It's evil.
No one is trying to do anything evil. Every step is individually quite reasonable and well within ethical bounds. The issue is that you can produce systems comprised solely of reasonable and ethical decisions that nonetheless yield an outcome that every actor would describe as bad.
That is a useful way to interpret this situation and others, because you don’t waste your time looking for a boogeyman to call Evil and instead it prompts you to zoom out and operate on the bigger picture.
My dream is "game theory" taught in schools, so we can all more productively discuss public policy, etc.
The field of "mechanism design" may interest those to whom this speaks to. From Wiki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_design):
> Mechanism design is a branch of economics, social choice theory, and game theory that deals with designing games (or mechanisms) to implement a given social choice function. Because it starts at the end of the game (the optimal result) and then works backwards to find a game that implements it, it is sometimes called reverse game theory.
But I think it's a stretch to say nobody is being evil or unethical, because there's no consensus about what those entail.
It’s a coordination problem.
> How long must it go on
They can last indefinitely at immense cost.
> until we say "No, this is evil."?
Call it evil for as long as you want, especially if you’d prefer it remain unsolved. When you feel like solving it, a different framing will be much more useful.
Now I'm not saying thats what they did, perhaps they were scumbags, but its possible they did try to do what I said above and had the best intentions.
Asking everyone to "play nice" or "don't be evil" also often does not work in practice. I mean I'd love it if it did, but such is life.