"...Google execs all work for their shareholders, in a psychotic "market system" in which the myth of "fiduciary duty" is said to require companies to hurt us right up to the point where the harms they inflict on the world cost them more than the additional profits those harms deliver"
There is no legal requirement to maximize shareholder value. The very idea is an economic theory popularized by Friedman and his students.
It gained popularity in corporate governance since then but it’s not a legal requirement it’s a shareholder preference. But that preference is violated all the time.
People often cite a 1919 era case from Henry ford because it has a pithy statement but the court in that case explicitly upheld many of the decisions Ford made that violated the principle.
That is, there is no law or precedent that requires corporate officers to only consider shareholders.
It depends on your legal jurisdiction but it means COs need to act in the corporation's best interest and not their own. In some places, that requires them to take shareholders' interests into account (especially for mergers or takeovers) but also the employees, consumers or creditors. In the US and notably Delaware, courts generally value shareholder value over anything else.
Considering the vast majority of US corporations are incorporated in Delaware, I think it's accurate to say most US companies only aim to maximize shareholder value.
Legally, sure. (there's a citation, a case between craigslist and a minority shareholder (ebay I think?), that backs up your argument about the common trope).
But when stock valuations are completely disconnected from fundamentals like earnings, then regardless of the legality we're kind of circling back to the market pushing that dynamic, aren't we? It's like the market is no longer even optimizing for short term gains per se (eg quarterly earnings), but rather for whatever memes might boost their meme stock. Sometimes this is [still] quarterly earnings, and sometimes it's about the perceived size of the market or how they're cozying up to the fascists in power. So for public companies, it's not like major shareholders, the board, or management really have the ability to work towards longer term plans that go against this dynamic.
It saddens me to see this flagged, I did not have any predefined opinion about the author or the medium, but I did enjoy reading a text with a bit of character - which is becoming rare in these times of LLM omnipresence. And whether we like the form or not, this is an opinionated piece like many others we see on HN, with a thesis that I find pretty relevant. Beyond saddened, I am actually worried to see the HN community dismiss this type of post rather than discussing it like others.
I worked for an ad-tech company for 3 months. I could not wait to get out of there.
It became clear to me quickly that the data these people wanted to collect on anyone and everyone could be used against me should they want to - not that I was doing anything questionable, but it was just creepy as F**.
The final straw for me was when they got some kind of contract with a major hotel chain and were all-too-giddy to listen in on the smart TVs in every room. I did not want to help them further any of their agendas, so I bailed on that place. Fortunately this was many years ago when dev jobs were easy to come by, I had 3 offers in a week.
Is there anything that Doctorow actually enjoys and likes? I used to read his blog but it's constant negativity. He is not wrong at all but it's just not good for our mental health either.
He enjoys writing [1], takes pride in making his collages [2], reviews sci-fi books every once in a while [3][4], and oh wow what is he doing [5]:
> Oh, nothing, just individually locating and downloading 9.5gb worth of (200+) high-rez (3600px wide) scans out of a 16th C book of extremely satisfying machine from the Library of Congress, one at a time, labeling them, and putting them in a folder for future collage work.
>The harms of mass commercial surveillance were never hard to foresee.
I don't think I've ever been harmed by this stuff. Google no doubt knows a lot about me as I use their stuff and I imagine they'd show me a targeted ad if I didn't have an ad blocker but not much harm there really?
Has any Google user been actually harmed like that?
It doesn't harm individuals, unless you speak against the government and they don't like you. Then you are in trouble, since it becomes very easy to find you or find something against you. This is how it harms the freedom of speech and democracy. Everyone should have privacy to protect the activists and journalists. It’s sort of like freedom of speech is necessary not just for journalists, but for everyone, even if you have nothing to say.
I will give you the near monopoly on things like advertising pushes up the prices of things like hotels as they have to give a percentage to Google and similar.
You’d still be having fascism here even if the internet didn’t exist. The most reliable way to prevent the rise of the far right is to implement robust safety nets and low inequality, to reduce status anxiety and grievance. Support for such measures (welfare, healthcare, unionization, high taxes etc) is usually low among Americans. Eventually rents/healthcare/tuitions outpace income, so people become desperate and start voting for strongmen.
I didn't flag it because it might be the first original thought that blog has had in years, but I totally understand the impulse to flag pluralistic without even reading it.
HN has ads (job ads for YC companies). When I see people post these deranged takes about ads on HN, I always ask myself: Do they not notice this--a common criticism of ads is that they blend too much into the real content, and this is nowhere more true then on HN--or do words just not mean anything to them, do they just mindlessly repeat memes rather then thinking about what these ideas mean for their own life? Is a sentence which to me expresses an idea to them more akin to a drug that gives them a kind of moral high? Because if I thought that ads were fascist, I'd look for a forum that doesn't have any, like Lobsters[1].
Ads aren’t inherently fascist but the modern implementation of ads put forth by companies like meta and google are. Having terms that allow companies to spy on your daily routine and habits in order to sell that info to companies that would then push their products to you is dystopian and fascist. This is not a simple billboard. The mechanism that ad companies use infringes upon our basic rights for privacy with manufactured consent.
Nailed it.