Herein lies the crux. We want to live in a democracy, but fundamentally undemocratic entities run the world and act on it in ways none of the citizens decided. The obvious next step is to dismantle those undemocratic places, or at least reduce their actions to what citizens decide, but we're far from it.
If the clear response is to fire those employees, the clear response to this should be to fire google
I could not disagree more strongly with the notion that democracy should be the mechanism by which businesses should be run.
Democracy says which choices we're okay with, but businesses and people should totally have the autonomy to decide which of the allowed choices to go with.
We become ruled by socialopathic oligarchy, in the form of corporations instead of a few individuals. And no one executive can be held accountable because they're large organizations that diffuse responsibility.
Once I was a young conservative who thought these ideas were crazy Hollywood tropes. As I get older I see the pattern manifest more and more in the USA.
I believe you are talking about "representative democracy" specificly. Besides from this and "Direct democracy", there seems to be dozens of more types, according to Wikipedia.
"Forcing people into jobs they don't want, working on things they don't want, forbidding tpem to talk about it, all because they need money to eat and have a roof" is not letting people do their thing.
The whole point of a democracy is that the people are the priority; everything else is a tool to further the people's lives. Companies must be tools to make the lives of people, both outside and inside, better. Otherwise when it decides to do what it wants with no counter-power it is not furthering democracy.
Remember: businesses are not people.
Furthermore, the fact that you are not free to act with impunity, and do not have the right to demand that others indulge your preferences and suppress their own, is not in of itself anti-democratic. In a free society other people also have the right to structure their affairs as they see fit. And you have the right to choose to engage with them, or not.
What you are doing is treating some of those consequences as "force" and others as not.
For example, if you need money to pay your property tax, you need to earn that money somehow. Or face the consequence of losing your home. No one is forcing you to stay in that home, leave, but that's pretty brutal thing to not call "forced." But you can see paying property tax is optional as long as you accept the consequences.
So if you aim to have financial security with a median lifestyle, or even better (e.g. single income), that's easy to do in software. Chasing maximum money is a choice. It seems pretty out of touch when looking at any other job to use "well they need to pay the bills" to excuse behavior in this field.
How you do so is up to you. If you want to start a commune, go for it. If you prefer to work at FAANG, that’s cool too. We are very lucky to find ourselves in a society where we have this choice, and we should be careful about the extent to which we impinge on others’ ability to choose as well
As another poster correctly pointed out, no one is forcing you to specifically support your own survival at Google. People choose to work at Google because of greed and a desire for prestige, and because it is much easier to benefit from what already exists than it is to create something yourself. This is all perfectly rational, but framing the issue in lamentations about “force” and “democracy” is nothing but crocodile tears.
Plus if property taxes and so forth really were the issue, there is already a democratic remedy for the problem. Taxes are instituted by our society democratically, and they can be removed democratically as well. But I suspect that this would not rectify the OP’s concern, because it’s not really about democracy or freedom. Instead it’s about greed and envy for what others have that they do not.
The truth is most people when they say "I am forced to do X" there is really an implicit unstated "So I can have a, b and c".
The fact that you value a, b and c differently from the person does not mean it was not forced from their perspective.
I basically agree with you about the phenomenon you’re pointing out, so please don’t take this as overly salty, but:
Just because I believe that I can fly doesn’t make it so. So too is true of people believing that they are “forced” to work at Google, no matter what they might perceive.
Now, if you want this argument to be complete, you also need to specify what doesn't count as "forced" in your opinion. Otherwise you can pick any arbitrary human interaction and deem it as "forced" and you end up with some pretty weird consequences.
In this particular case, you think a Google engineer was essentially doing forced labor. Google being Google and not McDonalds, it would follow that all or the vast majority of salaried employees are doing forced labor. Did I get this right? Where exactly do you draw the line?
What you need judge two things, the validity of the consequences avoided and goals which is subjective and whether there are alternatives to the same goals that have acceptable consequences.
This is not the point of democracy. The point of democracy is that the priorities of the people are the priority.
For instance, it is entirely possible to have a democracy that agrees that we should perform human sacrifice once a month, so long as the majority of its constituents agree that that's their priority.
Democracy provides a vehicle for a populace to enshrine their values into law. It does not define those values (such as valuing human flourishing or freedom of choice), that's up to us to build on top of it.
Nobody wants to live in a totalizing democracy.
For 99% of human history, they did actually.
But that whole argument is a red herring. OP is dead right: If your megacorp aids genocide, there should be consequences. Firing employees who dare to make noise about it is just peak dystopia shit and we'd be mugs to accept it.
No. Do you think, in mediaeval France, the King cared about the internal relations of the family of some random townsperson or peasant? Do you think any of the aristocracy cared? Do you think the Church cared? No.
And that is the norm of human history – unless it gets to the point they have to pay attention to it, what ruler wants to be bothered with the details of the private family lives of their millions of subjects?
This whole 'keeping kids behind closed doors all their childhood' thing is a WEIRDness, and very much not the norm.
It's ok to be wrong sometimes you know, as long as you learned something...
“Communal environments”? In many societies, the primary unit has been the extended/multigenerational family not the nuclear family, yes. But your grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins are not the demos any more than your parents and siblings are. The point I made stands, since I said “family” not “nuclear family”.
Most of human history has been hunter-gatherer societies-many of which are composed of small units federated into larger ones. The members of the smallest units were usually closely related to each other by blood or partnering (but again, an extended/multigenerational family rather than a nuclear one). And my point stands there too - do you care what goes on in the friendly group that lives a couple of hills over?
It's ok to be wrong sometimes you know…
The democracy is not simply everyone in a country deciding on everything down to the minutiae of individual lives. Some political lessons are missing here. Democracy is about the people who are subject of a situation being also actors of the decisions on this specific matter. Nobody is saying how you should behave in your bedroom.
Somewhat true, but not relevant to the point at hand. The historical family was typically run in an autocratic fashion by the elders, without even a vague trace of democracy. For that matter, there are still plenty of places in the world where families are run that way.
Is this a serious comment or flame bait?
Instead, perhaps you're disagreeing with my assertion that most families in the past were autocratic, and that in many cultures they still are. A link to a lengthy Wikipedia article does nothing to refute the claim. You're going to have to be more specific.
Most historical families in Europe, India, and China were run by the elders on autocratic lines, and those constitute, and pretty much always have constituted, the majority of families on Earth (at least since the population boom brought on by the invention of agriculture).
Indeed, in classical Roman civilization, the paterfamilias could kill any junior member of the family at any time, for any reason he chose. Your own article even mentions that.
Sounds pretty autocratic to me.
May I introduce you to the legions of anti democratic groups vying to do just so?
For example, in your world, as long as enough people agree with me, I can decide that the couch in your living room should actually be in the kitchen. After all, one of the most widespread place in the world is your housing and in todays world it’s fundamentally undemocratic.
But simply sticking to companies/businesses, how are startups supposed to work? You start a business, hire 2 people to help you out, and suddenly they can democratically take over the entire company? How is that a solution to anything?
de Tocqueville spoke on this in the 19th century, and highlights exactly why liberal democracy has codified bills of rights limiting the scope of what the masses can enforce on others.
You should learn about the difference between personal property and private property.
Having democratic control of what's currently private, non-personal property has clear benefits to society which obviously don't apply to personal property. Arguing that people would want to encroach on your rights to enjoy personal property is a big strawman.
> You start a business, hire 2 people to help you out, and suddenly they can democratically take over the entire company?
How to get from our current situation A, to our democratic utopia B is of course not something that we can make justice to in a brief comment, but:
Instead of thinking "hire 2 people", if you need support of more workers think: "cooperative"
If instead of support from more workers what you need is capital investment for the public good, think of partial state-ownership in your enterprise (which would be a mean to ensure oversight and making sure that funds are not wasted... Which should already be the case when we talk about subsidies and state grants in our society)
> as long as enough people agree with me
You need to learn about the different decisions methods. Votes is actually the worst because it divides people between opposing groups. Before voting, it is always better to reach for consentment (everyone agrees), and if not, consensus (noone strongly disagrees). Rules of the society have to be set by these methods first.
> But simply sticking to companies/businesses, how are startups supposed to work?
Why are startups suppososed to work ? Do they help the democracy, or the people in it ? Why does a startup need capital ? Who owns the capital ? Why do people need a salary ?
The capitalist system is the reason startups are what they are. In any democratic system where resources are shared, an assembly of people working on something wouldn't struggle like that.
We can certainly argue competence and alignment. - And soon enough we reach the issue of who the voters choose to represent them...
The whole point of a democracy is that people are the priority, all else is a tool for furthering the betterment of society. That a company can decide how it works without input of its workers means it has stopped being a tool and is now an end in itself; that's progressively leaving the territory of democracy.
Also that different forms of corporations do already exist (in the US), including not-for-profit, cooperative / worker-owned, mutual / member-owned, state-owned corporations and more. So that, yes, even Google could have been founded under a different form of corporation... Oh wait, it was - see its governance and the original purpose for it.
I'm not forgetting owners, quite the contrary.
> Oh wait, it was - see its governance and the original purpose for it.
Who cares what the original governance and purpose was ? Does it has any single impact on how things are run today ?
I'm not sure you understand that communism, like any ideology, has multiple currents. The most common one today is trotskyism which specifically rejects the notion of bosses in the movement and only uses self-organization. Anarchim is also another system that works. Unfortunately no capitalist system will gently give away its power over the people for new forms of governance to be used.
Governments and companies are different things entirely.
These folks can choose not to work for Google. They (and we) can't just impulsively choose to stop dealing with the United States of America
Well, of course you could obtain citizenship in another country and move there, but that's much more difficult than just finding another job, particularly if you are a Googler. I doubt they'll be unemployed for long.