[benterix]

> Companies do not have ethics, only interests.

While that's certainly true (although an simplification - they are just managed by people with low ethics), we can do better. If I behaved like managers of Google, Meta or Microsoft, I'd be ashamed of myself.

[sph]

I despise this philosophy. Megacorps are shit, so we should be better than them? It's a popular theme because it makes one feel like they have control over the world around them: they just have to be better than it.

No. I shouldn't have to work harder myself to somehow cancel out the evil in the world. Because if we were less cowards and calling them for what they are - evil - they wouldn't hold so much power over us.

Reminds me of that scene from Mr. Inbetween about bullies. Bullies exist because we're told to ignore them and get punished if we retaliate, so they get away with it.

--

But without getting sidetracked. Companies have no emotion, no particular sense of ethics, and least of all, they don't need people to defend them, unless they're called a lawyer.

[js8]

> No. I shouldn't have to work harder myself to somehow cancel out the evil in the world.

Not only you should, but you should also support countermeasures that make it harder for evil, so you eventually wouldn't have to work harder.

If there is one reason, do it for your kids, to show them that a better world is possible.

[hilbert42]

"Because if we were less cowards and calling them for what they are - evil - they wouldn't hold so much power over us."

Exactly, if we held public demonstrations outside the offices of book publishers, Sony, RIAA, and similar greedy bastards, and it became the norm to snub our noses at their employees then things would soon change.

For instance, we ought to be demonstrating in the streets over how these bastards are hounding the Internet Archive, but we're not.

If we were, then these companies would quickly change their tune and think twice before launching such lawsuits.

Trouble is we're not out there demonstrating. And it's only a tiny minority of the population who actually care about such things—those of us posting here on HN etc.—who do. We're such a small force we couldn't escape from a wet paper bag on the deck of a sinking ship let alone take on the might of these greedy corporations.

Cory Doctorow has said this many times although he's not been as blunt about it as I am. I've followed this for decades and I reckon it's essentially a lost cause.

Even if we could get politicians to agree to change laws they could only do so around the edges as they've signed international treaties, Berne, WIPO, etc. which prohibit signatories from exiting. Any country that left the treaties would have sanctions placed against it.

These corporations have not only won but they've implemented a system that's irreversible, like a ratchet, every one of their cog-like actions squeezes us consumers further and there's fuck-all we can do about it.

[deltarholamda]

Agree very much with this. To mix metaphors, megacorps see you as cattle to be fleeced. Any public good they might do is a public relations stunt or to take advantage of something, e.g. open source development. Yes, there are people in charge, but their duty is to the corporation. Corporations do not have ethics. They cannot have ethics.

A person should be ethical to another person, because that person can reciprocate. A person should only interact with a corporation in terms of legal frameworks, which are also amoral, because that is the only "moral" framework within which a corporation can act. The fictional personhood of a corporation is just that, a fiction.

(There is somewhat of a sliding scale on this, in that a small corporation formed to protect a fruit stand or something is certainly not Microsoft and shouldn't be treated as a Microsoft.)

[thfuran]

>Megacorps are shit, so we should be better than them?

To do otherwise plainly makes you shit as well.

[cryptonector]

> Because if we were less cowards and calling them for what they are - evil - they wouldn't hold so much power over us.

three years of covid nonsense -> crickets

video download speed throttle -> rage

Something is wrong here.

[midoridensha]

That's because there was a very good reason for that Covid "nonsense" as you put it: reducing infection rates and keeping healthcare systems from collapsing. If you disagree with that, then I'm sorry you aren't living in reality and believe in idiotic conspiracy theories and microchips in vaccines and the like.

(That said, there really was some real nonsense, such as certain dumb countries that penalized people for going on bicycle rides in rural areas by themselves.)

There's no good-for-society reason behind throttling video download speeds.

[cryptonector]

> There's no good-for-society reason behind throttling video download speeds.

Google certainly would disagree. Their argument (I assume) would go something like: if people don't pay for content up front and also don't watch the ads then these services can't exist, therefore if these services existing is better for society than them not existing, then it follows that <DRM, etc., fill in the blank> is good for society.

You might not like it but a great deal of our economy is built on that premise, so a lot of people and companies have a stake in holding onto such arguments.

Such an argument is a serious and honest one, and should be responded to with some care. Outright dismissal is not interesting.

> That's because there was a very good reason for that Covid "nonsense" as you put it: reducing infection rates and keeping healthcare systems from collapsing.

That definitely turns out to have been false. The models were vastly wrong. We definitely have differential handling of the pandemic, from Sweden, Africa, and some states in the U.S. for example, and those that went all out did not do better than those that didn't.

Many people warned that this was overblown, but also many people greatly enjoyed exercising authority, and others greatly enjoyed a sense of moral virtue ("saving grandma") that was unjustified.

[rolph]

If I behaved like managers of Google, Meta or Microsoft, not only would i be ashamed of myself; I would not leave my lunch or coffee out of my sight.

[ohgodplsno]

Allow me to wire 500k+ in your account every year, and you'll see that your morals are easily bought.

[mrguyorama]

No, fuck that. There are many people I know who have explicitly rejected a payoff to do the right thing.

If your morals go away when they actually matter, you didn't actually have morals, you just had an excuse why you weren't already rich. A person is judged by what they do, explicitly and especially when it actually matters.