Just look at them!
They don't wear suits, they wear t-shirts with corporate logos - completely different. They're relaxed and chill and they take Soylent because they like it not because their corporate non-corporate overlords demand the time something resembling lunch would take.
They celebrate losing money! Who else does that (other than activist investors who will intentionally restructure a company to bankrupt it)?
They're not greedy, they just want to be fairly compensated with life-changing amounts of equity. That's just the value they bring.
They're anti-capitalism man! They just voted in favour of more taxes so that they don't have to see as many homeless while they wait for the company bus to take them from their company-issued container home to the company campus. They don't live to work like those Wall Street drones.
They're not cocaine-infused Wall Street Dude Bros! They're micro-dosing LSD and Adderall because they're performance hacking - can't you see the difference?
It's totally not like Wall Street. Have you not seen the map? It's California man. West coast is the best coast!
1000x yes. This is exactly what happened.
An entire generation of impressionable youngsters, essentially brainwashed into believing to the depths of their soul that Silicon Valley is a utopian meritocracy, composed solely of founders out there saving the world by exploiting zero day vulnerabilities in the individual/social/collective/national psyche.
Like a burning-man-gone wrong style acid trip, where everything starts out peachy and Friendly and then somehow, imperceptibly, so slowly that you never even saw it coming until it was far too late, the place for your friends turns into the circus, like LinkedIn but even more shameless self promotion and rampant fakery, and one day you wake and realize to your horror that real people’s lives are being destroyed due to this tone-deaf technology juggernaut. Shifts in global politics. Bullying. Teen suicides. Cognitive bias amplified by the collective intelligence of some of the greatest and most misguided minds of our generation, all united behind their leader’s vision of a world of programmable social interactions, backed by an absolutely ruthless win at all costs mentality.
The war on reality has begun, people. It’s actually been going on for the last 14 years, but the masses are finally starting to pick up on it.
Facebook employees: it’s time to pick a side and engage in some public collective action like your frenemies at Google. The #techlash is upon us. Ethics is coming back into fashion. Take a stand. Not only will it help save the world, for real this time, it will look good on a resume.
When individuals get into positions of unaccountable power and have access to infinite resources they don't do as great a job as we think they can.
In politics, military...even science, the arts and entertainment again and again we are seeing we overestimate what people at the top of the food chain can do.
With speed and scale technology produces larger and larger interconnected networks that can be exploited.
Our traditional power hierarchies that get propped up to make this exploitation efficient are highly efficient only during the growth phase.
You really hit me right there, I've genuinely considered things like microdosing and nootropics in technology, but derided the old fashioned version of the same thing happening in business spaces as if taking drugs to get more work done is somehow better if the drugs are more trendy.
I need to rethink.
Assembling a set of false dichotomies (capitalism vs taxes), stereotypes, over-generalizations, and outright fabrications (company-issued container homes) into an extended non-sequitir and caricature proves nothing, other than your non-constructive intent.
But this much I'll give you: it's easy to take all your rage and craft it into a diatribe targeted at a scapegoat.
> they don't have to see as many homeless
Would you want to have people suffering through homelessness in the place you live? There are only a few options for dealing with it humanely, and they do involve spending money. Otherwise, you are suggesting leaving the problem as it is, or doing inhumane things to deal with it.
to me, amorality is preferable over warped morality. it is clear what wall street wants: money. it isn’t clear to me what facebook and google actually want. i fear they strive for control.
Google's net positive has almost certainly been search. I believe this has probably had a huge net-productivity improvement across the world. I don't even use their search engine anymore, but they started the modern search engine and made a great deal of information more easy to find. I don't think they've improved communication otherwise. I don't believe Gmail or Hangouts have improved communication. I don't think buying Android and mostly giving the OS away has been a net-positive either.
Facebook is much harder to say. They've definitely connected many, many people via their service, but it has also been shown that the more someone uses Facebook the less happy they are. Now, this could easily be conflating causation with correlation (sad people use Facebook more), but they've also been caught doing bad things.
It's fun to think about, but there are so many what-ifs. How long would it have been before modern search came about without Google? If we had a federation of smaller social networks, would that have limited the damage that a single company could have done?
It all comes back to the leader and culture they set...
I think it comes down to having founders who define changing the world as "better for all" rather than simply "obscene amounts of money for us". Even if they sell up later the hollowing of a formerly ethical brand under a multi-national often means it stops performing.
We seem to be in a gilded age of no consequences currently. Money, and absurd amounts of it, seems to be the be all and end all of everything. There have been times where philanthropic founders and industrialists have thrived. There can easily be another. Hopefully we can get it without need of pitchforks, but that seems like an evens bet right now.
What words or actions could you invoke that would allow it to be distinguished from what some previously friendly sounding companies said or did during their ascent?
1. Provide your service with the option of collecting nearly zero or precisely zero data about customers if they so choose. In order to do this, it may be necessary to provide your services as open source software they can operate themselves on hosts they own or lease.
2. Adopt a comprehensive privacy-respecting mission statement analogous to the portions of the Mozilla manifesto [1] pertaining to privacy.
3. Provide full transparency about when, how, and in what measure data is collected about users who have not opted out via #1 above.
4. Ensure that your revenue streams are firewalled from user data. Never allow user data to be considered a potential source of revenue.
5. To the extent feasible under the law, provide transparency about revenue and finances. Provide evidence that the business is healthy thanks to voluntary exchange of money from principal users for products or services, and not exchanges that are involuntary for users.
Very similar to the game theory experiment of having a piece of cake to cut: one person gets to cut, the other person gets to pick the piece they want. You have to handcuff yourself to doing the right thing. Your decisions about "being evil" then become easy; you simply can't pick those paths knowing you've locked in the consequences.
But, that doesn't account for Amazon who have become (or were always?) evil in their own special ways.
Obviously that's a poor risk assessment: of course it's easy to make the annoying-bug-beneficial choice when it doesn't cost much. The actual test is what happens on a very bad day when you're exhausted and worried about other problems. Most people eventually end up caving and "cheating" on their diet, simply because we're terrible at judging risks and overestimate our ability to resist temptation when it isn't actually being tested.
The solution to this problem is to have the humility to admit our weaknesses in assessing risks and how easy it can be to overestimate our own abilities. From that point of views, prudence suggests a good idea might be using the benefits available on good days to prepare for the bad days and moments of weakness. Don't allow the temptation into the house so succumbing to temptation isn't possible or involves a much higher cost.
Words that promise that you won't fall to temptation are hard to enforce on yourself if the company has as bad quarter/year and finances are tight. Instead of words, the way for as company to distinguish themselves from the mostly-empty promises of the past is to publicly remove your own ability to make the wrong choice. If your hands are tied by a Ulysses Pact[2], it doesn't matter if someone offers to drive a dump truck full of money to your house if you sell out your users[3]: the decision has already been made and you no longer have that power.
[1] https://youtu.be/Yth7O6yeZRE?t=18765 (Doctorow's talk starts at 5:12:45)
Even one bad actor, at the right position and power, can make the ethical values of thousands of developers irrelevant until it's too late.
I often wonder about companies that are filled with ordinary folks, companies that do real nasty stuff. Like say Nestle, or even Enron. How do normal, ethical people get by in these companies. Do big companies and corporate culture destroy the inherent compassion and empathy in people?
For example even if they have no intentions to use it, they know that their competitors might, so they patent it so that their competitors can't, and thus no one can?
Does this happen? I see patents all the time that never made it to market, so I guess it's plausible. But is it even legal to patent something without intent to bring it to market?
I used to be somewhat naively optimistic about companies like Google and Facebook. I knew so many people who worked at those places, and I had such positive feelings about their ethical core...but, in hindsight, that optimism and that faith was poorly placed. They're companies that make money entirely based on the profitability of violating people's privacy. Of course they're gonna be evil; evil is where the money is in the advertising industry.