Diffusion of responsibility [1].
I hypothesise the frequency of deliberate evil is similar among companies big and small. What's more frequent with large companies is unchecked sporadic harm. Over time, that accumulates into uncoördinated patterns of behavior.
These patterns would get called out in a smaller company. Social mores almost force us to. But those mores get washed out in large, corporate environments, where well-meaning people can turn a cheek to callous and even evil behavior.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_responsibility
At every step, you are surrounded by people roughly as put-upon and desperate as you are. While profit filters up and compromise filters down, the only people to appeal to are in roughly in the same situation you are, if not worse off.
Not doing a survey for Philip Morris as one of those leaves of the corporate graph who faces the raw material of the consumer just means you don't eat, and they find another person who will.
Read a great article once about how trading stocks will turn pretty much anyones actions sociopathic. The gist is that nobody really has to take responsibility, so most just follow the money. Unfortunately, the closer to slavery the better the profit margin.
"We shouldn’t fetishize mom and pop operations. They offer lower wages, skimpier benefits, and inferior labor protections."
See: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/01/small-businesses-workers-...
as an aside, I've read that jacobin article before and I find it to be a bit myopic. a large part of why small businesses offer comparatively shitty pay and benefits is because they can't really afford to do better. part of this is just inherent efficiencies of scale (generally a good thing), but it's also because the biggest players get to rewrite the rules to make it very difficult to compete with them. it's not unreasonable to think that a friendlier environment for small businesses might lead to better compensation for their employees.
So I'm not sure that big business is really "responsible for irresponsible economics that hurts everyone".
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2016/04/11/is-big-...
critiques of small business aim to reject the following dilemma as false,
> The alternative [to monopolists and global megacorporations]? Small business.
rather than to promote big business.
In the USA, the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls any business with 500 employees or fewer a ‘small business’, and it's usually something like that which gets translated into policy. Not all that small, imo.
But absolutely people valorize small businesses in a way that elides the fact that what makes businesses exploitative is (contra this former Amazon VP) inherent in wage relations, and smaller employers are still operating under those relations. Because small businesses are romanticized and valorized as they are in their culture, the language of ‘promoting small businesses’ is often used to give cover for massive corporate giveaways on the part of the government. These are [common](https://inthesetimes.com/article/22412/outrageous-corporate-...) [lines](https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/07/can-business-of-any-s...) of [socialist (this piece has some of the exact language of the grandparent poster)](https://jacobinmag.com/2018/01/small-businesses-workers-wage...) [critique (see Morales on free trade here)](https://inthesetimes.com/article/22412/outrageous-corporate-...).
Generally, calls to treat ‘small business’ with greater scrutiny come from an anti-capitalist (or at least ‘capitalism-critical’, if you will) perspective, and are not motivated by some belief that monopolies or anti-competitive cabals are actually preferable to larger numbers of smaller, weaker, relatively competitive corporations. But there's a sense that the critique should go deeper than ‘big business bad, small business good’— which imo is pretty commonly distilled in a lot of mainstream political rhetoric— and raise questions of worker ownership, decommodification (e.g., of healthcare), the role of public enterprises, etc.
Advising skepticism toward the valor of small businesses also doesn't negate the fact that promoting small business _can_ be [beneficial or strategic for society as a whole](https://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/22385/coronavirus-wor...) in particular circumstances! But I sympathize with the grandparent poster's general sentiment; I feel like on the whole it's called for.
I haven't paid Jacobin much attention heretofore. If this article is any representation of how well worth taking seriously they are, I'll continue that policy. This reads more than anything like a Republican caricature of leftist thought.
So there is a strain of left-wing thought that see smaller businesses as a bigger evil that big businesses.
From the article:
"In reality, small business promotion is mostly a bad idea. Small businesses pay lower wages, provide worse benefits, are often exempt from important worker protections, and are incompatible with the way unionization works in the US."
Given that exactly these sorts of changes to the status quo are table stakes for socialist political movements including the one that's been trying to form around Bernie Sanders for half a decade or more by now, it is, again, strange to see an ostensibly socialist publication treat the status quo as immutable.
Poking around a little more, I get the sense from Jacobin's articles that they're written by the sort of, again soi-disant, socialist who can spend all day toying with highflown theories, but turns contemptuous on the instant when faced with the expectation to back up words with action, and thinks nothing of crossing a picket line when it'd be even slightly less personally convenient to do otherwise. In other words, I think they're a bunch of useless academic liberals who enjoy the cachet of calling themselves socialist but can't be bothered to do the work of earning the name.
Perhaps I'm doing Jacobin's writers an injustice, but seeing as I'm judging them by their writing, I don't think that I am.
Whether that qualifies as a "credential for speaking on socialism", I can't properly say. But I'm not inclined to listen to anyone speaking on socialism who I don't even trust to not cross a line.
Edit: Whoops this comment could have been made less controversially - I wish everyone well.
You seem to be suggesting that the only relevant information is that there is a "big" corporation involved and that the particulars of the situation are irrelevant.
I'm just suggesting that the particulars of the case are important to deciding who is acting in a "morally superior way" (to use the phrasing from the earlier comment.
That an engineer whose work I greatly respect, whose VP role gave him vastly more knowledge of the corporation's inner workings, walked away from seven figures of RSUs and whatever no doubt sizable other compensation, because he agrees with the folks making minimum wage that their situation is bullshit, I'd think should add considerable point to the argument.
But Bray's action, while commendable, is severable here. If you need convincing that corporate power vastly outweighs labor power in the United States of 2020, I'm not the person to do it, for the same reason I'm not the person to convince anyone that water is wet or fire is hot. You might try struggling along paycheck to paycheck for a while, working some place like an Amazon warehouse, if you don't know what it's like. Or you might try listening to people who do when they tell you what it's like. Beyond that, I really don't know how to help you.
> Q: Why does it seem like big corps never get the benefit of the doubt?
> A: Big corps don't get the benefit of the doubt because they are big. Anyone who disagrees is a moral coward.
The first rule of firearms safety is that the gun is always loaded, because any other assumption will far too easily betray you into deadly error. The first rule of electrical safety is that you always keep one hand behind your back, because it only takes a few milliseconds for a cross-body current to stop your heart. Economic power, similarly concentrated, is differently risky, but not less so. Some things - no matter how useful they may be when properly handled - are simply too dangerous to ever be trusted.
This seems like pretty lazy thinking to me.
It's not impossible to convince people of that, but you're going to need to work at it, because you're asking them to believe something that's the direct opposite of the situation they're actually seeing with their own two eyes.
If you want to call something lazy, why not start with the kind of thinking that takes such a mealy-mouthed, "we can't know for sure until all the facts are in" approach to that?
In this specific case Amazon immediately fired every single person who whistleblew or attempted to communicate their non-action on Covid-19 in the early days and the early outbreaks in warehouses. This isn't some kind of worker pay disagreement or such, the company literally got people killed.
Every single person they fired was female or a person of color.
The problem with big companies with hundreds of thousands of employees is the general fact that eventually lobbying and shareholder meetings lead to treating people like sheep and robots.
I think there are plenty of great examples of responsible mid-size companies, but nearly every massive company has these stories somewhere and there are plenty small companies guilty of massive missteps but generally not on these kinds of scales, I suspect it's because the ceo of a small joint has to look these people in the eyes on Monday and nobody is squeezing them over the last 2%.
Bezos doesn't have to look anyone in the eye and its much easier to put your underlings at risk and fire people when your boss tells you to do it.
Simple. Morality is a human trait and corporations are not human beings.
"always"
"I haven't read the article but..."
"always the evil ones"
"always little enslaved saints"
Thanks, I just filled out my bingo card
edit: Sorry gang but some comments just don't warrant being taken seriously. Especially when using inflammatory, offensive language designed specifically to be maximally confrontational. So you'll excuse me if I take a little pleasure on Monday morning taking the piss out of this bootlicking comment.
Sincerely,
A little enslaved saint
Edit: just a reminder to support local bakeries, because they are usually tastier than big ones. Bad example.
A quote I never get tired of using is, "Apathy is the glove into which evil slips its hand." If you can, be the change.
Destroying a company through mismanagement is decried as evil too.
Most companies cut corners here and there, mess up something with compliance, accessibility or even break the law in small ways. But almost no companies can afford to defend themselves in court, pay settlements to make things go away, pay lobbyists/strategists to write laws etc...
Ted Kaczynski would roughly say that Big becomes evil because Big means standardization. If you have a large corporation you need to standardize processes in order to be efficient enough to justify your existence. This is directly at odds with individual dignity and autonomy.
Specifically see 111. onwards of Industrial Society and Its Future.
He was the victim of 200 hours of brutal psychological experimentation by Henry Murray. It turns out you can torture people past their breaking point and they may not recover.
It also turns out that doing this to people with greater-than-average intelligence can have proportionally greater-than-average consequences.
This is a conspiracy theory and a myth.
The (often claimed) part of the story that's conspiracy theory is that the experiments are tied to MKULTRA, which I didn't claim at all, because there's no evidence of that.
If anything's a conspiracy theory, it's that the entirety of your comment history on Hacker News, spanning 2 years is to post solely on the topic of the Unabomber, and that you do the same thing on Reddit.
Other participants in the study and other researchers involved have come out and stated that it was benign.
No other students involved reported any lasting issues.
We have on record the actual transcripts of Kaczynski's participation and it conclusively shows that it was benign--in fact it shows a calm and relaxed Kaczynski make the interviewer appear silly.
It's easy to see why people cling to the idea that Kaczynski must somehow have been affected by this study: it distracts their own and others attention away from his ideas and on to his personality. The reasons for his violence are entirely consistent with his ideology. There have been terrorists and revolutionaries throughout history who have committed far worse "crimes" and yet we don't need to pathologize them or their motivations.
I wonder if Dang considers it astroturfing if an intelligence agency does it? (edit: joke, but it is weird that your comment history is nothing but about Ted).
And for those of you who are wondering if the psych. experiments are real or not: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/06/harvard...
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/09/letters...
Why would an intelligence agency do what I'm doing? What would they have to gain by posting this?? I'm trying to understand the humor, please help me.
I'm genuinely worried here.
Why does everyone here seem so timid and silly? Is it really necessary to get your panties in a bundle about someone interested in this controversy? Do you find it....disturbing? lol.
This quote is especially on topic. Speaking of which, what do you think of that new Michael Moore doc "Planet of the Humans"?
How is that a "conspiracy theory"???
You mean TO fail in an ad hominem.
However, the codification of certain motives–such as the alienating profit motive–encourages the otherwise less abusively included to collude in the ultimately exploitative program of their institution. The whole institution, then, resonates with this taint in outsiders' minds.
So, it's not that big always becomes evil, it's that "the bigger it is, the more likely you, u/bawana, will have heard of it."
Don't hesitate to read up on the ubiquity of "evil". I can get you started:
0. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/224552.Why_Does_He_Do_Th...
1. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17601.The_Will_to_Change
(My impression is that public companies are essentially required to maximize profit and shareholder value at any cost... at least at any cost that's technically legal and which wouldn't create significant blowback from society--blowback which would cut into those profits. Private companies owners have the freedom to follow their conscience and not sell their company's soul even if doing so would greatly increase profits.)
To sum it up, the imperative (or lack thereof) to maximize profits.
Meanwhile, society and human nature have some baseline of pressures acting on them that amplify or dampen different sets of virtues and vices. Among these are a certain level of greed and cutthroatedness.
Companies rarely actively select against cupidity or avarice, and insofar as they do it's usually fine as long as it flows downward and enriches the company overall. So, as the company scales up it scales up in its capacity for evil too.
Though it's not as if "small" can't be evil as well. Small businesses are still part of a network of small businesses and subject to market forces that also select for and against different behaviors, many of which involve screwing over their workers.
The man or woman at the top usually sets the high bar for what culture pertains, and how stringently it is brought to the rest of the business.
The bigger the business, the closer to baseline (just a machine) the business tends to drift. If the culture is not a strong one, or starts from a mostly mechanistic stance, then drifting to what we would consider evil in a person is easy.
This has little to do with capitalism, and everything to do with people functioning in groups. Because it happens with every activity that has more than one individual acting to move it forward.
Sports teams can be excellently principled, even moral, because their leadership applies these as a way to strengthen the team. (It's also a small group.)
This applies to towns full of people, to social groups and clubs, to "movements" on social media. We see it everywhere.
It's just particularly painful in circumstances like this one.
Google may have touted the "do no evil" matra, but looking back, their plan was always to look over your shoulder. Nothing Google did was ever altruistic, and I think Amazon was and is the same way.
However, as the founders lost interest in the day-to-day operation of the company, any pretense of being more than just another soulless profit machine was discarded.
The pyramids got built for free, so did America, that whole Serf system, kids used to work, Colonization, and I think there’s people half way across the world making things for a few cents an hour as we speak.
If you want to know what’s happening, then just look at what already happened. War, technological advancement, and worker bondage are pocket aces you must to bet on when it comes to humanity.
When we organize into groups this is what happens.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
Capitalists own capital. And they exploit labour.
If workers really want to improve their situation they would all need to unionize. It would require a significant portion of the workers to join, or else Amazon can just keep firing and replacing people. While I'm certainly pro-worker and pro-union, I think most of the demonstrations have been a tiny number of workers relative to Amazon's whole workforce.
Keep in mind that in the US there's a negative stigma attached to unionization thanks to many years of propaganda from "business leaders" who (obviously) are opposed to unionization because it eats into their profits.
This doesn't mean unions can't work or that things would be better without them or that we shouldn't trend toward more unionization; it only means that there are real problems with unions and it's hard to trust pro-union people when they won't even acknowledge as much.
For me, I hear Europeans raving about their unions, so clearly unions can work, but if the pro-union side intends to get more political support, it needs to articulate what it is about American unions that aren't working very well and how they intend to address those issues. Chalking it up to "propaganda" comes off as patronizing and naive at best.