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Comment by mortdeus | Hacker News Reader

He isn't the only person who talks about the dopamine driven feedback loops. Chamath Palihapitiya, who was one of the first engineers at facebook, talks about how they all used to gather in meeting rooms and have intense back and forth discussions on how they actually build this thing so that the entire world wouldn't be able to resist adopting it.

He talks about how at the time they really didn't foresee the foreboding future implications of what they were trying to build at the time.

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That's a little like talking about how you didn't foresee the foreboding implications of designing a self-sustaining chain reaction involving neutrons.

Although I think the reaction continues and we can't tell exactly what's happening even now.

Yeah, I see lots of early hires of the tech giants bemoaning the monsters they've created. They are very concerned about the negative societal impacts of their former employers, but not quite concerned enough to give back the millions of dollars they earned peddling these products.

They will use those millions (or at least part of one of those millions) to create "An Initiative" along with an app or two to somehow combat the monsters. Of course that will fail but their conscience will be cleared. But more importantly, they will be able to think that their blood money is now normal money and they can live and die peacefully.

Give it back to who? Facebook? Their shareholders? Doesn't seem to help the situation in any sense. In the videos linked the early FB engineer says the only thing he can do now is to try use the capital he has earned to combat the ills he created, which is a sensible approach in my view.

  not quite concerned enough to give back the
  millions of dollars they earned

Do you have a way to undo the social harm done by facebook for a few million dollars?

Or do you think they should just get rid of the money, K Foundation style, regardless of whether doing so would reverse the effects of the work they did to earn it?

Well they could start by planting trees.

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