Why are so many leaders in tech evil?

Submitted ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨Buttflapper@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨technology@lemmy.world⁩

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…

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rsuri@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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AshMan85@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Because tech is capitalism, and it goes hand in hand with fascism

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LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Capitalism is the death of society and aligns the interests of people and corporations alike towards a race to the bottom for maximum exploitation.

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- NotAnotherLemmyUser@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    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.
    
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TheBananaKing@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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Doolbs@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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linearchaos@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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TheBigBrother@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Late stage capitalism.

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antihumanitarian@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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gandalf_der_12te@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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stellargmite@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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- Halcyon@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  This is alledgedly the location of Zuckerberg’s property on Hawaii:
  
  google.com/…/data=!4m4!3m3!8m2!3d22.209563!4d-159…
  
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occultist8128@infosec.pub ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
you either die a hero or live long enough to see your self become a villain

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SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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ValorieAF@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Because money

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ZeroGravitas@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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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unmagical@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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rickdg@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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feedum_sneedson@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
living heck

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captainlezbian@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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YeetPics@mander.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
It’s the same reason why hip hops sucks in '96

The answer is at 0:24

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0x0@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Power corrupts.

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NaibofTabr@infosec.pub ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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).

I highly recommend the documentary All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace by Adam Curtis.

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ogmios@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Because being an industry leader is more about controlling people rather than whatever it is that your industry produces.

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Ilandar@aussie.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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tabular@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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vzq@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I generally think Satya is a fairly decent guy.

Microsoft is still a fucking shit show, but still.

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Boozilla@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Earth_Catalog

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xyguy@startrek.website ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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dinckelman@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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

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