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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

> Something is seriously broken with computers and we can't seem to face it.

It's not computers that are the problem, it's people.

We've normalized (and even embraced) the situation where relationship between businesses and customers is adversarial. The phenomenon you're describing, known as "banner blindness", is just brain filtering out noise, but the thing is, that noise didn't get there by accident.

What I can't wrap my head around is, businesses are run by people, and all these entrepreneurs are making explicit decisions to abuse their fellow human beings to smaller or greater degree, and everyone seems fine with it.

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> What I can't wrap my head around is, businesses are run by people, and all these entrepreneurs are making explicit decisions to abuse their fellow human beings

This is a thought I want to pull on

I have a view that organisations, with their network of misaligned incentives, mean that companies act something like an alien lifeform. Something with a decentralised brain, unable to plan beyond immediate stimuli

Companies consume and self-cannibalise. They are both aggressively rational in pursuit of profit but irrational when it comes to preserving their ecosystems

Many companies look like groups of people where nobody has total control. Everyone is reacting to some stakeholder, even the CEO is terrified of "the shareholders". So these organisations cut off healthy limbs (layoffs), engage in lurid rituals (AI), and wastefully destroy the natural resources of the humans who work for them

I first heard this idea in a James Bridle lecture, where he suggested that the strange behaviour of companies was a good starting point for understanding what an alien lifeform might behave like. And he observed the ways that humans and machines now mirror each other.

Inside our society, controlled by these aliens, humans act like machines (Taylorism at work, self-censorship for algorithms at play). Machines act like humans (AI, spam, computer programs mediating relationships).

Underneath it is a frantic need to quantize everything so it can be dominated

Yes!

Corporations were the first paperclip maximizers.

This reminded me of an old documentary about corporations: "If we look at the corporation as a legal person, it exhibits all the characteristics of a psychopath" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5hEiANG4Uk

I remember recently they polled workers about AI pressure: "the AI doesn't work very well, but my boss wants to see me using it." They polled the boss: "I didn't say they had to use it, they're choosing to use it and this'll look good to the executive". The executive: "well this costs a bunch but it'll look good to shareholders and we should encourage more use so it'll look even better." The shareholders: "do we look like we give a shit?"

Out of all of them, I'd assume the shareholders to be wrong.

Look at the state of the world. Yes, you do look like you give a shit.

Also there's an effect here where if just 10% of shareholders care about this it still makes sense to go for it if you think you can be faster than your competition.

Can you name any shareholders of Microsoft who pushed for renaming Office to Copilot?

Corporations are too complex for any single person to truly control. Attention of leadership necessarily dilutes with each additional layer of management. The result is this weird corporate chaos where nobody is completely in charge because everybody has to take charge of something, however small, to progress, or the whole could accomplish nothing at all.

The result is this flailing tentacled monster where each appendix seems to have a mind of its own and sometimes littlw regard for even the other parts of its own body.

All-time classic stack overflow thread where someone is asking why everyone seems to ignore a large banner on top of his page that strongly resembles an ad: https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/120541/why-do-people-...

> all these entrepreneurs are making explicit decisions to abuse their fellow human beings to smaller or greater degree, and everyone seems fine with it.

Local incentives. Every single person and entity is just maximizing their gain against the rules and rewards. The way you become really powerful and rich is to create an organization where all the local incentives keep funneling to you, sitting at the top.

> What I can't wrap my head around is, businesses are run by people, and all these entrepreneurs are making explicit decisions to abuse their fellow human beings to smaller or greater degree, and everyone seems fine with it.

This is a simplistic way to think about it. Even the most altruistic physician needs to advertise their services if they hope to make a living out of it. Even the best film maker, the best actor needs to "hit the circuits" to promote their movie.

"Make and they'll come" is only possible if you're already successful. Apple can chose not to advertise, since they are Apple (although they do plenty of advertising themselves).

The physicians doesn't need to shove ads in front of people's faces in order for people in need of a physician to find him.

> "Make and they'll come" is only possible if you're already successful.

That's just because your competitors are already shoving ads in front of your potential customer's faces. If they weren't allowed to do that you would be fine without doing it as well. It's the definition of a zero sum game.

> businesses are run by people, and all these entrepreneurs are making explicit decisions to abuse their fellow human beings

What they do is actually a robbery of others' time, privacy, screen space, money, and freedom. All for profit.

I mean. That's how profiteering works for the most part. Extracting wealth from people who don't know better is many times easier than creating more wealth for everyone.

The relationship was always adversarial for all history. Bakers used to mix sawdust with flour to profit more. The only counter has been regulation and oversight.

Bad actors have always existed but that doesn't mean that the proportion of bad actors and the effects they can have hasn't changed. "normalized" is the key world in gp's comment here - many people can't seem to even imagine a world without ads from the comments this subject gets whenever it comes up.

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