Why are so many leaders in tech evil?
Why are so many leaders in tech evil?
I remember when I was growing up, tech industry has so many people that were admirable, and you wanted to aspire to be in life. Bill Gates, founders of Google Larry Page, Sergey brin, Steve Jobs (wasn't perfect but on a surface level, he was still at least a pretty decent guy), basically everyone involved in gaming from Xbox to PlayStation and so on, Tom from MySpace... So many admirable people who were actually really great....
Now, people are just trash. Look at Mark Zuckerberg who leads Facebook. Dude is a lizard man, anytime you think he has shown some character growth he does something truly horrible and illegal that he should be thrown in prison for. For example, he's been buying up properties in Hawaii and basically stealing them from the locals. He's basically committing human rights violations by violating the culture of Hawaiian natives and their land deeds that are passed down from generation to generation. He has been systematically stealing them and building a wall on Hawaii, basically a f*cking colonizer. That's what the guy is. I thought he was a good upstanding person until I learned all these things about him
Current CEO of Google is peak dirtbag. Dude has no interest in the company or it's success at all, his only concern is patting his pockets while he is there as CEO, and appeasing the shareholders. He has zero interest in helping or making anyone's life pleasant at the company. Truly a dirtbag in every way.
Current CEO of Home Depot, which I now consider a tech company because they have moved out of retail and into the online space and they are rapidly restructuring their entire business around online sales, that dude is a total piece of work conservative racist. I remember working for this company, This dude's entire focus is eliminating as many people as feasibly possible from working in the store, making their life living heck, does not see people as human beings at all. Just wants to eliminate anyone and everyone they possibly can, think they are a slave labor force
Elon musk, we all know about him, don't need to really say much. Every time you think he's doing something good for society, he proves you wrong And does the worst thing he can possibly do in that situation. It's like he's specifically trying to make the world the worst place possible everyday
Like, damn. What the heck happened to the world? You know? I thought the tech industry was supposed to be filled with these brilliant genius people who are really good for the world...
Bill Gates was a huge piece of shit in his heyday, rivalling the Zuckerberg and Musks of today, and Jobs was an abusive narcissist shitcunt on a surface level.
Tom and Zuckerberg both came from the same time. Zuck was shit since day 1, today has nothing to do with it.
I think you just have some very rose tinted glasses.
Going back even further is assholes like Edison and Ford.
It's hard to beat ignoring doctors and not treating your very treatable form of cancer, then using your wealth to get a liver transplant and then dying anyway. Dude committed manslaughter because of his own arrogance.
Bill Gates was a huge piece of shit in his heyday, rivalling the Zuckerberg and Musks of today,
Bill Gates was a ruthless businessman destroying competition but as far as I know he didn't support fascists or facilitate pogroms.
Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter has done far more harm to our societies than whatever shady tactics Bill Gates used.
Not to take away from Zuckerberg, Musk, and the less-known people in tech like Thiel, but Bill Gates was and is a huge piece of shit who harmed more than just his competitors. Among other things he convinced the world that we need IP and patents for covid vaccines instead of sharing them freely, which alone cost countless lives around the world. I don't even want to know what other ills his "philanthropy" has and will cause. https://newrepublic.com/article/162000/bill-gates-impeded-global-access-covid-vaccines
Adding to that, Bill Gates put quite some effort into image building and mostly succeeded.
Before Microsoft, programmers were treated like factory workers by HP and IBM and setup in large open floor rooms like a secretary pool from the 1960's. Gates thought programmers were important and gave every programmer a private office.
Gates did dirty tricks to competitors even to tiny ones they could have bought out (stacker). But he was never Musk's level of evil.
I remember when I was growing up, tech industry has so many people that were admirable
Perhaps you were too young to understand who these people were:
- Bill Gates dominated the PC world with aggressive business tactics and vendor lock in.
- Larry Ellison bought up his competitors and jack up prices on databsae products owning the industry for more than a decade.
- Steve Jobs lied and cheated his investors, his family, and his closest friends to benefit himself.
Tom was a good guy, but possibly because he took his fortune and left tech. There were very few admirable leaders.
Larry Ellisons Oracle gobbled up many great companies and open source projects and sucked the life out of them, such as Sun Microsystems, OpenOffice, MySQL to name just a few
That was a single blow, Sun owned OpenOffice and MySQL when bought.
See the acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle Corporation.
Larry Ellison bought up his competitors and jack up prices on databsae products owning the industry for more than a decade.
It's well known that ORACLE is an acronym for One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison.
I don't ever remember Bill Gates or Steve Jobs being good people. Or Jeff Bezos, trying to kill bookstores.
The guys behind Google seemed okay at first and I think they really wanted to do good. But the way the company culture was built was toxic.
But in the end it's all about the greed. As soon as a company becomes public and whose stocks become available on the market, it turns to shit.
Look at how Steam is going well and actually helping personal computing progress. Gabe Newell is doing a great job because he loves that he does and ensures the people who work for him do too.
Newell also has overseen Valve as one of the pioneers of the most predatory monetization in the video game industry (lootboxes, etc.).
There are no saints at this level.
I mean their unwillingness to do anything about the market abuse and rampant child-gambling aside, the lootboxes for purely cosmetic items are one of the least predatory ways to do microtransactions. It's not like EA where the only way to unlock entire characters in some games is to grind for hundreds of hours or pay, or like COD where they took the lootbox idea and made it actually affect (multiplayer) gameplay
TBF to Valve, their lootboxes were limited to cosmetic items in a free to play multiplayer games. You can ignore those and it wouldn't change the gameplay at all.
Bethesda used to be awesome. Until they popularized DLC
Capitalism rewards psychopathy
Complete explanation in three words. Well done.
Concision!
I'm not sure about that. Nobody wants to work with psychos. Work is too much of your short life.
Psychopath is being used in a colloquial way here and not an exact diagnosis. Even if they are actual psychopaths they are known for being very charismatic and there are a lot of sadomasochistic people in the world who are motivated by punishment.
Further the people who work directly for these people want to be them, so they see it as just part of the process.
Another factor is money, it's a motivator. Those who work lower down the org chart can often be desperate, struggling to get by and get used to the punishment, convincing themselves that it would be worse elsewhere.
The Idea that life is short and work just isn't worth it comes from a place of privilege and the luxury of time for self reflection. Something not everyone can afford when one lives in survival mode.
when I was growing up
This is really the key. We're all stupid and unaware of how things work and the particular goings-ons when we're kids. There were plenty of shitty people running the tech giant companies back then, but we just didn't realize the extent of what was happening.
Edit: The evolution of social media also adds a lot to this. We are both more connected to each other and society, and therefore more aware of BS think it's pulled by corporations. Then, of course, you have folks like Elon Musk who seem to make a point of making sure everyone knows how big of a piece of shit they are, and how proud of it they are.
Yeah we're baffled about how kids get sucked into worshipping Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, but I remember a brief time in my life when I thought Steve Jobs was the greatest and that he singlehandedly invented the iPhone with a rusty pair of pliers and gumption.
They were all evil shit back then... You were just innocent and information didn't travel as fast
Also, Jobs "pretty decent"? That asshole was Narciso reborn
Might I ride your coat tails, and recommend Behind the Bastards episodes on Bill Gates and Steve Jobs? Who for the record are both absolute monsters. Not like....Hitler bad, but still pretty shockingly bad....
Behind the Bastards Part One: The Ballad of Bill Gates
Behind the Bastards Part Two: The Ballad of Bill Gates
Behind the Bastards Part One: The Terrible Secret of Steve Jobs
Behind the Bastards Part Two: The Terrible Secret of Steve Jobs
Behind the Bastards Part Three: The Terrible Secret of Steve Jobs
Behind the Bastards Part Four: The Terrible Secret of Steve JobsPlease note: Steve Jobs was bad enough to earn a 4 part series.
bill gates was like, one of the worst of the worst. Dude literally broke the law, and then settled to avoid paying for acquiring fees.
They have never been good.
Convicted monopolist. Slimy and dishonest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRelVFm7iJE
His direct influence is in numerous places in the Horrorween Documents.
Screw that guy.
Dude literally broke the law, and then settled to avoid paying for acquiring fees.
That sounds really tame compared to nowadays.
Was going to say this.
sociopaths have a pretty big advantage in capitalist leadership positions over non-sociopaths. they are more likely to get there in the first place, and they will perform better.
In all leadership positions, period. Capitalist or communist. Democratic or autocratic. Does not matter, those that are not held back by their morals have an advantage.
If you think Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were good for the world then I don't know what to tell you.
Bill Gates during the early years, yes. But now, I thought he's turned 180°.
Bill Gates pressured the group at Oxford University not to open source their Covid vaccine, as it would undermine his investments in pharma companies.
(The team had originally secured funding from the UK gov with the intention of making it open source so that it would be more accessible to poorer countries.)
Imagine lobbying against that. Imagine knowingly making life saving medicine more expensive and less accessible, particularly to the poor.
The guy is a dick. He just spends money on good PR so people can remember him as a good guy.
He's always been a ruthless capitalist scumbag.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp.
https://en. wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/72o8qh/the_sordid_history_of_microsoft_or_alternatively/
He is now slowly trying to buy what rich people normally can't buy; acceptance and recognition. Don't fall for it. He keeps doing the same criminal things in parallel. The world would be better without him and people like him.
Bill Gates was an evil piece of shit, that did many illegal things to secure Microsoft's software empire.
It was much easier to "hide" sit back then unless you were in the know in the industry.
That said I think because tech was such a young industry and innovating so quickly. Many geeks got a chance to run companies that took off. Nowadays it's Like every other industry with sociopaths in charge.
It was much easier to “hide” sit back then unless you were in the know in the industry.
It wasn't hidden. Everybody knew back in the day what an evil piece of shit he was.
It has just been forgotten about and many current adults weren't old enough, or even around, in the heyday of his evil empire, so he has been able to whitewash his image. My 50 year old ass remembers though. Fuck Bill Gates.
Bill Gates was an evil piece of shit, that did many illegal things to secure Microsoft’s software empire.
Yup. And his wife left him because of his association with Epstein.
Melinda Gates Says Bill Gates's Work with “Abhorrent” Jeffrey Epstein Led to Divorce
I remember when I was growing up,
You remember propaganda (when corporations do it, it's called "Public Relations").
That's what you remember. Now, thanks to the internet democratizign information somewhat, they don't just get to feed us their "public relations" anymore. Now people can counter that shit, and people see them for what they really are - parasites.
It's capitalism, baby. Welcome to the real world.
Social media would be drowning in negative posts about Bill Gates if they were a thing in the 90s. The only difference, perhaps, is back then the industry was still at its early years, it was quickly evolving, so many brilliant people had a chance to achieve something too. Today, it's huge corporations where each individual has virtually no impact.
Normal well adjusted people get a few million dollars and call it a day. Only people with a mental problem get billions and keep trying to get more.
Bill Gates admirable? Did we grow up in the 90s in the same dimension? Him and Windows were the butt of almost every IT joke, and there was his whole thing of never doing anything original or innovative except gobbling up companies and tech who were. Then the court battles. Those were a pretty big thing, even as a teen I followed the progress of it on the news. Then holding the whole web back for almost a decade as we had to deal with the monopoly of IE.
My dad wrote software in the 90s and developed a pretty good name for his business. He once got a call from Microsoft saying they wanted to package his software in their newest OS builds. Holy crap, right?! That would be a major break!
They told him they needed to do some deep interviews to set the plan in motion. I can’t remember if there were supposed to be 4 calls total or if it was on the 4th call, but after a couple conversations my dad realized the questions they were asking were to reverse engineer his software. They were never trying to make a deal; they were trying to learn what they could so they could rewrite it and not pay him a dime. He told them to pound sand.
There were a few other conflicts he had with Microsoft. I was young and didn’t understand it well, but my whole childhood I knew Bill Gates led a shady as fuck company and thought he was an awful POS. It honestly still kills me to admit that he (now) does some good in this world.
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Greed. A sane person will walk away from working once they have enough saved to comfortably retire.
$100 million can let you live comfortably forever, but there are plenty of people who want that much every year.
Those are the folks who become 'leaders.'
And they should be eaten.
You listed a bunch of people who were "good", but honestly, none of them were. You just weren't necessarily aware of how Bill Gates treated anyone who had anything he wanted, or what Steve Jobs did to his daughter.
Honestly, the lesson here is All CEOs Are Bad, it's just that some are only moderate psychopaths instead of ones that skin cats and then stuff them into mailboxes.
thanks, I didn't know anything at all about his daughter (after reading your comment) and found this pretty good article/interview with her.
Her book is a good afternoon read, as well.
I remember when I was growing up
You can basically stop right there. You were young and naive, viewing the world through the rose colored glasses of youth.
For real, all those guys were always cutthroats. How do you think they dominated the markets? It was not because they shared and encouraged competition. No, they stole, lied, and cheated their way to the top.
You don't get to be a billionaire and a decent person. Choose 1.
George Soros? The occasional hollywood star?
When did you grow up that Gates has not been evil yet? All of the 90s was marked by Microsoft making home computing worse to create a monopoly. Fucking emails formatted in a way that's unreadable outside Windows, closed .doc format that became a de facto standard in offices and likely many other things I don't remember
FUD wars on Free and Open Source Software, shady deals with companies and governments to make them dependent on MS software and solutions, holding the web hostage to IE “standards”, …
As the old Microsoft saying went, "it ain't done til Notes don't run"
"I thought the tech industry was supposed to be filled with these brilliant genius people who are really good for the world…"
They are but as usual it's the WORKERS who are the good brilliant people, not the ownership class and 3 letter executive dirt bags. They're the same in EVERY industry. Owner/CEO ONLY cares about profit profit profit, fuck everyone and everything else.
Workers, they're a mixed bag as there are so many different people, but in the tech space they're generally intelligent "good" people.
Idk, given how many evil mobile games and dark patterns there are, there are plenty of "bad" people, or at least people who won't push back against bad decisions from management.
The workers also just care for profits. Nobody is working for free. Everyone needs to pay their bills. Companies will stop making profits when workers dispense with their wages, but I bet that's not gonna happen.
Technically workers do not care about profits, they care about wages. The average worker doesn't benefit from profit because they represent a fixed expense. The work they produce is worth more than their salary which is how a company produces profit. As long as a company breaks even and the salary is enough to meet one's needs a worker does just fine. However a worker's job could easily be axed in the name of profit because they are what is being profited off of, not the entitled beneficiary of the business as a whole.
Profit it just the take home winnings of the investors or owners of the business and the few jobs at the top where compensation is based off of profit percentage or lavish bonuses for making the targets.
It's not just tech, but leadership positions in general.
Short answer is that the traits you need to climb the ladder have significant overlap with the traits of legit psychopathy.
To add to this, there's been evidence that as an individual accrues more wealth, their empathy response lessens over time.
My arm chair psychologist hypothesis is that: as the individual sees their quality of life increase, they look at other human beings in deplorable conditions, and their empathy response atrophies in order to avoid cognitive dissonance.
There's a concept in the study of wealthy individuals which goes over their desire to hide impoverishment from their view.
Any good books or other articles on this? I'd be legitimately interested.
The more money I make or the better off I am, I actually just end up feeling more guilty and giving more away. Frankly, one only needs so much, after that if you can improve the quality of life of those around you it makes everything better.
You haven't named a decent person in your post.
The Google founders are simply more secretive in their lifestyles compared to Musk. They dropped the "Don't Be Evil" motto a long time ago.
Bill Gates, a decent person? LMAO is OP literally a kid or something.
Americans are the most propagandized people in the world and simultaneously genuinely believe they are not propagandized, it’s incredible.
I agree. Someone already put links showing how bad Jobs and Gates were earlier in this thread.
But you see he invest 0.1% of their money to save some people in the world, sometimes. He is so generous.
Don't be evil came from an ad agency that did tobacco ads.
Honestly, Google back in the day was a great company. They were focused on putting the best product for consumer, supported open standards, kept ads at a minimum... A bit like Valve today. They really were "good guys".
Then I'm not sure what happened, they stopped caring and left the MBAs in charge maybe.
It was the serifs in their logo. They ditched those serifs and all bets on morality were off
They went public, simple as that.
These people have always been bad. Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Ford, all of them had their issues. The big difference between then and now is the information we have access to. These leaders are more or less forced to live a very public life. We can find all sorts of articles and investigative journalism reports about Elon actually having family money. And when you are rich enough to control the few newspapers, the stories are going to put you in a very good light.
I don't know much about the other guys you named, but close friend of Jeffry Epstein, Bill Gates is a demon with good PR. A lot of his outreach consists of privatizing schools in Africa and America, testing vaccines on tribal girls in India without consent, and demanding Oxford sell their covid vaccine instead of releasing it free..
But if you google anything about Bill Gates medical activities, they get drowned out by puff pieces and fact checks about microchips in vaccines instead of the.
Their job is to maximize shareholder profit. That is their only and one true job as CEOs. If you want a CEO that is not evil, look for companies that are not public even though they could be.
Years ago, I was hanging out with a manager of finance and asking a few basic questions about finance. After a little while, i guess she got tired of the conversation because she handed me her old finance textbook.
Anyway, I was mostly interested in the foundational ideas of finance, not the details, so I went away and started reading the introduction. It turns out that the introduction was very short, no more than two pages. It was extremely well-written, simple, and to the point.
The foundational idea of modern finance, according to this standard textbook, is very simple and highly reductionist: the one and only goal of finance is to maximize shareholder value, and share prices are the ultimate way that goal is measured. I've never seen a whole discipline reduced to such stark and prosaic terms with absolutely no attempt to articulate ethics or justify it in relation to some wider public good.
You can look back to Lee Iacocca. The Ford Pintos caught on fire because he sat back at his desk and laughed at the engineers who wanted to add a safety bar back there, the car had to be 2000 dollars no matter what.
Then he was at Chrysler and pioneered the idea that CEOs could set their own bonuses. At the time it was a shocking idea, called unethical.
Now the personal tech world comes along....
Late stage capitalism. It's the same in every industry, it's just that it's more obvious in tech.
This phenomenon is not limited to tech company leaders.
It's a common problem with all large corporations leadership, and gets increasingly worse the larger that corporation becomes.
They still exist and they're just as unheard of as the unsung heroes who brought us the digital revolution of the 20th century.
Alan Turing, Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, Gary Kildall, the list goes on. At least Torvalds and Stallman got some recognition for what they did within their respective communities, even if the latter is a bit of a creep.
All of those people where far more important to computing, and far less famous. Just like how no one really thinks about the developers holding up the open source projects which function as the bedrock of our modern society. They're more interested in company heads than actual technologists, or more accurate, that's what the people in power are more interested in.
Actual engineers tend to have pesky things like morals and ethics.
The people you list didn't prioritize money, so they're not billionaires, so don't apply to OP's question.
A crowd is attracted to those whom it feels to be strong and without this:
Actual engineers tend to have pesky things like morals and ethics
, and also it's mostly comprised of people who are not engineers, but are maybe strong against someone here and there.
So they just identify with those who are on top via social and not technical means. It's easier and makes them feel good.
Steve Jobs (wasn't perfect but on a surface level, he was still at least a pretty decent guy),
Very very incorrect. He was a complete garbage pail of a human being from the very beginning.
Behind the Bastards: Part One: The Terrible Secret of Steve Jobs https://omny.fm/shows/behind-the-bastards/part-one-the-terrible-secret-of-steve-jobs
They have a series on Gates too.
The answer to OPs question is that these people they admired were just as bad, just better at PR. Unless you think that social media has had some kind of positive effect in outing these newer bastards. Being young and naive may also have been a factor (which I can personally attest to since I was a fan of MS back in the 90s before I learned about them).
Tech is just the most visible industry right now. Look at any other major corporations and you'll find the same.
Narcicistic sociopaths are the best profile to boost profit. Even some of the "good guys" you listed as founders were some trashy pricks.
You cant get that kind of money without being piece of shit humanbeing. You need to constantly look out for opportunities to exploit others and how could you even do that if you have any shred of empathy or decency. Not sure if they were like this from the beginning or if they became like this when they got enough money or if its influence from their family, but we will all suffer under their rule.
At its very core, capitalism breeds greed.
Nothing happened. It was always like this. Geeks got unduly put on a pedestal. They got a reputation that was never earned. They're not any different than your typical psychopath executive.
I grew up in a town where a lot of these types of guys have become multimillionaires since 2010s tech boom. One person manages some hundreds of millions of dollars AI investment portfolio. That was before the GPT explosion. I have no idea how big they are now but I wouldn't be surprised if it's billions.
Growing up they were almost all psychopathic. Lying, cheating, backstabbing type of people. Nothing like the timid altruistic geek that pop culture proliferates. The more normal people did not go into tech. The actual timid types have had modest middle class careers in tech.
Success in business (profit) requires exploitation, which requires few or very select morals to reach the very top. Those people you describe sound a perfect fit!
You're out of your mind if you thought bill gates was someone to look up to.
Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. - Lord Acton
And if not that, then the inverse applies: People who end up the wealthiest and most powerful do so by being the best at exploiting other people and systems.
There's a reason there are more and more sociopaths and narcissists the higher you get in a corporate structure, and its because such people truly do not care about the harm they cause, unless they get caught.
Mate, that's the curse of capitalism. Yeah the living standards have improved and all, but the balance of scale tips so much towards the evil doings of these executives and the guys at the top that it doesn't matter how much my living standard increases.
Tech or not, they've always been like this.
Living standards have improved for many, but at the expense of others through exploitation. Like you say, an age old story. We're just incredibly lucky to catch a period in the history of mankind where the improvements have benefitted more than just the rich/elite.
Capitalism
I'd blame capitalism. And corporations prefering short term growth and attracting investors. And the whole modern business model of exploiting users private data to sell advertisements. That's how the whole internet works these days and thak makes being evil baked into every successful company.
And btw: Zuck did one good thing. He personally gave us competetive AI models to tinker around with. If it weren't for people like him, we would have AI dominate us without the average person having access to more than the online services like ChatGPT. Yeah but that doesn't take away from the things you lined out.
Tom from MySpace really is the nicest guy on this list...he was my first friend on there! 😎
The good ones retire or have important, but not the most profitable/public facing jobs.
The other Apple Steve, Steve Wozniak founded the EFF and was the tech guy at early Apple. Jobs was the business guy.
John Carmack is a controversial figure, but he's actually the tech wiz kid the techbros dream they are. He seems to just be interested in pushing technology and had some choice words for Meta when he left. They should have let him have his axe to carry around.
founded the EFF
*helped found. He provided some initial funding and served on the board, but he wasn’t a founder.
Two big ones:
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Power corrupts
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The laws in America have been bent or repurposed specifically to serve the entity, not person, with more money over all else.
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The earlier generation of tech leaders were just as bad as the current ones. Bill Gates was willing to do almost anything to hold onto his near monopoly and to squeeze as much money out of it as possible. Larry Ellison has made a life's work out of taking over software projects that benefited everyone, then brutally killing them. I actually met Steve Jobs several times and he was an awful person who made his fortune by exploiting more talented people. And so on.
There were plenty of decent tech innovators, as there are now. Then, as now, they did not end up running huge corporations.
I'm sure there were others, but the only exceptions I can think of were from the generation before that. Bill Hewlett and David Packard founded HP and made it a great place to work, a center of innovation, and a very profitable company, until they retired. And it all went to hell rather quickly.
Capitalism. Specifically, the stock market. IPOs make good companies into bad companies.
Being owned by stockholders effectively removes any amount of "human" in the company's choices and direction. There becomes a single goal, to which everything else is sacrificed: make stock prices go up in the short term. The C-suite execs will say all sorts of other shit, but any appearance of accountability or altruism is solely geared to making more money at any cost. Any leadership with a soul will be forced to either give up trying to be "good", or they leave.
Capital demands growth. It doesn't care how you do it. It doesn't track or reward whether you did it by making the world better or by creating death squads and working with the CIA to kill thousands of people and overthrow a government that wanted to charge you taxes and limit the amount of land you could have.
It's been this way, and worse, for a long time. But bear in mind that Twitter gave us the ability to see how billionaires think. Modern media made them more accessible. They didn't change, our knowledge of them did.
Well, buttflapper...
Capitalism filters sociopaths to the top. It's a feature, not a bug. It has always been this way. Read about Henry Ford and JD Rockefeller, John Kellog. The list goes on.
It's not even capitalism but just society in general. Good people typically look at what it takes to lead and want nothing for it. To strive to be in charge of things you have to have a certain arrogance and to succeed you have to be ruthless enough as well.
Businesses succeed by profiting. The most successful businesses of any time period are ones who maximise profits at all costs, including ethics.
There are a lot of arguments about more ethical businesses being the most viable longterm, but that sort of variable isn't considered when the big businesses calculate their next move.
Almost none of the Tech Company leaders actually finished college, if somebody you know is calling them a genius then that person measures intelligence by profits. A very stupid person.
To get to the top you have to throw people under the bus.
"If they're gonna drown, put a hose in their mouth"
They all have a story like this. They are all terrible.
I think Gareth Reynolds said it or was it Jordan from knowledge fight? But once you reach a billion you should get a medal saying you won capitalism then be 100% taxed the rest of your life.
Everything over a certain amount should be taxed 100%. Not everything. But also there should be a substantial house tax on mansions. And a higher house tax if you own more than one property.
Yeah, you don't need to have a billion to exclude people from shelter and exceed complicity in their suffering or death. Anyways, yeah short of abolishing property and landlords a significant tax, property hoarding deterrance, and rent control would make so much sense. It would take an severe naivete or true sociopathy not to support it.
Money
Monkey + money = bad
Came to post the short answer as well. It's always the same.
"Leaders"
They were always bad people but media shilled them as good guys... Buffet is similar example. We all LARPed it. Now we are learning the hard truth.
These people a part of the owner class and control key portions of us and global economy.
They are not the same as the rest of us. They know it and they act upon it.
When you step on an ant do you even notice?
They don't either peasant, now get back to fucking cucking and making daddy some mother fucking money, boy
Hint: it's not just in tech...
Because sociopathic tenancies are useful when on your way to the top. It lets you step on everyone else in your way and then do whatever you want without having to care about others.
Yep!
Tech is absolutely a space where people who break the rules get rewarded. Every tech company I've worked at has had a situation where they turned the other cheek on laws. And if they broke it, the fine was just the cost of doing business.
A example at my old job (with fake numbers), they broke laws in some EU countries. It took them like a decade to finally catch up with them. And the fine was like $8 million dollars. But during that law breaking, they made $100mil in sales, while also destroying the competition and solidifying they position in the marketplace, guaranteeing more profits for another decade.
If they followed the law, they wouldn't be this major player in the industry.
And the job I worked at is one of thousands of companies that think like that.
Shit like this doesn't deserve to remain anonymous. Just name the company.
Sadly, in this world you accomplish nothing for being nice and considerate. If you want to leave an impact (anything - a new invention, a new product, a new idea, anything with impact to contemporary culture) you have to bully yourself to the top, including stealing ideas and screwing people over, as well as to exploit people. All "great" people who accomplished something did that: Gates (Microsoft), Jobs (Apple), Musk (Tesla, Twitter), Bezos (Amazon), Thiel (PayPal, Palantir), Zuckerberg (Meta), Huffman (Reddit), as well as many politicans. It's a personality treat.
Here is a video that explains the issue, albeit it focuses on designers:
Because you can’t climb to the top of the pile without treading on people and crushing others.
Shitty people like to become olympic power-grabbers.
And they can do a lot of damage so you hear about it. You've heard zero news stories about "ceo doesn't do heinously evil thing", because those don't become stories.
Leaders in tech have to be good at raising money from rich investors, lenders, etc.. Most of these people aren't tech people. They're hedge fund managers, bankers, or just people with lots of money. So consider the following 2 strategies:
Strategy A: Be realistic. Explain the positives and the negatives. The tech looks promising, but the future is uncertain. It's a risky investment that could pay off massively, but it probably won't. You the CEO know a lot about the topic, but you're still just a guy, not a miracle worker.
Strategy B: Just focus on the plus side. It will succeed, and it'll succeed way more than anyone expects. Not only that, you the CEO are an unstoppable hardworking galaxy brain genius who sleeps on the factory floor. They should be so lucky to get to invest in your company.
Which of these is more likely to work with investors who don't know tech? And which is most likely to be the strategy chosen by leaders who are narcissistic and deceitful? The answer is the same.
Perfect human beings don't exist. Apparently there's a religion positing there was one perfect human, but we nailed him to a cross for interfering with business.
Here's a thought. If you were able to get away with Almost Anything (TM) and were surrounded by people praising your genius, dashing good looks and boundless generosity towards their persons, how long would it take for you to lose your moral compass, you think? You would pretty soon lose your frame of reference to the normal people, and your empathy would follow. And that's assuming you're not 2nd or 3rd generation ultra rich, in which case you never had it to begin with.
Succession is a very good TV series exploring the mindset of such people, if you want to see it in action. Otherwise, history is full of examples - such as Nero, the greatest poet to ever set fire to Rome.
I know there are exceptions, like everywhere else in life. But those tend to cultivate humility as a habit, like other people go to the gym.
Because tech is capitalism, and it goes hand in hand with fascism
Bill Gates, founders of Google Larry Page, Sergey brin, Steve Jobs (wasn’t perfect but on a surface level, he was still at least a pretty decent guy), basically everyone involved in gaming from Xbox to PlayStation and so on, Tom from MySpace… So many admirable people who were actually really great…
They weren't that good, just charming.
And, well, they also at least knew where their power came from. Maybe Jobs was not some genius inventor normies consider him to be (those who remember him), maybe Bill was born to a rich family, but they still knew deeply enough what they were doing and they really had visions of future (they wanted, of course, to get all the dough from those being reached, but that's a normal capitalist wish) towards which they were walking step by step for decades. They can be compared to WWI ace pilots in some sense (not about risking their lives).
Still they were doing things similar to what corps do now. Just a bit more subtly, because it required some subtlety back then.
Then their corporations overgrew them, and outlived some of them.
Elon musk, we all know about him, don’t need to really say much. Every time you think he’s doing something good for society, he proves you wrong And does the worst thing he can possibly do in that situation. It’s like he’s specifically trying to make the world the worst place possible everyday
I have a suspicion he just secretly wants to help those big corps suicide themselves to free space for something new and good.
Like, damn. What the heck happened to the world? You know? I thought the tech industry was supposed to be filled with these brilliant genius people who are really good for the world…
Everything ages and rots. The secret to still having the world nice and fresh and optimistic is waste disposal. And also removing weeds from your garden. Like those corps and politicians.
They weren’t that good, just charming.
They weren't even that charming. Just a little more able to keep their mouths shut while in front of mixed company.
Source: In the early 2000s, I worked in a position that was two degrees away from BillG. I put together presentations and demos that my boss delivered to the man.
Listen to how Melinda talks about her relationship with him for clues about how little actual charisma he has. She's responsible for every bit of humanity he's shown over the last three decades. There were interviews he gave prior to marrying her where he expressed open disdain toward humanitarian endeavors.
for clues about how little actual charisma he has
Well, I have even less charisma, but I got what you mean.
If you want to push material that completely contradicts morals (respect for privacy and free speech, for example), maybe you need this kind of people. They'll just say they don't give a f*** right to your face. Not that Bill Gates or Larry Page are any different, the times just changed. Do you really believe Bill Gates is that intelligent God among men? Because I don't.
It's where the money is. Simple.
OK. Listen. These people are damn smart at what they do. Gates, Zuckerberg, Bezos.
I have to deal with people every day that cannot do anything other than watch Fox News, News Max, and News Nation.
The above named people are taking advantage of people like that.
That's all i have to say.
One word - capitalism. It favours master-slave model
Copying and pasting something I said elsewhere just the other day, because it fits:
However, I do think it’s also cultural in the tech companies. The modern tech culture was borne from an attitude that was 100% rooted in “well the law says we can’t do this, so we’ll do this instead, which is different on a technical and legal level, but achieves the same end-result.”
This was heavily evident in early piracy, which went from centralized servers of Napster and Kazaa to the decentralized nature of Bittorrent entirely in response to civil suits for piracy. It was an arms race. Soon enough the copyright holders responded by hiring third parties to hide in torrent swarms to be able to log IPs and hit people “associated” with those IPs with suits for sharing trivial amounts of copyrighted data with the third party. That was responded to with private trackers, and eventually, streaming.
Each step was a technical response to an attempt by society to legally regulate them. Just find a new technical way that’s not regulated yet!
The modern tech companies never lost that ethos of giving technical responses to route around new legal regulation. Which, in itself, is further enabled by capitalism, as you astutely pointed out.
This isn't meant to be an indictment against regular ass people and internet piracy, but it's more about pointing out the leaders in the tech industry at large have always had a similar mindset to the pirates. That their response to attempted regulation of their industry has always been to ignore the spirit of the regulation and attempt to achieve the same result through technically wonkery as opposed to legal wonkery.
I mean, you don't have to look farther than Sean Parker from Napster. Guy still has oodles of money and connections from running what amounted to an illegal business model at the time. He's still heavily involved in lots of major tech groups with oodles of money.
You're just not dealing with rational or good faith actors if their response to any attempt to reign them in is to avoid the attempt to be reigned in by changing how the tech works.
Oh summer child
Because money
A CEO can be good. But a CEO with public shareholders has no choice.
I'm not saying that most CEOs aren't bastards but it's not necessary to be in the position or compete. But when you have public shareholders they are going to demand that you take every dollar through whatever means possible.
My father was the CEO of his small business. At his funeral, everyone talked about how kind of a person he was. We were rich growing up, but we never lived like it because he was too busy helping people.
He didn’t have shareholders. Just coworkers.
I've had a couple of good CEOs. Any really good CEOs end up getting fired when they go public because they're not willing to exploit the people for the product.
Resources and influence will always drunkard's-walk into the hands of the unscrupulous and manipulative, pretty much by definition.
They're going to be drawn to it, they'll fight dirtier for it, and they'll use the power it gives them to prevent anyone else from taking it away.
Big Tech is a huge source of both, so it would be amazing if the people on top of the heap weren't massive piles of shit.
People haven't really changed. As always, power corrupts. When the rewards are great enough, it seems people are often enough willing to compromise their integrity.
It was a lot easier to pretend to be a good person when every moral failure you make wasn't broadcast around the world the moment it was discovered. Case and point, look into Bill Gates more. He wasn't always a respectful guy, got caught up in the whole "filthy communists" schtick when the government was investigating his company, advocates for more restrictive control of aid distribution favoring manufacturers more than those he's trying to help, conflicts of interest in his charity, opposing twitters ban of Trump after the insurrection, etc.
The information technology industry in the US has always had a thread of Ayn Rand's philosophy running through it. Some of the people who were part of the computer revolution in the 70s and 80s knew her personally, and thought of themselves as Randian heroes (which is to say, they were narcissists). This is sort of a foundational aspect of the culture of Silicon Valley, so it's always been there.
I highly recommend the documentary All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace by Adam Curtis.
That's a fair question.
I think there's many different - and valid - answers to this, depending on how you look at the question.
I guess you could say that society had a stronger immune system back then to eliminate these bad cells. These days, they run way too freely. It's bad, and i'm not sure whether we need a structural reform or whether we can wriggle through this one.
Power corrupts.
you either die a hero or live long enough to see your self become a villain
Capitalism is the death of society and aligns the interests of people and corporations alike towards a race to the bottom for maximum exploitation.
EDIT: Death of society may sound like hyperbole, but it's me just paraphrasing one of the biggest advocates of capitalism in history: Margaret Thatcher, who famously said: "There is no such thing as society, only individuals."
What economic concept are you proposing that's better than the current systems in place?
At least government regulations can help keep capitalism in check, but taking that too far leads to monopolies and dictatorships.
I have an ideal socialist libertarian utopia skin to anarcho-communism in my mind as does just about every leftist. But that's not the point.
The point is that we need change towards balancing out rampant economic inequality that has been rising since the 80s and the impact of neoliberalism and trickle-down, the undoing of the priorities shift from private ownership and individualism to public and societal welfare and wellbeing. Towards a future where we can work on things that benefit us all, rather than enrich a select few at the expense of all others. Imagine a job that paid well and meant something, instead of bs job slaving away to make the line go up for some rich guy.
The point is that aligning the interests of society in such a way lead to amongst headier arguments of alienation - environmental destruction in a way that is fundamentally unsustainable and robs our children of their futures in many ways.
What you say could have very well been applied to kings in monarchies of old if one were to merely picture a dichotomy of the current world and a worse one. But that dichotomy is false, we have built a better world in many ways since then. We should do so yet again.
Thanks for letting me know about Zuck’s behaviour in Hawaii . I was unaware, and should be as a person of the pacific. What a disgusting imperialist culture destroyer and pig. As with many first nation cultures, to Polynesians land is sacred and we are a part of it , maybe guardians of it , more so than any possible ownership over it which is a ridiculous nonsensical concept. Was it not enough that he has compromised international democracy with his extremely dubious contributions to humanity. These sociopathic siliconvalley billionaires really are a scourge. This isn't exclusive to tech though.
As for your overall point, I never particularly admired any corporate characters in tech. All in all I believe the whole sector is overvalued and its importance in life is way over emphasised - the social platforms, and google particularly are overinflated advertising businesses and so of course their self importance has been trumpeted loudly..by themselves and everyone who hitched their giddy advertising budgets to the illusory service provided. Barely as effective as traditional advertising of a century ago. They’ve constructed a panopticon we have trouble looking away from - they even want us to wear goggles to shoe us banners wr cant look away from, to sell us their own useless trinkets.
I believe we should think of the so called tech industry as merely a single component in whatever sector of life it happens to provide a product or service to. Not as a single industry but as a small department of weirdos running say the plumbing (though actual plumbing is arguably more important) with a dingy office in the basement. The cEOs of these are merely the hated bloated bosses of the ones really doing the work. But we should also judge their utility objectively. Sure some aspects are useful in some specific ways. But how useful really? What has the net gain been to humanity of gadget x, or platform Y , or pseudo-sub-industry z? What real energy has it consumed in order to solve what problem(s)? What has the human cost been? They don't think in these terms but we actual humans should.
By the way I work in a tech area, in a small way. I like to think I speak from an angle of some experience with the way I’ve seen some behave, and the irreverant way some customers treat their ‘vendors’. The aura of the tech world is a cult-like bubble which each of these corporations create for themselves , and fledgling startups clamour for, and when clustered as one concept adds up to a massive bubble of hot stinking gas begging to pop.
Unfortunately concepts of value in our economy rarely match their true usefulness. The market is always correct and self corrects, apparently. I look forward to it, but the actual steps forward can be hard to appreciate with all the noise in that hype filled graph.
Also, and this isn’t exclusive to tech, corporations behave like psychopaths due to their narrow goals , profit being the main one, so the characters who float to the top of this septic system of single minded psychopathy tend to be sociopathic due to what they have needed to do to get there. Perhaps for tech this is more a late stage thing, in contrast to our memories of the romantic early days having been more about scrappy boffins soldering things in their parents garage. Now its about whipping up misconceptions in order to raise copious amounts of (mispent) capital in order to make…a smartphone app based ‘platform’ that provides solutions to problems we don't have. So long as the pitch had “A.I” in each sentence.
So yeh, that this environment has resulted in some psychos with a disproportionate amount of money (and therefore political clout) is not a surprise.
To varying degrees if we live in democracies, we are all responsible for creating these monsters. It’s our responsibility to do something about it. Such as raising awareness -as you have done, choosing alternatives, thinking about whether a tech option really is necessary in your life (e.g choosing Amazon over your local independent bookstore), in your workplace (if you have any power here: atleast expressing an alternative method, or solution to your colleagues or managers), and holding tech providers to some level of account at the least with your skepticism. And obviously boycotting what you can. Also remaining hyper aware of the scammy nature of much of the so called sector in its business practices.
I never trusted Tom from myspace as a default insta friend, but he now does seem quaint . But the tech industry is not really an industry and it definitely isn't the world.
This is alledgedly the location of Zuckerberg's property on Hawaii:
living heck
Leaders tend towards evil. Early in a technology there’s space for innovators to wind up on top, that allows for some morality agnostic advancement. But as time goes on you find yourself led by those who sought leadership, those whose ruthlessness enabled leadership, and those who’ve been in leadership long enough to have had it damage their morality.
Tech is no longer new and fancy, it’s no longer a space where a few people with an idea can wind up in charge of something valuable. It’s an established industry led by investors and businesspeople, their concerns are not for your benefit and even if they are your experiences are so alien to them that they will try to assist using the frameworks they think in, ones of hierarchy, investment, and other capitalistic and paternalistic world views. But most don’t care, they think they do, they think competition raises everyone, and in the off chance they feel a twinge of guilt about their victims that’s what they tell themselves.
Shareholders want the CEO that gets them more money. If that person doesn't deliver, they don't ask why, they ask when. If they don't like the answer, they get a new CEO. Rinse repeat, here we are.
Except Zuckerberg, of course. He's just evil.
Power corrupts people. On top of that, the capitalist machine isn't satisfied with "just okay" performance. It's infinite growth, or nothing. Once you hit the upper limit of what you can deliver, you start delivering the same, but with a lot of cut corners
It's the same reason why hip hops sucks in '96
The answer is at 0:24
The link below isn't the fundamental reason, but I think it helps to explain the shift in mindset. With the best of intentions and a desire to innovate and help people live better...the ersartz movement became corrupted by conspicuous consumption and a "disruptor" capitalist mindset:
Because being an industry leader is more about controlling people rather than whatever it is that your industry produces.
Once you have acquired a certain amount of money and power a cult shows up at your front door with a clone and a video from the grassy knoll. You get in line, or the clone does... That or something about power corrupting, and absolute power corrupting absolutely.
I can't really say whether any of the people you've listed are actually more or less "evil" than one another but in terms of why they present differently, there are a couple of factors I can think of.
One is the changing state of the tech industry. Data and attention are the most valuable commodities now, so these businesses are designed to be aggressively anti-consumer. There is also less big investment now and/or companies are required to pay back their investments quicker, which has degraded the quality of their products and services. Google's big decline is heavily related to this, for example.
The other aspect is the rise of the culture war shit in the US. Most of the people you listed are American or live in the US, and people there have completely rotted their brains with that shit. It's infecting the rest of the West as well but if you want to see what a genuinely retarded nation looks like, the US is where it's at.
I suspect if you swapped these groups of people between their relative eras you'd be disappointed in how similar they turn out.
Quick guess - as people become enormously successful, the values they had as individuals often fade. Executives forget what it was like to live paycheck to paycheck (assuming they didn’t have rich parents to begin with). They feel less need to hide (or even acknowledge) their flaws, because now they’re making “fuck you” money.
Our society values money over integrity. If you’re rich enough, you can literally get away with murder.
That assumes success under capitalism is possible for people with morals in the first place. Maybe once upon a time, but I'm firmly of the opinion that it is impossible to be financially successful and be a good person.
Huh. You might be right.
When tech isn't controlled by the user: then the user is controlled by the dev, and power corrupts.
Some are born selfish and others are molded by our insistence you strive for money to survive.
My thought is that these people think that their smarter than everyone else therefore they are justified doing anything they do. On the other hand, anyone with a billion dollars got it by making a whole lot of other people poorer. And they ate neither actually geniuses nor benevolent in any other way.
The Phillip Morris CEO makes money by hooking people onto something that isn't good for them. Tech CEOs are very seldom any different. Anyone who says otherwise usually has a financial interest in making you believe them.
In my opinion : The money is MUCH more lucrative now because of data mining. That's it. That's the real product being sold and because it isn't encouraging innovation for innovation's sake, but for a bottom line or goal that almost certainly depends on features that gather ad much data as possible to sell... etc etc
Late stage capitalism.
In my opinion it’s pretty simple… greed
$$$$
Big money / venture capitalists prefer to fund people of their kind: the ruthless. They also accept the spineless they can boss around. That's gone on for centuries, so the good funders have been trampled and gone extinct.
lack of "social intelligence". They mostly rose through the ranks because their technical (or business) skill. They never had to act for benefit of others to advanve
It's better to assume good humans don't exist, they just haven't shown (to you) their bad side yet
I generally think Satya is a fairly decent guy.
Microsoft is still a fucking shit show, but still.
Well first of all, I don't personally think evil even exists.
Secondly, I don't think these people are any more or less "evil" than the rest of us. They just operate on a much larger scale that affects many more people. If any of us normal folk would be put under equivalent level of scrutiny as these guys with journalists combing thru our every social media post and paparazzis following us around combined with the intention to dig up dirt and contribute to the negative narrative that sells better than a positive one, we'd all look like them. Most people don't like Gates, Musk or Zuck because that's the conclusion they've independently arrived at. It's how they've been told to think by the media.
I don't know how someone could possibly say that evil doesn't exist.
There are people out there that torture animals to death purely for fun, with no other purpose. There are people that wish genocide and debilitating diseases on a demographic they don't like. There are people who abduct children, tie them down, rape them, then murder them.
The whole "there's no good and bad, just what the media conditions you to believe" philosophy is bullshit, and screams of a 14 year old thinking they're enlightened and philosophical, when in reality they're just being a fuckwit.
I'd ask how you define evil in this case. To me, an act is evil when the net detriment to the planet and its contents (including humans) is greater than the net benefit it creates, and the actor pursues said act knowing this. I'd argue it scales with the nature and context of the act. It's hard to say this isn't real. But yes, we all have the capacity for evil, and also can be complicit in other evils by dint of normalized behaviours (without necessarily being 'evil' ourselves)
I do agree that an absolute Evil doesn't exist, the same way an absolute Good doesn't exist. But we're a pile of writhing meat puppets on a moist, moldy rock - we don't exist on that level in the first place.
Well I'd say that for a person to be evil they'd need to be doing evil things with the sole intention of causing harm with nothing good coming out of it. Perhaps a good caricature of an evil person would be someone wanting to destroy the world including themselves. Admittedly such people absolutely does exists so maybe that debunks my own claim.
However if someone draws joy from causing harm to others I wouldn't still call it evil but more like extreme disregard; you don't care how others feel, only how it makes you feel. This is why I don't think billionaires abusing the system for their own benefit makes them evil because causing harm is a byproduct of their selfish goals but not the intention of them. Similarly someone like Hitler wasn't evil either because causing suffering to the jews was not the reason he set up the death camps but rather a way to achieve his other goals.
This is okay but my post about AI is not? Same as reddit 😔.