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Comment by cocktailpeanuts | Hacker News Reader

I have no idea when this "law" was written or said, but I think this type of thinking--in 2016--is exactly the cause of what it's prophesizing.

Instead of thinking from "corporations vs. us", a better approach would be to think of humanity as a single entity.

I do understand that all this "open software" movement could have an impact because it was very polarizing and moved a lot of people. But in a world where open source is the norm, it should not be about fighting against corporations. The discussion should be on a higher level.

For example, you should think deeper about why it looks like: "While corporations dominate society and write the laws, each advance or change in technology is an opening for them to further restrict or mistreat its users".

Only when you look deeper into the corporation's motivations you'll be able to figure out a way to defeat this. Otherwise it just reads like a rant.

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> Only when you look deeper into the corporation's motivations you'll be able to figure out a way to defeat this. Otherwise it just reads like a rant.

It's actually pretty simple - money, power. Corporations are amoral machines; if there's something that brings profits and they can get away with legally, some corp will eventually do it (same seems to apply to small companies).

> Instead of thinking from "corporations vs. us", a better approach would be to think of humanity as a single entity.

Thinking like this was always the hallmark of my life. But the more I interact with actual people, and not just high-school friends but random people; CEOs and coworkers and shopowners and cleners - the more I realize there is a split there. Some of us think of humanity as a single entity worth caring about. Others don't give a fuck. They think of "me, family and friends vs. the rest of the world". Which makes it easy to justify fucking "the rest of the world" for profit. I don't really know how humanity is to reconcile those two worldviews.

The thing I sometimes have trouble with is:

1. Corporations behave like sociopaths.

2. Corporations don't really exist. They're a legal fiction that, in reality, is just a group of people working towards a common goal (maximum profit).

I wonder if it's counter-productive to think and speak of corporations as some sort of separate entity to the people it is composed of. I think the notion that 'corporations are evil sociopaths' is one of those thought-stopping 'mind-killers'. Corporations don't have intent, good or bad; they don't really exist (except in our minds).

As harsh as it may sound, if we want a 'corporation' to behave ethically, then we should assign blame to those that are perpetrating the harm: to the employees, managers and owners of that corporation. It's their collective efforts and actions that have led to unethical outcomes, not the singular effort of some invisible corporate spectre.

I think it's the only possible way to fight this 'diffusion of responsibility' that allows a whole bunch of (mostly) normal people to all do tiny unethical acts that, when viewed in aggregate, are abhorrent. I suspect whatever the best solution is will be similar (or analogous) to how you overcome the 'bystander effect': rather than saying 'someone call 911', say 'you, guy in the red shirt (point at him), call 911'.

tl;dr - It turns out the Ring of Gyges is not a ring at all. It's a multi-story building filled with rows of cubicles.

Thinking of corporations in terms of its employees means said employees have to take responsibility for their products. I'm all for it.

The same can be applied to governments (though I believe it's less of a problem than with corporations): it's not "the government" that's fucking things up, it's the people in it.

I agree. Moreover, we have ‘smart contracts’ technology now to make responsible society real. The problem is that we have too much parasites in human society who fight against progress in this area to protect their status quo. I think that in future responsible people won’t share the same economics/law system as irresponsible one, the same way humans are separated from the animals now. This split will happen once the world bullshit reaches its critical mass to make all reasonable people to unite.

Huh, do you think all the status-quo-preserving douchebags will want to live by themselves? That's no fun, is it? Then again, the internet is young. Maybe such segregation would work, but I'm not a fan of the idea. I'd rather try getting everybody on the intellectual boat, mostly to avoid segregation but also because smart asshats exist (my hope being that the beauty of responsible society swings them over).

I think it is accurate to talk about corporations like separate entities - alien entities, in the same way we sometimes talk about "market" as an entity, or about "$country" when we mean its government's decisions. In a complex organization composed of many individuals pursuing somewhat aligned, but ever so slightly different agendas, there may not be any single person to blame for the aggregate behaviour.

I see your suggestion of overcoming "diffusion of responsibility" as a way to kill the alien being corporation is. When you force things to be set up in such a way a single individual (or a small group) is ultimately responsible for some area of corporate behaviour, you reduce the chance of corporation displaying some emergent behaviour that no human can prevent or vouch for. Seems like an interesting and maybe even good idea to me.

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