[scandox]

Slightly OT but the significant thing about "Don't be Evil" is that Google had already taken the fundamental choices that were evil. The slogan itself is blatantly self-conscious - an acknowledgement of the insane power that would inevitably accumulate as a result of the business model they were pioneering.

[hn_throwaway_99]

> The slogan itself is blatantly self-conscious - an acknowledgement of the insane power that would inevitably accumulate as a result of the business model they were pioneering.

I think that's historically false. At the time, "Don't be evil" seemed like, more than anything, an acknowledgement that Google wanted to have a corporate culture that was different from Microsoft, which at the time was the 800 pound gorilla in tech and was widely seen as being "evil" (I may be dating myself, but does anyone else remember the Bill Gates/Borg avatar that was the standard for Microsoft stories on Slashdot back in the day?) Google was founded in 1998, right when the US v Microsoft antitrust suit was filed.

One could certainly argue Google now engages in some of the monopolistic tactics that originally got Microsoft in hot water (with MS is "everything is part of the OS", with Google it's "everything can be part of the search results page"), but I think you're reading too much into what was originally behind the "Don't be evil" slogan.

[scandox]

I would have certainly felt the same way until recently but the timeline laid out in Shoshana Zuboff's book on Surveillance Capitalism made me re-evaluate that.

[stjohnswarts]

I think that’s overly pessimistic. I think it may have helped delay the inevitable as it was in the back of their minds. I didn’t really completely give up on them until they renounced the slogan. It was a sad day and made it dead obvious they had gone full corporate.

[toyg]

> an acknowledgement of the insane power that would inevitably accumulate

That's overthinking it. "Don't be evil" is just the kind of slogan that could emerge in the '90s, when it became clear that good and bad were not linked to a specific organizational form or trait - you could have bad capitalism and good collectivism as well as the other way around. There was a feeling that "big business" was bad but "medium business" could be a force for good, you only had to stay decent and things would work out. And of course the 'net would have rejected any clipper-chip and not replicate the historical corruption of the real world.

Those were very naive times, in retrospect, but I don't blame the original googlers for believing in a simplistic view of the world. I blame Eric Schmidt and his sponsors for hiding their evil behind that line. Modern Google is basically all Schmidt.

[malikNF]

I see. Now that makes it worse.

[taylorfinley]

I've long thought of it as a big-brothery admonishment: "Don't be evil... because we'll know about it." Sort of a Santa Claus Is Coming To Town style cutesy celebration of tyranny.