I suspect its less size then being at or near the top.

If you're up and coming, the best strategy is to just make a better product. You know whose at the top and you can adapt your product to where they are weak.

If you're at the top, i suspect the optimal strategy is to try and cut your competition off at the knees before its a threat.

I think we see this across many things. Just look at all the messed up things states do when they're super powers vs middle power states.

It's cartel behavior, they are trying to control every facet of the environments they live in. Hence why there are no competitors and all the upcoming platforms get acquired and absorbed.

Criminal business is the most profitable business and "unethical" just means "white collar crime". If the law allowed drug trafficking and kidnappings, the biggest corp in the US would be a drug cartel and the only reason they are outlawed is because even people at the top agree that such cartels are bad. Things are different for white collar crime: most people believe that its OK to do shady things if nobody's obviously hurt. This is why senators brazengly trade stocks influenced by the laws they pass. They don't believe its a crime. So unsurprisingly, the biggest corps in the US exploit this weakness at scale. It may take centuries before the collective agreement will equate such business practices with drug cartels.

> If the law allowed drug trafficking and kidnappings, the biggest corp [anywhere] would be ...

History proves you right.

The entire British empire, a fabulously wealthy system, was founded on slave trade (think: kidnapping, trafficking) and when that became too risky to maintain either the trade or profit margins, they moved over to global drug trade. The opium wars.

this has a few diagrams https://historyindoors.co.uk/britains-dark-past-the-atrociti...

some are telling

> the biggest corp in the US would be a drug cartel

This is besides the point you’re making, but I disagree with this. Disregarding the ones who make drugs for medical use, we already have recreational drug companies operating legally, namely those selling alcohol and tobacco (and coffee I guess). They are not the biggest corporations in the US (although some are still huge and powerful, of course).

The reason it’s currently so insanely profitable dealing in some of the other drugs is their prohibition, which makes prices skyrocket (and of course, when you’re already on the wrong side of the law, you might as well cut corners and utilize harmful practices to the extreme, even further increasing the profits).

It’s partly the Peter Principle, and another issue is maybe Google buying “management talent” from other companies. Just a guess though. Perhaps at that scale you have to be cut throat to be noticed and rise in the ranks (as it displays authority, which some people are especially fawned by)

Humans don't scale: we get big egos, we exploit size advantages far in excess of ethics, and we believe our own PR. Humans do not scale. We need to philosophically admit that with greater influence only fictional heroes can remain ethically honest. Self deception typically ruins a wealthy person's honesty; it is natural human nature. Until we recognize this innate fact of human nature, we will continually create large disasters, over and over again.

It's about shareholder value added. A public company or a VC-backed private company can focus on making creative nice widgets and services for only a limited time before growth inevitably stalls. After that (unless the management can and wants to screw over their owners) they will need to look elsewhere for more profits.

It's about capitalism, which rots the spirit of everything it touches.

Money is the most dangerous behaviour-altering drug.

It shouldn't be a surprise that a system which rewards sociopathy and discourages kindness and empathy keeps generating sociopathic behaviours.

Capitalism has always been about greed, and I say that as a profound advocate of it. Its very convenient to blame capitalism now for stuff we don't like when I'd argue we knew all along about greed being a core part of capitalism. Convenient in that it somehow absolves government out of it, and hides how we as the supposed democratic participants have been utterly powerless to direct the state towards reigning in these supposedly greedy/evil capitalist companies.

Greed is good.

I mean, the Soviet Nomenklatura had a reputation for similar behavior. Pre-capitalist societies also had plenty of corruption, graft, corruption, and destructive avarice.

I don't quite get why capitalism would reward sociopathy more than any other system in history

Your ethics are my opportunity.

To a Capitalist, the only possible deal is a profitable one. However, to be profitable, the arangement between participants has to be unfair. It is only through an unfair exchange of goods and services is a profit produced. So it imperative the other parties believe they are getting a fair deal, otherwise they would not participate. So, it is unmentioned while required that the Capitalist control the information of the participants such that they will believe they are getting a fair deal, while the Capitalist is in fact always getting the unfair advantage, or they would not participate. This is the nature of the corruption that is Capitalism.

I pay an electrician a slight premium for knowledge and experience that won’t burn my house down. Sure, I could look it up on YouTube but the probability that I do something wrong probably outweighs the premium I would pay for a qualified electrician.

How is this unfair?

Communism advocates for the workers owning their own means of production. An electrician working as a sole trader is an example of this. It is perfectly consistent with anti-capitalist thought to hire someone to perform work.

It’s completely fair and it’s also not quite what people who critique capitalism are talking about. Imagine you’re hiring a company that has electricians on payroll, then by definition the electrician you hired will get less than the labor he performed, and the company will pocket the difference as profit - or it won’t stay in business long. Electricians have the option of going alone, many other industries not so much.

Another profession where freelance is a common option is coding. So if going alone should always better, is the implication that all the employed electricians and coders are irrational or want to be exploited?

There are clearly advantages when working for someone else. Is the negotiation between the employee and the employer always fair when an industry has a few established incumbents? That depends and there’s a large spectrum of possibilities.

Unfair in the sense that the buyer pays more than the cost of goods sold, but trade often increases utility for both parties anyway. People happily pay $1,000/year for homeowners insurance even though the expected losses and expenses are only $970 or whatever, because they don’t want to be on the hook for a new home if theirs burns down, and they’re generally better off for doing so. And they may buy it from for-profit insurers, even though those for-profit insurers are in direct competition with mutuals (basically co-ops) and there’s full price transparency, because despite the capitalist making an expected profit of $30 or whatever the stock insurer provides a better price or service.

There’s absolutely no requirement that a capitalist (either the same one that stands to profit or a different one) control the flow of information in order to profit, lots of (probably most) capital funds the production of highly competitive and price-transparent goods, and all public stock companies disclose their expenses publicly. Even Google and Facebook provide clear prices to their customers, the issue with surveillance companies in particular is that their users aren’t the customers, but that’s totally orthogonal to the conflict you’re describing.

I am talking about the relationship between the employer and the employee. That is the unfair relationship which Capitalism is dependent and is imperative they control the information of their participants.

I'm not sure that unequal relationship between employer and employee is a feature of capitalism per se - even in a market socialist system in which labor receives all that it produces, any individual worker depends on their employer more heavily than their employer depends on them, so you still have an imbalance of power.

I also don't think it's really relevant here, since Google and Facebook employees are about the least coerced labor there is, considering that virtually all of them could another job earning an order of magnitude more than the minimal living wage in their area at the drop of a hat.

> I'm not sure that unequal relationship between employer and employee is a feature of capitalism per se

It is.

It is also a feature, to a greater or lesser extent, of many systems that are downstream descendants of capitalism and haven’t replaced the elements that produce that feature.

It is also a feature of the upstream immediate predecessor of capitalism (feudalism, in which control of the means of production is unified with land ownership and typically executive, and often judicial and legislative, power over those on it) in an even starker form.

> even in a market socialist system

“even”? Market socialism is a very close relative and (conceptually) descendant of capitalism, not some distant and opposed system.

> in which labor receives all that it produces, any individual worker depends on their employer more heavily than their employer depends on them, so you still have an imbalance of power.

In market socialism, the employer is an agent of the employees, who (in many versions) each individually hold guaranteed rights with respect to it much the same as citizens of a liberal democratic regime do against the State. Both the universal elimination of the employer fundamentally serving an interest outside of its employees and also the common (but not universal, “market socialism” is a broad category with lots of variations) guarantees of individual rights to employees exist specifically to mitigate the adverse effects of the employer/employee power balance that it retains from capitalism.

I think it's just that there's more scrutiny and the cases we hear about are more in the news. Smaller companies, and especially individuals who run businesses, do plenty of dodgy crap that nobody hears about and it never makes the news.

Perhaps when they are large enough to have significant power, they attract more employees with looser morals who see them as places where they can profit.

It might be both, some sort of feedback loop.

My take on this is that in a small company, the individual with his morals and values can still have an impact on the behaviour of a company. Above a certain size, when the company is public, the individual has less impact on the company, and there is an emergent behaviour that is only driven by the incentive to "enhance shareholder value", and all moral values that the company could follow, and that come from individuals in the company, disappears.

A company's social role is to provide jobs and goods for the society to work well. But this is not aligned with the survival incentive of the company, to "enhance shareholder value", which becomes it's only role.