There have been multiple accounts created with the sole purpose of posting advertisement posts or replies containing unsolicited advertising.

Accounts which solely post advertisements, or persistently post them may be terminated.

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…

Deceptichum ,
@Deceptichum@quokk.au avatar

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.

TachyonTele ,

Going back even further is assholes like Edison and Ford.

wintermute_oregon ,

I think it’s easier to name the people who have been decent in tech. Woz seems like a decent guy.

Ted Waite all in all was decent. Not perfect but decent.

Omniraptor ,

Stallman was right about everything

ramble81 ,

Gabe too.

TheBananaKing ,

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.

Adanisi ,
@Adanisi@lemmy.zip avatar

Gates was always a dirtbag.

He is one of the main reasons proprietary software is so prevalent and predatory nowadays.

Artemis ,

Tom from MySpace really is the nicest guy on this list…he was my first friend on there! 😎

helenslunch ,
@helenslunch@feddit.nl avatar

I remember when I was growing up, tech industry has so many people that were admirable

Like, damn. What the heck happened to the world?

Nothing happened to the world. You just grew up.

sunzu2 ,

yes

magnetosphere ,
@magnetosphere@fedia.io avatar

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.

BallsandBayonets ,

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.

magnetosphere ,
@magnetosphere@fedia.io avatar

Huh. You might be right.

originalucifer ,
@originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com avatar

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. - Lord Acton

sp3tr4l ,

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.

cyborganism ,

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.

Ashtear ,

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.

MagicShel ,

You’re not going to out-compete the sociopaths if you’re a saint. That’s a reality.

beejjorgensen ,
@beejjorgensen@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

And in politics, too!

GiveMemes ,

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

TachyonTele ,

Bethesda used to be awesome. Until they popularized DLC

LainTrain ,

Capitalism is the death of society and aligns the interests of people and corporations alike towards a race to the bottom for maximum exploitation.

NotAnotherLemmyUser ,

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.

Doolbs ,

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.

linearchaos ,
@linearchaos@lemmy.world avatar

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.

SuiXi3D ,
@SuiXi3D@fedia.io avatar

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.

linearchaos ,
@linearchaos@lemmy.world avatar

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.

rsuri ,

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.

TimeSquirrel , (edited )
@TimeSquirrel@kbin.melroy.org avatar

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.

SnotFlickerman ,
@SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

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.

Curious_Canid ,
@Curious_Canid@lemmy.ca avatar

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.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • [email protected]
  • random
  • lifeLocal
  • goranko
  • All magazines
    •