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bambax

Startup culture is a study in psychopathy.

- lack of empathy: Uber, Instacart, etc. etc. etc., exploiting the poor

- parasitic behavior: aggressive tax optimisation/tax evasion, Amazon employees relying on food stamps for subsistance

- superficial charm: get rich quick

- pathological lying: cf. Facebook denying they ever did anything wrong

- manipulativeness: "make the world more open and connected"

and my personal favorite,

- grandiosity: "change the world!", "solve physics for good!", "be immortal!"

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That's quite a broad generalization. For sure a lot of the biggest names have done ethically questionable things. It's no doubt that growing that fast and gaining that much power is going to hugely amplify whatever ethical flaws the founders have. And no one is ethically perfect. That's not to excuse Uber, Facebook, Google, Amazon or any of the more egregious companies.

But it's just a case of confirmation bias if you didn't look for counter-examples to try to disprove your theory.

Are the following companies ethically perfect? I doubt it. But I haven't heard much bad about them and they have changed my life for the better significantly: AirBnb, Dropbox, Stripe, Rappi, WhatsApp, Square, Netflix. I bet I could find others.

WhatsApp is owned by Facebook as of 2014, so unfortunately all the same issues with Facebook apply to them too.

I agree that folks have very good reason to keep a much closer eye on what WhatsApp actually does, and also what the user agreement says. However, you can't say that the WhatsApp team or product is necessarily and already violating people's privacy in the same ways as Facebook is. You can have all the healthy skepticism you want, but it doesn't mean that WhatsApp is doing those things.

Change "startup culture" to "corporate culture"

"solve physics for good!"... that was a quick meta.

Turns out machine learning has some limitations.

> startup culture...

> Amazon > Facebook

I don’t think amazon and Facebook are startups

This isn't just startup culture though, it's capitalism in general. Startup culture is really just the embodiment of everything wrong with capitalism.

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