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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…

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.

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.

partial_accumen ,

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.

kfchan ,

Steve Jobs decided to kill himself by being an idiot.

So...there was a redemption arc there.

MagicShel ,

I’m not a fan of Hitler Steve Jobs, but I am a big fan of the guy who killed Hitler Steve Jobs.

cheese_greater ,

That man’s killer’s name?

Steve Jobs 🔔

RagingHungryPanda ,

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.

vzq ,

I generally think Satya is a fairly decent guy.

Microsoft is still a fucking shit show, but still.

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

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

RedditWanderer ,

Money

14th_cylon ,

Monkey + money = bad

youtu.be/bGXV-oMgkWc

unmagical ,

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.

ogmios ,
@ogmios@sh.itjust.works avatar

Because being an industry leader is more about controlling people rather than whatever it is that your industry produces.

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