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Comment by bawana | Hacker News Reader

Why does big always become evil?

> Why does big always become evil?

Diffusion of responsibility [1].

I hypothesise the frequency of deliberate evil is similar among companies big and small. What's more frequent with large companies is unchecked sporadic harm. Over time, that accumulates into uncoördinated patterns of behavior.

These patterns would get called out in a smaller company. Social mores almost force us to. But those mores get washed out in large, corporate environments, where well-meaning people can turn a cheek to callous and even evil behavior.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_responsibility

I think more importantly is that there are legal and organizational structures (General Counsel, HR, lobbyists etc...) that are introduced at a certain point in a companies lifecycle that prevent external costs from being imposed.

I've long thought that in many ways, a corporation is nothing but a system which shields people from the moral consequences of their actions. A company like Altria, for example, couldn't function if you were told your job was to give people lung cancer, so the company instead has layers and layers of bureaucracy and paper pushers so that each individual person takes actions which they're only slightly uncomfortable with at worst. When I was in my early 20s, I saw how it works first hand when I worked at a company that did market research surveys at a mall, and we had a survey from Phillip Morris, and I refused to do it, and my manager tried to say: "You're not doing anything wrong, you're just asking people their opinions, you're not giving away samples or advertising to them, etc..." It all sounded so convincing, but it eventually came down to me either doing it or being fired, so I quit. Easy to do when you're still living at home and don't need the job, a lot harder if you have a family.

I've always thought that modern corporate capitalism in general is a system that makes sure that you never actually meet the people whose weakness you are taking the most advantage of. Consumers and citizens encounter hourly-paid clerks and customer service reps who probably make less than they do, those clerks work under salaried managers who are overworked because they don't get overtime, those managers work under well-paid but even more overworked managers of managers, who work under well-paid, less-overworked, but more precariously-employed project/regional heads whose primary job is taking the blame for failures. Then you get to overpaid, overworked, secure people who dictate parts of the overall strategy of a company, the vastly-paid and secure people who run the place, and the people who passively own the place and take all the profits.

At every step, you are surrounded by people roughly as put-upon and desperate as you are. While profit filters up and compromise filters down, the only people to appeal to are in roughly in the same situation you are, if not worse off.

Not doing a survey for Philip Morris as one of those leaves of the corporate graph who faces the raw material of the consumer just means you don't eat, and they find another person who will.

Ding ding ding.

Read a great article once about how trading stocks will turn pretty much anyones actions sociopathic. The gist is that nobody really has to take responsibility, so most just follow the money. Unfortunately, the closer to slavery the better the profit margin.

I agree with you and would add loss of high level mission. When it becomes unclear to people what the broader goal of the company is and how they fit into it, or if they are only rewarded for achieving a local goal (eg hitting some artificial metric) even if their actions impede the broader goal, then you will only get optimization towards the local goals regardless of overall outcomes.

In someways small companies have more potential to be evil, because they often fly "under the radar".

"We shouldn’t fetishize mom and pop operations. They offer lower wages, skimpier benefits, and inferior labor protections."

See: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/01/small-businesses-workers-...

Nobody "fetishizes" small business. This sounds like big corporation mouthpiece rhetoric. Big business is responsible for wealth concentration and irresponsible economics that hurt everyone. The alternative? Small business. It's easy to see why people might prefer a reality where small businesses continue to exist. Not everyone likes the Orwell novel we're writing.

"fetishize" is probably the wrong word, but people are certainly a lot more sympathetic towards small businesses. in my city, people are donating tens of thousands of dollars to local businesses that are closed due to coronavirus. can you imagine someone donating money to keep walmart afloat?

as an aside, I've read that jacobin article before and I find it to be a bit myopic. a large part of why small businesses offer comparatively shitty pay and benefits is because they can't really afford to do better. part of this is just inherent efficiencies of scale (generally a good thing), but it's also because the biggest players get to rewrite the rules to make it very difficult to compete with them. it's not unreasonable to think that a friendlier environment for small businesses might lead to better compensation for their employees.

That’s because companies like Walmart shouldn’t need those donations - bigger operations like them bring in much higher revenue. They also tend to work around tax laws and find loopholes, which a small business can’t do (and even if they did, it would be chump change compared to the behemoths). So it makes sense for the small guys to get that kind of “grassroots” support.

Revenue seems like a weird thing to look at though. If you only get more profit by hiring more employees, that doesn't change how much you can afford to pay your employees. How do they compare in terms of profit/employee?

That doesn't make the citizens ill-informed or delusional. The donators think the existence of small businesses provide a benefit to society beyond bottom lines. Small businesses always so close to sinking, so conditions will be worse for workers. Small business workers don't need to be in The Party though, and their social credit score won't come into play. One storm could sink every small business, leaving only big businesses to cover the entire market. Businesses that have gone unchecked for half a century and are big enough to keep legislation in regulatory capture.

Walmart doesn’t need donations if and will they would the people would have little say in that since they’ll get bailed out and the tax payer will pay for it one way or another.

Big business is also responsible for economies of scale. A small mom and pop shop can't really scale the same way a big business does. Another added benefit is that we get to regulate the products much more without swamping the business in costs they can't afford.

So I'm not sure that big business is really "responsible for irresponsible economics that hurts everyone".

Publicly traded companies are profit maximizing machines. Societal wealth has never been higher but the middle class is shrinking. It shouldn't be a surprise, then, when people can't afford to live in their own society. We're facing the natural progression of a society ruled by greed machines: economic depression.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2016/04/11/is-big-...

This article was from the Jacobin, perhaps the foremost Left-wing publication in the USA presently. Jacobin is essentially the Pravda in English.

tl;dr:

critiques of small business aim to reject the following dilemma as false,

> The alternative [to monopolists and global megacorporations]? Small business.

rather than to promote big business.

In the USA, the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls any business with 500 employees or fewer a ‘small business’, and it's usually something like that which gets translated into policy. Not all that small, imo.

But absolutely people valorize small businesses in a way that elides the fact that what makes businesses exploitative is (contra this former Amazon VP) inherent in wage relations, and smaller employers are still operating under those relations. Because small businesses are romanticized and valorized as they are in their culture, the language of ‘promoting small businesses’ is often used to give cover for massive corporate giveaways on the part of the government. These are [common](https://inthesetimes.com/article/22412/outrageous-corporate-...) [lines](https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/07/can-business-of-any-s...) of [socialist (this piece has some of the exact language of the grandparent poster)](https://jacobinmag.com/2018/01/small-businesses-workers-wage...) [critique (see Morales on free trade here)](https://inthesetimes.com/article/22412/outrageous-corporate-...).

Generally, calls to treat ‘small business’ with greater scrutiny come from an anti-capitalist (or at least ‘capitalism-critical’, if you will) perspective, and are not motivated by some belief that monopolies or anti-competitive cabals are actually preferable to larger numbers of smaller, weaker, relatively competitive corporations. But there's a sense that the critique should go deeper than ‘big business bad, small business good’— which imo is pretty commonly distilled in a lot of mainstream political rhetoric— and raise questions of worker ownership, decommodification (e.g., of healthcare), the role of public enterprises, etc.

Advising skepticism toward the valor of small businesses also doesn't negate the fact that promoting small business _can_ be [beneficial or strategic for society as a whole](https://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/22385/coronavirus-wor...) in particular circumstances! But I sympathize with the grandparent poster's general sentiment; I feel like on the whole it's called for.

It is extremely strange to see soi-disant socialists fail to recognize the difference between essential traits of small businesses, and qualities contingent upon a legal regime which socialists themselves argue should be changed in ways which would largely alleviate the problems they describe. Unbinding health care from employment makes it available to everyone, whether their employer can afford a group plan or not. Reforming anti-union legislation means small business employees can unionize effectively across shops. And so on.

I haven't paid Jacobin much attention heretofore. If this article is any representation of how well worth taking seriously they are, I'll continue that policy. This reads more than anything like a Republican caricature of leftist thought.

But small capitalists are a bigger problem in someways than bigger capitalists, since the difficulties their workers face are harder to be brought into public attention, because of the small localised scale of them. Large businesses have to face regularly oversight and scurutiny on a much more wider scale.

So there is a strain of left-wing thought that see smaller businesses as a bigger evil that big businesses.

From the article:

"In reality, small business promotion is mostly a bad idea. Small businesses pay lower wages, provide worse benefits, are often exempt from important worker protections, and are incompatible with the way unionization works in the US."

The point I'm making is that - even granting their claim, which I'm not sure I do - unionization doesn't have to work in the US tomorrow the same way it does today. Neither need benefits and worker protections.

Given that exactly these sorts of changes to the status quo are table stakes for socialist political movements including the one that's been trying to form around Bernie Sanders for half a decade or more by now, it is, again, strange to see an ostensibly socialist publication treat the status quo as immutable.

Poking around a little more, I get the sense from Jacobin's articles that they're written by the sort of, again soi-disant, socialist who can spend all day toying with highflown theories, but turns contemptuous on the instant when faced with the expectation to back up words with action, and thinks nothing of crossing a picket line when it'd be even slightly less personally convenient to do otherwise. In other words, I think they're a bunch of useless academic liberals who enjoy the cachet of calling themselves socialist but can't be bothered to do the work of earning the name.

Perhaps I'm doing Jacobin's writers an injustice, but seeing as I'm judging them by their writing, I don't think that I am.

Well, would Marx have joined a picket line? I don't think that joining picket lines suffices as the main credential on speaking on socialism.

I said 'cross', not 'join'. What I mean by it is, I don't get the sense these people, unless they knew someone was watching, would inconvenience themselves by refusing to give their custom to a business whose workers were striking.

Whether that qualifies as a "credential for speaking on socialism", I can't properly say. But I'm not inclined to listen to anyone speaking on socialism who I don't even trust to not cross a line.

Mom and pop operations are less productive, that's why they have to offer lower wages and charge higher prices, all other things being equal. But that's not the same as being evil to others, and many actively prefer them as places to work for and patronize as customers.

Why does everyone assume the actions of the little guy are always morally superior than the actions of the big corporation? I haven't delved into the details of this specific case but this reaction is typical regardless of the facts it seems. The big company is always the evil one and the employees are always little enslaved saints.

Edit: Whoops this comment could have been made less controversially - I wish everyone well.

When one side has all the power and the other side has none, to pretend that the benefit of the doubt accrues equally to both is an act of moral cowardice.

How about considering the facts of the situation and not generalizing and applying a pre-conceived narrative?

I don't really know how to address the kind of confusion that mistakes a statement of principle for an imposition of narrative.

There's no way to respond seriously to someone who is suggesting we ought not learn from history.

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding you, but how can you know if your principle ("one side has all the power and the other side has none") is relevant without understanding the specifics of the issue at hand?

You seem to be suggesting that the only relevant information is that there is a "big" corporation involved and that the particulars of the situation are irrelevant.

I'm just suggesting that the particulars of the case are important to deciding who is acting in a "morally superior way" (to use the phrasing from the earlier comment.

I mean, for as much as I've said so far, I'm pretty comfortable working from the knowledge that one side is a corporation worth enough billions that the specific number is both indeterminate and irrelevant, and the other is some people making minimum wage who'd like their working lives to be a little less shitty. Also, the corporation can fire those minimum-wage workers at any time, for any reason or none at all, and leave them zero effective recourse under the law - because most of what the law says is what the lawyers convince the judge trying the case it says, and one of those sides can afford hot and cold running lawyers out of petty cash while the other is living paycheck to paycheck and can't afford them at all.

That an engineer whose work I greatly respect, whose VP role gave him vastly more knowledge of the corporation's inner workings, walked away from seven figures of RSUs and whatever no doubt sizable other compensation, because he agrees with the folks making minimum wage that their situation is bullshit, I'd think should add considerable point to the argument.

But Bray's action, while commendable, is severable here. If you need convincing that corporate power vastly outweighs labor power in the United States of 2020, I'm not the person to do it, for the same reason I'm not the person to convince anyone that water is wet or fire is hot. You might try struggling along paycheck to paycheck for a while, working some place like an Amazon warehouse, if you don't know what it's like. Or you might try listening to people who do when they tell you what it's like. Beyond that, I really don't know how to help you.

You have made the false assumption that I'm talking about this particular situation (Amazon/Tim Bray) when I was simply responding to the more general comment about making judgements based on generalities and not on particulars.

Yeah, totally. People are so annoying with how they want to learn from history! Like you, I too wish people would just be total morons and not ever learn from the past.

So your asserting that without understanding the specifics of the situation that a "lesson from history" should be applied and should guide your opinion about a particular situtation? It isn't important to you what the nature of the particular situation is? How are you deciding which "lesson from history" is applicable or is there just a single universal lesson about "big corporations" that should be applied irregardless of the facts?

That's not an argument, just an assertion. All you've done is restate the position the GP was questioning the reasoning behind:

> Q: Why does it seem like big corps never get the benefit of the doubt?

> A: Big corps don't get the benefit of the doubt because they are big. Anyone who disagrees is a moral coward.

Perhaps you have overlooked that the distinction I drew was one not of size, but of power.

I guess I just don't see how that's a meaningful distinction in this situation. Size and power are pretty obviously correlated. GP's question wasn't "Are large corporations powerful?" it was "Why aren't large (powerful) corporations given the benefit of the doubt?"

Phrasing the question in terms of size makes it easy to ignore the power differential, and ignoring the power differential is the only way that question seems to make sense.

The first rule of firearms safety is that the gun is always loaded, because any other assumption will far too easily betray you into deadly error. The first rule of electrical safety is that you always keep one hand behind your back, because it only takes a few milliseconds for a cross-body current to stop your heart. Economic power, similarly concentrated, is differently risky, but not less so. Some things - no matter how useful they may be when properly handled - are simply too dangerous to ever be trusted.

You seem to be asserting that all that is needed to determine who is right or wrong in any particular situation is to assign some sort of "power" metric to both sides and then conclude that the powerful entity must be wrong and the weaker entity must be right without actually considering the particular issue at hand.

This seems like pretty lazy thinking to me.

What it seems like to you is your business. But, to extend a metaphor from my prior comment, you're going to need to go a lot further than you have to convince anyone that the guy with the shotgun needs to be worrying about the guy he's pointing the shotgun at, and who is also obviously unarmed.

It's not impossible to convince people of that, but you're going to need to work at it, because you're asking them to believe something that's the direct opposite of the situation they're actually seeing with their own two eyes.

If you want to call something lazy, why not start with the kind of thinking that takes such a mealy-mouthed, "we can't know for sure until all the facts are in" approach to that?

All I said was that the particular facts of a situation are relevant. Hard to believe that is a controversial point.

>Why does everyone assume the actions of the little guy are always morally superior than the actions of the big corporation

Simple. Morality is a human trait and corporations are not human beings.

The actions of big corporations are the actions of humans.

Yes. Humans with a fiduciary duty (legal obligation) to put shareholder value above all else.

"everyone"

"always"

"I haven't read the article but..."

"always the evil ones"

"always little enslaved saints"

Thanks, I just filled out my bingo card

edit: Sorry gang but some comments just don't warrant being taken seriously. Especially when using inflammatory, offensive language designed specifically to be maximally confrontational. So you'll excuse me if I take a little pleasure on Monday morning taking the piss out of this bootlicking comment.

I actually did read the article.

Oh ok thanks, that makes a huge difference.

Sincerely,

A little enslaved saint

Because the little guy in these situations has nothing to hide. His motives and goals are clear to everyone, as are the constraints he may face in pursuing them. That's never true of something on the scale of Amazon.

How about cases when the little guy is just as big of an asshole as the big guy? There are stories of small business owners in poorer countries employing literal slaves (in XXI century)...

Well, for one thing, the "big corporation" isn't a human being, and the 'little guy' is.

I don't think you have to assume little is morally superior to say big becomes evil. When those in power become powerful, by nature they do everything they can to maintain that power. When they were small that might be by making the employees happy, or the like but when they are big they have shareholders to answer to and percentage points to keep up.

In this specific case Amazon immediately fired every single person who whistleblew or attempted to communicate their non-action on Covid-19 in the early days and the early outbreaks in warehouses. This isn't some kind of worker pay disagreement or such, the company literally got people killed.

Every single person they fired was female or a person of color.

The problem with big companies with hundreds of thousands of employees is the general fact that eventually lobbying and shareholder meetings lead to treating people like sheep and robots.

I think there are plenty of great examples of responsible mid-size companies, but nearly every massive company has these stories somewhere and there are plenty small companies guilty of massive missteps but generally not on these kinds of scales, I suspect it's because the ceo of a small joint has to look these people in the eyes on Monday and nobody is squeezing them over the last 2%.

Bezos doesn't have to look anyone in the eye and its much easier to put your underlings at risk and fire people when your boss tells you to do it.

Employees are subject to intense competition for employment, while big companies face much less competition [1]. This means that, all other things being equal, big companies are less unaccountable than their employees. While this dynamic certainly doesn't guarantee abuses of power on behalf of big companies I think it makes sense to be inherently suspicious of their actions.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopsony

I generally prefer small business, but the ‘big = becomes evil’ phenomenon just might be because of identity centralization. If your city has a hundred bakeries and one of the bakers turns out to be evil, it mostly just reflects back on him. Replace those hundred bakeries with a single large one, though, and suddenly one evil person reflects badly upon the entire organization.

Edit: just a reminder to support local bakeries, because they are usually tastier than big ones. Bad example.

Hmmm... I see a correlation between taste of bread and evilness here.

Human nature organizing itself within a legal and economic framework. Don't like the result, fix the frameworks.

A quote I never get tired of using is, "Apathy is the glove into which evil slips its hand." If you can, be the change.

Perverse incentives and people who have been perverted into pursuing such incentives. The main such incentive is "profit at any cost".

Because the people in charge are constrained to a narrow goal of bringing returns to shareholders

What kind of return? Long term or short term?

Destroying a company through mismanagement is decried as evil too.

Theoretically but there are far more examples of people getting extremely rich than suffering consequences, especially in a period where deregulation means the odds are overwhelmingly in favor of punishment being a tiny fraction of the profits.

Because it's only "evil" when an organization is large enough to invest in self protection mechanisms that dull the ability of other organizations to hold them accountable.

Most companies cut corners here and there, mess up something with compliance, accessibility or even break the law in small ways. But almost no companies can afford to defend themselves in court, pay settlements to make things go away, pay lobbyists/strategists to write laws etc...

"The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race."

Ted Kaczynski would roughly say that Big becomes evil because Big means standardization. If you have a large corporation you need to standardize processes in order to be efficient enough to justify your existence. This is directly at odds with individual dignity and autonomy.

Specifically see 111. onwards of Industrial Society and Its Future.

Not to fail in an ad hominem but I kinda give low value to the thinking of the Unabomber

He had a BA from Harvard and a PhD in Mathematics.

He was the victim of 200 hours of brutal psychological experimentation by Henry Murray. It turns out you can torture people past their breaking point and they may not recover.

It also turns out that doing this to people with greater-than-average intelligence can have proportionally greater-than-average consequences.

"200 hours of brutal psychological experimentation"

This is a conspiracy theory and a myth.

No it isn't. They were stress experiments and the goal was to humiliate him to see what his limits were and they're on the record.

The (often claimed) part of the story that's conspiracy theory is that the experiments are tied to MKULTRA, which I didn't claim at all, because there's no evidence of that.

If anything's a conspiracy theory, it's that the entirety of your comment history on Hacker News, spanning 2 years is to post solely on the topic of the Unabomber, and that you do the same thing on Reddit.

When I checked the comment history after reading that last line I couldn't believe my eyes.

I wonder if Dang considers it astroturfing if an intelligence agency does it? (edit: joke, but it is weird that your comment history is nothing but about Ted).

And for those of you who are wondering if the psych. experiments are real or not: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/06/harvard...

They've even suggested wikipedia edits on his page that were rejected. Single-issue posters in general are hard to deal with as far as community & discussion, but this is just weird.

I'm genuinely worried here.

It's strange that they suggest the alternate books at the same time. I just want to understand the agenda.

If you look at the reddit posts you'll see more of the same and in a number of boards. Deeper searches of the name turn up alt-right memes (triple ellipses, ok hand gestures) via car message boards. I'm assuming accelerationist?

What are you worried about? A debate about facts on a controversial topic with someone who is interested in it?

Why does everyone here seem so timid and silly? Is it really necessary to get your panties in a bundle about someone interested in this controversy? Do you find it....disturbing? lol.

This constitutes the "proof" that Kaczynski was somehow lastingly affected by the study? A writers theory in a book? The problem with that is that I can just as well present evidence that the book is completely inaccurate:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/09/letters...

Why would an intelligence agency do what I'm doing? What would they have to gain by posting this?? I'm trying to understand the humor, please help me.

Kaczynski has come out and said it wasn't stressful, and that it was mostly multiple choice questions.

Other participants in the study and other researchers involved have come out and stated that it was benign.

No other students involved reported any lasting issues.

We have on record the actual transcripts of Kaczynski's participation and it conclusively shows that it was benign--in fact it shows a calm and relaxed Kaczynski make the interviewer appear silly.

It's easy to see why people cling to the idea that Kaczynski must somehow have been affected by this study: it distracts their own and others attention away from his ideas and on to his personality. The reasons for his violence are entirely consistent with his ideology. There have been terrorists and revolutionaries throughout history who have committed far worse "crimes" and yet we don't need to pathologize them or their motivations.

"If anything's a conspiracy theory, it's that the entirety of your comment history on Hacker News, spanning 2 years is to post solely on the topic of the Unabomber, and that you do the same thing on Reddit."

How is that a "conspiracy theory"???

“There is an old saying in politics: ‘As soon as you start explaining, you have lost.’ It becomes incredibly difficult to counter misinformation with a point by point rebuttal—even when you are trying to bring science to bear. Any liar and propagandist knows this.” –Fox, Josh, “Meet the New Flack for Oil and Gas: Michael Moore,” The Nation, April 30, 2020.

This quote is especially on topic. Speaking of which, what do you think of that new Michael Moore doc "Planet of the Humans"?

"Not to fail in an ad hominem"

You mean TO fail in an ad hominem.

Yes, this is more or less correct. You should absolutely read Kaczynski's two books as well, "Technological Slavery" and "Anti-Tech Revolution."

This is a false premise. There is plenty of horrific abuse happening in small businesses, and at the local level. There are murders, rapes, and an endless stream of violations by management of their underlings. Evil exists at all scales.

However, the codification of certain motives–such as the alienating profit motive–encourages the otherwise less abusively included to collude in the ultimately exploitative program of their institution. The whole institution, then, resonates with this taint in outsiders' minds.

So, it's not that big always becomes evil, it's that "the bigger it is, the more likely you, u/bawana, will have heard of it."

Don't hesitate to read up on the ubiquity of "evil". I can get you started:

0. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/224552.Why_Does_He_Do_Th...

1. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17601.The_Will_to_Change

Also:

2. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34762552-algorithms-of-o...

Accountability. When humans turn into numbers for lack of personal interaction it is much easier to increment, decrement and decimate.

Economies of scale. 1000 people who were wronged by small companies are all complaining about different companies and it isn't newsworthy. 100 people who were wronged by a huge company are all part of the same protest and can make a lot more noise.

IMO, private companies do not necessarily become evil when they get big, but public companies cannot help but become evil, even when not all that big.

(My impression is that public companies are essentially required to maximize profit and shareholder value at any cost... at least at any cost that's technically legal and which wouldn't create significant blowback from society--blowback which would cut into those profits. Private companies owners have the freedom to follow their conscience and not sell their company's soul even if doing so would greatly increase profits.)

To sum it up, the imperative (or lack thereof) to maximize profits.

On what grounds do you say that public companies have to be unethical within legal limits? If there is any law which states that publicly owned companies have to maximise profit at any cost, then I am not aware of it.

The virtues and vices of any large group of people sort of coalesce into a big gestalt "culture." Companies hire for very specific virtues, related to competence and effectiveness, that they then amplify or dampen with metrics and training and so on.

Meanwhile, society and human nature have some baseline of pressures acting on them that amplify or dampen different sets of virtues and vices. Among these are a certain level of greed and cutthroatedness.

Companies rarely actively select against cupidity or avarice, and insofar as they do it's usually fine as long as it flows downward and enriches the company overall. So, as the company scales up it scales up in its capacity for evil too.

Though it's not as if "small" can't be evil as well. Small businesses are still part of a network of small businesses and subject to market forces that also select for and against different behaviors, many of which involve screwing over their workers.

Big organizations (public or private) are always dominated by internal politicking - there's a lot of scope for opportunistic behavior and very little transparency of any sort. Sometimes a whistleblower throws some light on the dynamics of what's going on inside the organization, as we saw here - but this is incredibly rare. It's a marvel that large-scale profit-seeking companies even manage to be halfway functional, but that's usually because the technical benefits of coordinating effort on a large scale overwhelm the organizational drawbacks; Amazon's logistics operations are actually a case in point.

In the grand scheme of evil, I'm not sure Amazon's firings ranks very highly.

In the lesser sceme? There are many evils past whatever is rank 1 evil, and they are not invalidated nor disappear because of rank 1.

In the lesser scheme of evils, Amazon firing employees who are unionizing to force the corporation to follow their environmental agenda, does not rank very high on the scale.

I think larger companies attract and depend on “yes people” to function. If everybody questioned everything, nothing would get done due to the increased coordination cost. In turn, that’s the kind of organization capable of executing on hard/amoral decisions, whereas a smaller company would probably just implode as critical people disagree and leave.

Child comments here are spot on. If you jam all of humanity through an economic blender, you will not come out with what you put in.

Surely it’s the other way around. The amount of evilness (or at least willingness to be evil) was probably baked in from the early history of each company. Then, the more evil ones tend to have advantages over the less evil ones, so the biggest companies are more likely to be evil.

There is a very common pattern where many members of a group (or organization) believe that protection of the group overrides normal ethical or moral responses. It goes way beyond big.

Their interests are not aligned with ours. If we had more democracy inside of companies, their interests would be more aligned with ordinary people.

Businesses don't have morals, or principles, or feelings. They have efficiencies and optimizations. Most businesses check that with culture. Business culture, when done well, is a reapplication of feelings (usually), principles (ideally), and morals (rarely) back atop the operating mechanisms of the business.

The man or woman at the top usually sets the high bar for what culture pertains, and how stringently it is brought to the rest of the business.

The bigger the business, the closer to baseline (just a machine) the business tends to drift. If the culture is not a strong one, or starts from a mostly mechanistic stance, then drifting to what we would consider evil in a person is easy.

This has little to do with capitalism, and everything to do with people functioning in groups. Because it happens with every activity that has more than one individual acting to move it forward.

Sports teams can be excellently principled, even moral, because their leadership applies these as a way to strengthen the team. (It's also a small group.)

This applies to towns full of people, to social groups and clubs, to "movements" on social media. We see it everywhere.

It's just particularly painful in circumstances like this one.

My bet is that it was always evil, no one noticed because they were distracted by the amazing customer focus and service.

Google may have touted the "do no evil" matra, but looking back, their plan was always to look over your shoulder. Nothing Google did was ever altruistic, and I think Amazon was and is the same way.

While Larry and Sergei were running Google, the company often (though not necessarily always) chose doing what was right over a more profitable wrong. A specific example was when they discovered the Chinese government was behind a major security breach targeting dissidents, they refused to continue to comply with Chinese censorship requirements.

However, as the founders lost interest in the day-to-day operation of the company, any pretense of being more than just another soulless profit machine was discarded.

It takes a village to raise a value based corporation. Many act like kids with no love, guidance.

Maybe it's that capitalism is incompatible with morality and the government isn't doing it's job to force behaviors that are necessary, but not aligned with capitalism.

It's not just capitalism. It's actually any society that is wholly reliant on subjugating individuals to produce goods and services for society.

People often gloss over the overwhelming theme in human history of work being extracted with ruthless optimization.

The pyramids got built for free, so did America, that whole Serf system, kids used to work, Colonization, and I think there’s people half way across the world making things for a few cents an hour as we speak.

If you want to know what’s happening, then just look at what already happened. War, technological advancement, and worker bondage are pocket aces you must to bet on when it comes to humanity.

Yep! Didn't mean to imply that there's necessarily any significant period where this wasn't happening. The opposite actually.

When we organize into groups this is what happens.

Any written set of laws or system rules are incompatible with morality. Morality cannot be formally described - there will always be ways to be true to the letter of the rules and still act immorally.

big always attracts the sociopaths [1]

[1] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/

It's not evil per se. They just have to serve the moloch:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

Big is winning at the game of capitalism.

Capitalists own capital. And they exploit labour.

This is just how capitalism works. It's about allocating capital in the most efficient way, and as far as Amazon is concerned workers are a dime a dozen. If workers complain, you can just fire them and hire someone else to do the job. This is especially true right now with the high unemployment rate.

If workers really want to improve their situation they would all need to unionize. It would require a significant portion of the workers to join, or else Amazon can just keep firing and replacing people. While I'm certainly pro-worker and pro-union, I think most of the demonstrations have been a tiny number of workers relative to Amazon's whole workforce.

Keep in mind that in the US there's a negative stigma attached to unionization thanks to many years of propaganda from "business leaders" who (obviously) are opposed to unionization because it eats into their profits.

It's not just propaganda. Many of us come from union backgrounds--either our parents, siblings, etc were blue collar workers or teachers or police. We've heard lots of stories of unions creating all kinds of nonsense inefficiencies and then when someone is being targeted by management, the union does little or nothing to protect them. My best friend taught in a low income school district, he was forced out because he wouldn't pass the basketball team when they wouldn't take tests or turn in homework; the union wouldn't protect him. My dad has a dozen such stories because he worked in factories since he left the family farm.

This doesn't mean unions can't work or that things would be better without them or that we shouldn't trend toward more unionization; it only means that there are real problems with unions and it's hard to trust pro-union people when they won't even acknowledge as much.

For me, I hear Europeans raving about their unions, so clearly unions can work, but if the pro-union side intends to get more political support, it needs to articulate what it is about American unions that aren't working very well and how they intend to address those issues. Chalking it up to "propaganda" comes off as patronizing and naive at best.

American unions, from my understanding, are less democratic and you lack the legal framework we have in parts of Europe which facilitates negotiations between unions and industry. Mind you, that framework didn’t come for free. It was fought for with blood sweat and tears.

Yeah, the propaganda has been super effective.

I don’t understand your comment in the context of this thread.

If you don't do it, your competitors will, and then eat you alive.

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