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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…

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.

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.

ValorieAF ,

Because money

AshMan85 ,

Because tech is capitalism, and it goes hand in hand with fascism

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.

tabular ,
@tabular@lemmy.world avatar

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.

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.

billwashere ,

In my opinion it’s pretty simple… greed

superterran ,
@superterran@lemmy.world avatar

Oh summer child

shartworx ,

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.

Ullallulloo ,
@Ullallulloo@civilloquy.com avatar

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.

TheBigBrother ,

Late stage capitalism.

alcoholicorn ,

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.

NaibofTabr ,

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.

ZeroGravitas ,

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 ™ 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.

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