Same as when remembering the "Don't be evil" moto from Google.
I'm wondering if at some level we always knew it would end up like this. What kind of moral shield can we claim from this mess ? I'm afraid it's actually very little
That's the thing, you can only have that kind of number for so many years before you start really not wanting it to get down.
And chances are they have been buying quite a bit of lifestyle by borrowing against that number. Because selling would strip them of that voting control you pointed out. Then they can't really afford the number to go down, because the borrowing is effectively a cascade, so in reality they aren't anywhere close to free in their decisions.
(but I'd imagine that they are quite capable of deluding themselves into believing that the decisions they have to take to keep the number up are what they actually want)
They can indeed do with their toys whatever they want. They just don't want to put up with the bother of other investors trying to get rid of them, or the orange guy not sending them a Christmas card, or having a little less than infinite money.
Even if that control is only nominal, of it comes at the price of anticipating every wish institutional investors might have and obediently following them to the (unwritten) letter.
Why shouldn't this be classified as a mental illness? Imagine a monkey hoarding more food than they could possibly eat, to the point that it lies next to them rotting away, while members of their tribe are dying from starvation. We'd immediately say that there is something wrong with that money, but why do we feel it is normal that some humans hoard an insane amount of money?
Having a billionaire who believes they aren't rich enough and need to make more money is like an anorexia patient believing they aren't skinny enough and need to lose more weight.
It allows one to disavow any sense of social reciprocity after becoming obscenely rich.
I was curious, so I looked through his Wikipedia page -- it says he donated $1m to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society in 2009 (which helped his family move to USA when he was a child). Even the NYT article notes that "The gift is small, given Mr. Brin’s estimated $16 billion in personal wealth" :D
(this is like you making $1m annually and donating $62.50)
Brin didn't go to every high school: he went to the one he did.
And maybe he had a terrible experience and thought it contributed nothing to his success... but that's kind of a dick perspective at a certain level of wealth, especially if a school has needs (and they always do).
In anything less than a fully-equalizing society, philanthropy still has a place.
(Said as someone who thinks higher wealth brackets, including my own, should be taxed more heavily)
The parent commenter put it well, philanthropy is just the rich convincing [America] that things are fine.
Next time your company makes you sit through one of these trainings, for whatever so-called value, remember: the company doesn't believe in it. It only believes in making money.
I don't think it's a benefit to society that corporations behave like amoral sociopaths. It should be in their interest to correct that behavior.
However, my point is this (slightly exaggerated) timeline:
1. "Diversity makes us stronger! Discrimination is bad! Power to women! Respect gender identities! Stop fake news!".
2. Go do all these trainings to improve yourself on those topics. We mandate this because we care, it's our inner moral fiber!
3. (election happens, government changes)
4. Actually, forget all of the above. The previous administration forced us, we now believe otherwise and we're decommissioning all those programs. Sorry we forced you!
So in the end, no value a corporation espouses is genuine, unless it's making money. So all those trainings? Fake. All those "values"? Fake. Individuals within the company may care, but the company as a whole doesn't (and let's face it, the CEO and board don't either, and never did).
If we're feeling charitable, we could argue any given company reflects the current (corporate) consensus about what's good/safe for business and for society, but always dressed in the language of "we genuinely believe this, it's heartfelt, and we're also trend setters because we care!". It's this last part that is 100% fake. At best they do what's safe for the current social/business climate; nothing is "heartfelt". If it was heartfelt, they would stand up to the bullies instead of saying "we never believed it, it was forced on us by the past evil administration!".
This is the ultimate rub.
There are constructions that corporations can implement in order to enforce values, but they fundamentally mean giving up control.
Because at root, control by people prioritizing making money above all else is what causes these decisions to be reevaluated. Aka when following principles has a serious financial cost.
Public benefit corp, non-profit, independent board, etc. are options.
Google, Facebook, OpenAI... at this point it shouldn't surprise anyone when 'you were saying something about best intentions' goes awry.
Hell, OpenAI's wriggling to get out of its charter (and honestly, its difficulty in doing so) and NewsCorp's attempt to forcibly assign control counter to trust planning should point out that 'Yes, you can make it harder to be evil.'
Google just didn't.
A very deep level. The level that joked about "pride month" being thrown put like Christmas decorations on July 1st.
The more positive sentiment back then is that bigotry wouldn't ever be profitable again as the world experienced more experiences and built more empathy. Of course, I can only laugh hysterically at poor 2014/2015 me.
Roughly speaking, the folks who truly cared knew.
Corporations have obvious market/regulatory incentives to say they're good guys.
Most people want to believe such statements, with the immediate incentive being a happier worldview.
Incentives for an extremely powerful corporation to actually be good are far weaker.
Persecuting marginalized people and supporting authoritarian regimes is the logical path for capitalism, yes.
The titular event is an account of when one of Google's executives came to britain to meet him in person (at this point he's fighting extradition to the United States but has not yet sequestered himself inside the Ecuadorian embassy). From the conversation Assange gets the impression that the Google exec is acting as an unofficial envoy of the US state department in hopes of convincing him to "play ball" by publishing more and more information which will advance the arab spring narrative. The rest of the book is his own personal investigation into the incestuous links between US foreign policy, social media corporations and the so-called "arab spring".
He's a notorious fan of unbridled American imperial power and "realpolitik" and brought Kissinger in multiple times to Google for "fireside chat" sessions.
Which always went over very... poorly... with the broader set of employees who used to get seriously annoyed at this. The reception was never good.
>In the end, the most charitable interpretation of Assange’s “dissembling” as Mueller calls it, in the Seth Rich hoax is that he genuinely couldn’t rule out the possibility that Rich was his source. The Mueller report demolished that final moral refuge. Rich had been dead four days when Assange received the DNC files.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Seth_Rich#WikiLeaks_...
>As director Tennant has pointed out, secretary Powell presented evidence last week that Baghdad has failed to disarm its weapons of mass destruction, and willfully attempting to evade and deceive the international community. Our particular concern is that Saddam Hussein may supply terrorists with biological, chemical, or radiological material
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTDO-kuOGTQ
Anyways I might care more about Seth Rich "conspiracy theories" if anybody had bothered to investigate what happened to him instead of chalking it up as a "robbery gone wrong" (in which nothing of value was stolen) and calling it a day. In about six more months it will have gone unsolved for an entire decade.
https://www.newsweek.com/assange-google-not-what-it-seems-27...
Everyone always knew. The criticisms get lumped in with with the unreasonable nay-sayers because it makes them easier to dismiss.
The honest people I know working for obvious evil will acknowledge it and say they're just doing it for a paycheck. But this gives most people cognitive dissonance and they'll find better rationalization. See also: every cope post on hacker news by someone defending a company they're pretending not to work for.
Fascism is not to blame, it is a means to an end for the economy at large. Ultimately, the issue is uneven distribution of wealth and power.
This is not a useful definition of fascism, if that is what you mean. Fascism can exist entirely independently of capitalism, and has done.
Is it possible for fascism to thrive in a regulation-free capitalist world? Apparently yes. But they are not necessarily coupled.
It's a common misperception that fascism necessarily involves a merger of state and corporate power. Rather in a fascist regime, companies have no more choice in whether they further the state's aims and align with its goals than individual citizens have; they just have more devastating impacts.
As to whether Meta is aligning with the administration's goals, I don't know whether it is happening, consciously or unconsciously, in this case, but we know for certain there has been deliberate and conscious alignment elsewhere, because Zuckerberg made a big deal out of it.
It’s a lot easier to juice the profits of your megacorp when the power of government is vested in a single, friendly individual. Of course ten seconds of thinking exposes the fragility of such a system (they may turn on you, they may be replaced, they may destroy the entire country, etc). But Capitalism itself encourages short term, winner-takes-all all thinking. If you don’t cozy up to the wanna be autocrat and help them attain more power, you will be outcompeted by someone who does.
The path of a greedy corporate executive is practically pre-ordained in such a situation. The only question is whether the wanna be autocrat succeeds to become the real deal.
> This is not a useful definition of fascism, if that is what you mean. Fascism can exist entirely independently of capitalism, and has done.
I think you should look up the definition and history of fascism. You're correct about totalitarism, but fascism is by definition capitalist.
What do you mean? The defining feature of capitalism is private/corporate ownership of the means of production which is a core part of fascism as well.
Fascist corporatism is as radically opposed to capitalism as Leninist “democratic centralism” is (and, arguably, despite the opposing rhetorical stance, in very much the same substantive direction in practice.)
I think it is you who should look up the definition and history of fascism.
Fascism usually exists in a capitalist context — but "by definition"? No.
Because there is literally no evidence he ever said it. It's a widespread but false attribution, as I outlined in another comment.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46239664
This attribution leads to a truly fundamentally broken reduction of what Mussolini actually thought fascism was (though his own definition of it was largely pseudointellectual drivel).
But even then, "corporatism" doesn't mean "capitalism" at all.
I suppose you mean this famous quote:
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power"
I have news: this is bullshit.
This quote is literally falsely attributed to Mussolini. There is no evidence whatsoever that he said it. It's also somewhat at odds with things he did say (though most of that was pseudointellectual gibberish) and the way he ruled.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Benito_Mussolini
It's simply wrong. It is one of the great falsely-attributed quotations that will not die.
https://blog.skepticallibertarian.com/2013/02/07/fake-quote-...
It's central to the 21st century misunderstanding of Fascism and it is the convenient misattribution that will not die. (Also what I was referring to up thread)
And what "corporatism" means, in a Fascist context, is not what western readers think it might mean. It is a term talking about collective organisation, not capitalism.
It's part of why the word "fascist" is so completely blunted to the point of uselessness in US debate.
That is not something I wrote.