| It seems to me that the basically religious concept of "evil" causes a lot of confusion. What Google, Facebook, and Amazon are is primarily extremely powerful. The U.S. government, say, does a lot of nasty, undesirable things; it also does a lot of benevolent, desirable things. Working in these institutions means, to varying degrees, aligning yourself with the motives of extremely powerful entities. But of course it also means potentially influencing that power in a way that you and your peers would recognize as benevolent. Neither Google, Facebook, nor Amazon have core missions that are obviously bad, i.e., they are not directly opposed to a free society, they are not fundamentally violent, they are basically not the Nazi Party. But they do share a core mission that is enormously expansive, kind of like the East India companies. Operationally, they are very likely to use some foul tactics in order to grow and compete. As long as we have the global kind of capitalism where for-profit corporations grow into hyperobjects, it seems like we will have a top layer of quasi-monopolies using information technology and capital accumulation to dominate. And according to the ideology, you can't really stop that without violating the principles of liberty. Basically to prevent such formations you need a powerful state, and that state will itself be such a formation, except with elections (hopefully, and maybe only nominally). You might even need a global state-like entity, right? If we use the word evil to describe Google, Facebook, and Amazon, I think we should rather say that the structure of capitalism is evil, and that'll get you into trouble. Especially because this is a forum topically and structurally centered on the very impulse to launch exponentially growing IT firms. This site is a promotional and educational wing of Y Combinator, which in its essence desires to be a recursively powerful generator of new mega-corporations, structurally bound to the multiplication of accumulated capital. So, umm, yeah. |