"What would you do if you discovered that your company's core product or service has a net negative influence on the world?". This is a hypothetical, so assume the evidence you have is clear and the conclusion correct.

Interestingly, while from the beginning the word utopia was used to refer to a desirable (perfect) society, etymologically it simply means a place that does not exist.

In contrast to dystopia, which is clearly a bad place.

This isn't true, I think? Assuming that it derives from the Greek τόπος (location), it literally means "good place" (εὖ-τόπος). The no-such-place translation in Greek would probably be ἄτοπος, but that's an existing word and uses one of the other meanings of τόπος (it means uncommon or absurd).

PR stunts aside, a business is where you allocate capital that needs to generate a return. Why overload this concept? Invest your money in a nonprofit or a charity instead. If you want to ride a horse, don't argue with a cow because it isn't a horse. Milk it, sell the milk, and buy a horse.

...And if this is not a discussion about how you personally are allocating your capital, your best next step is to go generate more capital because then you can invest it however you damn well please. :)

We must break that spell. For-profit business are not structured according to some immutable laws of nature. Everything about them is a legal construct and it can be tweaked. Corporate entities didn't even exist until a few centuries ago. There is probably an entire spectrum of entities one can have between a charity and a typical modern corporate.

Is it the government? The regulators and the executives of the companies they regulate are frequently the same people - they do their time in private enterprise and then they become policymakers for the industry they were working in. The justification for this is that an industry needs to be regulated by people who understand that industry in depth (if you're a programmer - do things go well when all the rules around your work are made by non-programmers?).

Is it the people? Depends on the country you're in frankly. In the US popular opinion doesn't really support heavy-handed corporate regulation. There are some high impact issues like anti-trust where the public is fairly sympathetic to reigning in the biggest bad guys and I think those are good places to put your resources. Again, the best use of those resources is putting them into an organization dedicated to working on that issue. And the more capital you acquire from your business, the more impact you'll have.

My point of view isn't that we should have no corporate governance. But I have the hard-nosed realist view that the wishful thinking of "we" is ineffective. It has a poor track record. I'm saying a better approach is to go make money and then use it to alter the fabric of reality directly. Maybe network with other people who've made their money and convince them to do the same. This is easier than most people realize, I mean it takes a lot of work and time, but it's the type of work that will prepare you to vet organizations and make smart decisions about who can do the most with your contributions anyway.

Another reason for empowered individuals to act on their hunches is that there is no sure fire prescription of how to achieve change. We feel that things are "not alright" and we can reasonably suspect "nearby" alternate realities. Yet finding the pathways from A to B is basically by trial-and-error. In such context, the more trials and the more orthogonal to each other, the better.

More systemic processes might be slow but they are not "ineffective". Its a matter of timescale and perspective. The slowest of them all, the educational system, is actually the most effective in the long run.

https://www.humanitix.com/au/about-us.

https://www.afr.com/technology/tech-platform-reimagines-ethi...

There are a few other similar examples, like https://thankyou.co and https://au.whogivesacrap.org.