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the myth of the good tech giant
(analognowhere.com)
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this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2025
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I remember struggling with the idea that all companies care more about the bottom line than anything else. People are good and care about good things. How can companies who are made of people always cause problems? There must be at least one good company out there, right?
It's only after I spent some time in the world that I figured out that money really messes with things. It pressures companies to do whatever they can get away with. It separates the people who run the companies from the bad outcomes that company creates.
And at the end of the day everyone needs to make a choice. Live and participate in a system that causes problems, or die. I chose to live and I don't blame anyone else for choosing to live.
Here's the thing... Once an organization grows to a certain point, it takes on a mind of it's own.
Decision making becomes fragmented. Details are lost between the decision and the decision maker
It's impossible to manage 100, let alone 1000 people directly, so metrics creep in as a way to reward good performance (and maybe punish low performance).
And because we're a hierarchial society, we further group into divisions and teams. The people who get the best metrics out of their teams are more likely to move up, the bad managers are more likely to be towards the bottom. And honestly, good lower management is mostly taking care of your people
So you're more likely to get managers who don't have the integrity to take a firm stand, so maybe when a worker realizes "oh shit, were leaking into the groundwater" it gets watered down to "we found a leak, but it won't impact production" before it gets up to someone who could authorize a shutdown and fix
It's possible for a company to do horrible things without any bad actors, and we do have plenty of bad actors around.
It's possible to fight against this sort of thing through culture or policy, but the natural inclination is always going to maximize the metrics at any cost
Companies, especially larger ones, abstract away human responsibility and ethics from the decision-making process, making it easier for people to do bad things.
“We do this for the company!”
Plus, an individual’s ability to live being tied to the continued success of said company doesn’t help things either.
“If I speak out, I’m not a ‘team player’. And those people get fired.”
There's also diffusing responsibility across the organization. It's easy to achieve unethical things, when the individual's part of the job hardly seems "bad" at all.
At least in the US, companies have a legal fiduciary duty to protect their investors interests above all else.
A change made through court cases in the mid-century. Basically the result of a neoliberal ideological campaign that first normalized the feduciary duty concept in the business world before forcing it on board rooms through the justice system. Before that, boards of companies could make decisions on ethical grounds and not just fiscal grounds. Today, that precedent has transformed boardrooms into terrifying financial automatons.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
The way laws and bylaws describe the jobs of CEOs and CFOs, the most qualified people to do those jobs are sociopaths. Empathy is practically a disqualifying personality trait.
We have trouble understanding what’s going on because the average person can’t comprehend the levels of greed that modern Wall St capitalism selects for.
Just like the average person cannot comprehend a million years, the average person can’t appreciate the level of avarice some of our rich and powerful operate at. Only a few of us have interacted with people that broken.
There a tons of good people and good businesses out there. They are currently victims to levels of avarice we can’t bring ourselves to admit exists.
The love of money is the root of all evil.
Remember that one time Jesus lost his cool? He made a whip and went H.A.M. on some crypto bros in the temple.
So yeah….