitors, they usually don't do it by deliberately trying to crush them, but by doing very good work, and crushing them as a matter of course. Google wins the way better scientists do. I don't think they're simply benevolent. I think what they've discovered is that focusing on doing good work actually makes you more dangerous.
ckuehne 17y ago
The first paragraph says it all: capitalism is a good system for handling sociopaths. After all we know, it is probably the best. In every other system known to mankind psychopath cause incredibly more damage. Think Soviet Russia, North Korea, the Roman Empire, Nazy Germany, Cold War Romania, ... The irony: Aaron Swartz probably had some idealistic system in mind when he wrote it (correct me if I'm wrong or if I am erecting a straw man), that would handle everything better if only the "right" people were in charge. The available data speaks otherwise. "Not to be a socialist at twenty is proof of want of heart; to be one at thirty is proof of want of head." Georges Clemencea
neilk 17y ago
I think Aaron misses the point about sociopaths. Individual behavior has nothing to do with corporate behavior. Larry and Sergey's personal niceness or lack thereof is irrelevant. Most people who work for giant tech corporations aren't sociopaths -- far from it. The top American tech firms are filled with people that are almost painfully conscientious, in an upper-middle-class way. Don't even think about cancelling the recycling program or face a general uprising at the next assembly. This is true whether you work for Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Apple, Oracle, or whatever. I don't know the telecom or media industry, but I bet it's about the same there. The sociopath angle makes sense to describe the behavior of the corporation itself. (viz. "The Corporation" film). Even if there's an opportunity you have qualms about (subprime mortgages, expanding into China), the shareholders will insist you get into that market as long as competitors are making money. Google's corporate behavior is pretty "evil". To their competitors. And sometimes even their partners. Consider how they are bootstrapping off TeleAtlas' mapping data product to basically make that entire industry obsolete, once people are carrying around iPhones that constantly map everything. But as long as they are "evil" to competitors in the service of making a better product, they are "good" for everyone else. The traditional media monopolies stopped really competing a generation ago, and after the consolidation of the 80s and 90s it's all been about denying entry to competitors, and controlling access to markets. That's what makes them "evil". Google isn't in any position where they can do that yet, except maybe online advertising (sort of). So for the most part Google is focused on breaking open markets. That might change if they ever start "owning" a consumer, like say with a Chrome-powered netbook. Just you wait.
jdale27 17y ago
I've been reading aaronsw's blog for years, and it surprises me how uniformly antagonistic the comments are -- both on the blog itself, and on HN and reddit -- compared to other blogs. He's either an incredibly skilled troll, or he's really on to something.
njharman 17y ago
The view of "major executives" (and Alexander for that matter) in the first paragraph is so ludicrously naive and shallow that I'm forced to believe anything else author has to say is utter waste of my time.
robak 17y ago
Google founders are sociopaths cooperating with censorship effors of any government - including Chinese - that will ask them for that. They just have cool image, that's all. Between surfing and travelling these dudes like talking about "if there's something you need to hide, probably you shouldn't be doing it in the first place"... what is it with this naivete in the American society?
cpr 17y ago
I missed the point in the script where Aaron went from Google-paranoid (witness his online novella) to Google-booster. Very odd.

105 points by mattyb 17y ago

I've been having a thought recently that Google is Microsoft done right. Sure, they have massive influence. But I never find myself switching to a new Google product because I have to--I switch because they're better products.

diego 17y ago
That was the case with MS at the beginning as well. I switched from the Sinclair Spectrum to a PC with DOS because it was better, and it became even better over time. If you pay attention you will see that Google, just like MS, is making an effort to be better than its competitors in order to disrupt and dominate their markets. Where there are no competitors, Google is letting its products languish. If they end up a virtual monopoly for the main markets, they won't be much different than MS.
sfk 17y ago
I don't agree. Nowadays I'm practically forced to communicate with people using Gmail accounts, which means that my mail is scanned at Google against my will. This is not much different from being forced to communicate with people using Word documents.
- slig 17y ago
  It's very different: you don't have to own a gmail account to send an email to a persons gmail account.
  - jff 17y ago
    You're right. His complaint, on the other hand, is that although you can use whatever "word processor" you want, you know that at the other end Microsoft will have full access when your colleague reads the document in Word. Substitute "word processor", Microsoft, and Word with email client, Google, and Gmail as appropriate.

tonystubblebine 17y ago

Also, I've always enjoyed this GapingVoid cartoon on sociopaths and the corporate hierarchy: http://gapingvoid.com/2004/06/27/company-hierarchy/ http://gapingvoid.com/2004/06/27/company-hierarchy/

theorique 17y ago
If you like that, you might also like http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-o...

aristus 17y ago

The implicit claim is that the people running Google are not sociopaths, yet he presents no evidence to support this claim. He attributes these upheavals to the "march of technology" and expects the reader to swallow this without objection. What exactly makes Eisner a "sociopath" and Brin & Page "normal decent people"? It's apparently that Google makes things people want and Disney does not. I'm not sure this holds up. Disney doesn't make desirable things?

RyanMcGreal 17y ago
Disney got its start by taking content out of the public domain, making it proprietary and selling it. Google got its start doing pretty much the opposite.
NathanKP 17y ago
Also the proof that Google is "good" is that they haven't banned their competitors from search results? That seems like a pretty weak argument to me. Perhaps Google is more ethical that some of other companies. At least they aren't like Microsoft, ripping off Plurk, but that doesn't make them "good".
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
novum 17y ago
Can you imagine the deafeningly loud outcry, wailing, and gnashing of teeth that would surely follow any attempt by Google to selectively censor search results for competitors or their products? I think this is one of those times when "don't be evil" is conveniently the same thing as "build the best (or most profitable) search engine". That Google is not censoring search results says nothing of whether they're "good" or "evil"; it just seems like a smart business move.
drats 17y ago
"The thing that’s hard for the sociopaths to get their head around is that this isn’t because one of their rivals has outsmarted them — it’s just the march of technology. " I don't get this quote. It's quite clear Brin and Page did outsmart them. Murdoch's latest rantings clearly show he doesn't understand we live in a world of algorithms now and just having a team of content producers has nothing on having a team of programmers, a host of servers and the capacity to find people the content they need in the vast expanse of the Internet/long tail. Newspapers are second best at almost everything now, world news (vs. the top blogs or state-funded like BBC), local news (vs. long tail of blogs), dating (vs. numerous sites, craigslist), classifieds (vs. ebay, craigslist), book reviews/sales (vs. amazon), reviews (vs. tons of sites), advertising (vs. algorithmically placed ads). A bundle of second bests, the newspaper, was the best when it was the only thing you could buy. It was a very effective delivery mechanism that far exceeded trying to subscribe to multiple newsletters/pamphlets/zines to cover each base. But tabbed browsing (or even sequential browsing untabbed) just slaughters that delivery mechanism in specialization/choice, cost and cost of delivery, time of delivery and place of delivery. Murdoch will be able to charge for some financial news, perhaps even some political news for a while, he will be able to put some sports he gets the exclusive rights to on mobile pay-per-view (banning twittering sportsmen/women and banning video/enforcing "IP rights" at sports events). But in the end he can't beat the fact that a newspaper or a TV station is just a bundle of second bests and isn't customized. He probably knows this deep down and is just looking to "hide the decline" until he retires (which has to be in the next 10 years given how old he is) so that his legacy is intact. But my will he be biting his fingernails in retirement. And frankly, this is how it should be in any somewhat capitalist system. I don't want to hear a journalist expound on economic matters when they don't have a degree in economics, only in journalism (or no degree at all). I can just go onto one of the many economic blogs, quite a few run by professors of economics. Ditto political news. Ditto tech news on reddit, HN or slashdot where there are multiple commentators who often have graduate degrees in the subject matter and certainly many links posted to peer reviewed articles or at least Wikipedia. So often tech journalism is just the recycling of press releases, or science journalism pops up with, yet again, a correlation/causation fallacy with all of the interesting details cropped out for a mass audience. I am glad journalism is dying, the bailouts were insane enough, but there was actually a stage where some journalists tried to float the idea of bailouts for all the big newspapers and media groups. Absolutely disgusting. Hopefully they will never get any more "IP" rules passed or sabotage net neutrality and the world of information plenty that we happy few live in can be expanded to the rest of the population on the planet (half of whom have yet to make a phonecall, which is humbling when you see the resources at our fingertips).

xinsight 17y ago

A nice summary of why Google is different. How refreshing for a company to ask themselves, "How can we create more value?" instead of scheming how to extract more value from the existing market.

ryanwaggoner 17y ago

Google gets a lot of criticism (often deserved), but it’s worth taking a moment to think of all the things they haven’t done. If Microsoft had Google’s market share in search, is there any doubt that they’d be systematically demoting or even banning their competitors in the search results? Demoting someone in Google is a virtual death sentence, and yet not only has Google ever been accused of using this vast power, the idea itself is almost unimaginable. Oh please. This is so weak that it's laughable. First, Google hasn't always had this much market share in search and the other big search providers (to my knowledge) didn't ban their competitors. Microsoft didn't ban other office suite products from working on Windows. They didn't ban other browsers. Yeah, IE might have been more tightly integrated, but please explain how this is different from the incestuous pile of Google products that promote Google search at every turn? Instead of glossing over how Google gets some criticism and then beating your anti-Microsoft strawman, maybe we should take a look at some of the questionable things Google has done (China). It'd be nice if I was wrong, but in my opinion, Google isn't some special orgy of love and kindness towards humankind. It's a multi-billion dollar company with millions of shareholders and it'll do whatever it thinks is best for turning a profit. If that happens to be stuff that isn't "evil", so much the better. If not (China), so be it. Let's revisit when Google is as old as Microsoft or Disney or News Corp. is now and see how it all turned out. I'm betting the only difference is that now articles like this will make Google out to be the big bad corporation filled with sociopaths trying to destroy the world. EDIT: added a closing thought

mynameishere 17y ago
other big search providers (to my knowledge) didn't ban their competitors Yahoo had links to Altavista, lycos, google, etc, at the bottom of its search results years ago. I'm not sure where he's coming from. If the internet was a book, the text would be companies like Disney and the index would be google. It would seem strange that the author would be paid less and be held in less esteem than the guy who compiled the index.
- ryanwaggoner 17y ago
  Agreed. I don't really understand people's mindless adulation of Google, which is at heart an advertising company. I find Google tremendously useful and I admire them as a business, but the reality is that we've swapped one barrier to entry (publishing, tv, cable, etc) for another (Google). As the author pointed out, if you get yanked from Google, you're dead. Is this really a better situation than what we had before? Instead of power being consolidated in a handful of powerful companies, it's now consolidated into one very young and very unproven company whose sole motivation in life appears to be selling ads against other people's original content. Terrific. Of course the vanguard of the media industry doesn't like Google. They've spent billions creating content and Google's entire business model is to lower the value of that content to free so they can sell more ads against it. And we cheer Google on because we want shit for free, meanwhile complaining about how Demand Media and Aol and TechCrunch are pumping out incredible quantities of shitty content to get more ad views. The middle of media is dying, and it's partly thanks to Google. You can go niche / high quality and produce artisanal content that small groups are willing to pay for, or you can mass produce piles of shit and make pennies at scale. But I'm not sure you can produce good content for a large audience anymore. /rant To be clear, I'm not really blaming Google, or Demand or anyone. This is what the market wants, and I'm not sure it's evil to give it to them. If they hadn't done it, someone else would have. My point is just that Google isn't some altruistic genie.

tarkin2 17y ago

This is a little too sycophantic. Both Google and other firms want their products to succeed, which means an increase in market share, or an "Alexander the great" share of the market, if you will. Both Google and other firms believe they are bringing value to the market. It's hard to believe Rupert Murdoch, for example, believes his companies bring nothing of value. You may not like what he produces, but it's hard to accept he doesn't in some way, and his customers certainly do. It's pleasing to believe Google is full of salt o' the earth types out to make the world a better place, and Newscorp, for example, and its like is full of evil men and women--but this is a picture far too black and white to be taken seriously. Essentially assuming two giant companies are so different to the extent that one wishes to make people lives happier, and has the success of the business as a second priority, and the other is inversed seems very fantastical, and without evidence.

potatolicious 17y ago

Alarmist and self-congratulatory tripe to the max. And without much backup to boot. Alarmist: Big corporations are run by sociopaths! What this means is never really defined (are we using the lay or clinical definition of sociopathy? If lay, then what definition?), but more tossed about as a straw man for why big companies are Bad(tm). Self-congratulatory: Big companies are Bad(tm), but us feisty startups are so awesome. We're a force of good in this world! Us technical folk sure are more moral and just plain better than them durned "sociopaths"! I find the constant overuse (and lack of definition or apparent understanding) of the word "sociopath" to be particularly stomach-churning, and it reads of alarmist hate-scribe not much unlike the racist, sexist, and other reprehensible things extremists tend to write about "them" (where "them" is a convenient, sometimes made up, demographic to blame). The consistent attempt to dehumanize these "sociopaths" (again, never defined) is really kind of sickening.

mattmaroon 17y ago

Ah good old fashioned tech-industry elitism. Our guys are brilliant engineers changing the world for the better. Everyone in every other industry is a mere sociopath exploiting customers for their own selfish gains.

camccann 17y ago
Well, technically, "brilliant engineer changing the world for the better" and "sociopath exploiting customers" aren't actually mutually exclusive categories...

gojomo 17y ago

Demoting someone in Google is a virtual death sentence, and yet not only has Google ever been accused of using this vast power, the idea itself is almost unimaginable. A total ban of an obvious competitor would clearly raise so much controversy that it is "almost unimaginable", I agree. But Google's smaller-scale bans and reorderings, always for ostensibly legitimate purposes, have sometimes caused accusations about Google's real goals by the webmasters affected. That's not to say their paranoia is correct -- but "[n]ever been accused" and "unimaginable" is a bit strong given the real history. And they are 'demoting' other content incrementally all the time -- whenever they promote their own content in the first few vertical positions. Tried any health-related search on Google recently? As of a couple months ago, 'Google Health', with an image, is almost always the top hit. Do non-YouTube videos get as prominent placement as YouTube videos?

SwellJoe 17y ago
I've never once seen a website owner complaining about Google that wasn't operating an obvious (to me) spam, or otherwise nefarious, site of some sort. I've even seen a few HN users commenting on such Google evils, and when I looked at the "innocent" site they were talking about, it was inarguably blog spam, content spam, used black hat SEO techniques, or some other nasty type of thing that provided no or negative value for users, and was carefully engineered to maximize ad or referral revenue at the expense of all else. I'm sure somewhere, sometime, some actually innocent website has moved downward in the search rankings, but I've never once seen a complaint about it that was legitimate (it's probably just lost in the noise of all the black hats that complain loudest, since I've never looked for innocent site owners with stories to tell...I just come upon the assholes who scream loudest).
- tptacek 17y ago
  Patrick McKenzie complains about Google here with some regularity, and it's not all just about customer service (lack of transparency another one).

sdrinf 17y ago

A referral upsale channel for Amazon's affiliate sales program -let's count them tricks of trade: misleading title (checked), inflammatory content (checked) targeted at a controversial topic (traditional pattern-matching makes people want to see google as the enemy by now); claims without proof, or evidence to back it up (checked), with a small hint of techno-superiority, that makes the target audience feel good (increased clickthrough&checkout of the book: checked). Deterministic geek-buzzing about content (triggering the network-reading effect): checked. Oh, yes, someone's going to have a marry christmas.

pwnstigator 17y ago

Technically speaking, most corporate leaders are psychopaths, not sociopaths. A sociopath has conscience, empathy, and ethics but his differ radically from those of mainstream society. For example, a gang member who'll kill someone in a rival gang-- breaking the law in most societies-- but would take a bullet to save his mother, is a sociopath-- not a psychopath. Psychopaths are selfish and devoid of any conscience or empathy. However, they're very manipulative and often skilled at playing within society's rules, which sociopaths rarely do (because they have so much contempt for society). Dr. House might be considered a very mild sociopath, but he's not a psychopath: he's never cruel, and he has very strong ethics, but absolutely no regard for the ethical principles society expects him to hold. The difference is that sociopaths reject society's superego and conscience but still have their own. Psychopaths have none. So the corporate barons and media moguls are correctly typed as psychopaths, not sociopaths. Otherwise, good article.

hnhg 17y ago
Doesn't this depend on where your definition is taken from? I remember reading in something reputable (or it might have been a BBC Radio documentary) that at one time they were synonyms for the same thing, but that one was used in the USA and other was used elsewhere. This has to be taken with a pinch of salt as my memory appears to be very vague on this. I'm sure though that historically they have been used to describe the same condition and that differences in their usage have only appeared recently.
- dasil003 17y ago
  According to this: http://www.mental-health-matters.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=94 http://www.mental-health-matters.com/index.php?option=com_co... Psychopath is not a technical term.
  - warfangle 17y ago
    Addendum: http://allpsych.com/disorders/personality/antisocial.html http://allpsych.com/disorders/personality/antisocial.html (Actual DSM-IV reference)

defen 17y ago

Wherein Aaron Swartz further confirms his status as a petty intellectual tyrant, pathologically obsessed with setting up nonexistent us-vs-them, good-vs-evil dichotomies.

ajju 17y ago
Uh..I don't agree fully with what he is saying here but 'tyrant'? When did Aaron acquire dictatorial powers?

ericb 17y ago

I was hoping this article would be a list of keywords search terms, like people use to find webcams.

crucini 17y ago

I'm afraid Aaronsw has gone too far. But there is an element of truth here. The men who created the media empires were incredibly aggressive. Many of their business practices were rooted in organized crime. For instance, Lew Wasserman, creator of MCA and Universal. He inspired terror throughout Los Angeles. No, he was not going to have you killed (despite one minor flirtation with the real mafia) but he could kill your career or your company. Wasserman was every bit a latter-day Genghis Khan. And I think it's true that capitalism directed his energies into making movies rather than building a mountain of skulls. There is an undeniable style difference between MCA/Wasserman and Google/Schmidt.

pg 17y ago

A lot of these comments are pretty harsh, but there is truth in what he says. There is a difference between Google and most preceding big companies. Google wins more by doing good work and less by deals and scheming that most big companies have in the past. When they crush competitors, they usually don't do it by deliberately trying to crush them, but by doing very good work, and crushing them as a matter of course. Google wins the way better scientists do. I don't think they're simply benevolent. I think what they've discovered is that focusing on doing good work actually makes you more dangerous.

ckuehne 17y ago

The first paragraph says it all: capitalism is a good system for handling sociopaths. After all we know, it is probably the best. In every other system known to mankind psychopath cause incredibly more damage. Think Soviet Russia, North Korea, the Roman Empire, Nazy Germany, Cold War Romania, ... The irony: Aaron Swartz probably had some idealistic system in mind when he wrote it (correct me if I'm wrong or if I am erecting a straw man), that would handle everything better if only the "right" people were in charge. The available data speaks otherwise. "Not to be a socialist at twenty is proof of want of heart; to be one at thirty is proof of want of head." Georges Clemencea

neilk 17y ago

I think Aaron misses the point about sociopaths. Individual behavior has nothing to do with corporate behavior. Larry and Sergey's personal niceness or lack thereof is irrelevant. Most people who work for giant tech corporations aren't sociopaths -- far from it. The top American tech firms are filled with people that are almost painfully conscientious, in an upper-middle-class way. Don't even think about cancelling the recycling program or face a general uprising at the next assembly. This is true whether you work for Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Apple, Oracle, or whatever. I don't know the telecom or media industry, but I bet it's about the same there. The sociopath angle makes sense to describe the behavior of the corporation itself. (viz. "The Corporation" film). Even if there's an opportunity you have qualms about (subprime mortgages, expanding into China), the shareholders will insist you get into that market as long as competitors are making money. Google's corporate behavior is pretty "evil". To their competitors. And sometimes even their partners. Consider how they are bootstrapping off TeleAtlas' mapping data product to basically make that entire industry obsolete, once people are carrying around iPhones that constantly map everything. But as long as they are "evil" to competitors in the service of making a better product, they are "good" for everyone else. The traditional media monopolies stopped really competing a generation ago, and after the consolidation of the 80s and 90s it's all been about denying entry to competitors, and controlling access to markets. That's what makes them "evil". Google isn't in any position where they can do that yet, except maybe online advertising (sort of). So for the most part Google is focused on breaking open markets. That might change if they ever start "owning" a consumer, like say with a Chrome-powered netbook. Just you wait.

jdale27 17y ago

I've been reading aaronsw's blog for years, and it surprises me how uniformly antagonistic the comments are -- both on the blog itself, and on HN and reddit -- compared to other blogs. He's either an incredibly skilled troll, or he's really on to something.

njharman 17y ago

The view of "major executives" (and Alexander for that matter) in the first paragraph is so ludicrously naive and shallow that I'm forced to believe anything else author has to say is utter waste of my time.

robak 17y ago

Google founders are sociopaths cooperating with censorship effors of any government - including Chinese - that will ask them for that. They just have cool image, that's all. Between surfing and travelling these dudes like talking about "if there's something you need to hide, probably you shouldn't be doing it in the first place"... what is it with this naivete in the American society?

cpr 17y ago

I missed the point in the script where Aaron went from Google-paranoid (witness his online novella) to Google-booster. Very odd.