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Comment by nus07 | Hacker News Reader

Back in 2004 I saw an interview of Larry Page who talked about how they wanted to be different from Wall Street and be more humble and nerdy and less evil.As a nerdy kid I became a huge fan of the Google counter culture against the evil Wall Street “derivatives” culture in the early 2000s and admired Page. Little did I know that the Burning man, Grateful Dead , Don’t be Evil was glossing over and corporate speak for one of the most evil and powerful organizations ever making money off my privacy and ads. Meanwhile Larry Page is retired in a Pacific island or New Zealand with billions and no concern for the minions and the working class ideals that he and his Michigan family stood for. Animal Farm is truly an important read .

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To play devil's advocate here, I think it's a frequently repeating pattern for a reason that doesn't just boil down to the outliers who tread this well worn path over and over again being fundamentally broken or corrupt. You fight this war long enough against what you view to be the villains, and sooner or later you come to the conclusion that the villains got the way they are for a reason.

They were shaped by evolutionary forces dealing with the rest of humanity proper, the great unwashed masses, who want to know nothing and be proud of it, and who if you ask a question that is too complex will be made to feel uncomfortable, inferior, or unworthy. In large part, it seems the genuine curiosity that lies at the center of the psyche that inspires the outliers who end up succeeding beyond their wildest dreams is terrifying to the vast majority of humanity. Sooner or later they give up, shrug their shoulders, and say "Well, what can I do, we all must make our own decisions."

And so they retreat to their islands, while the ugly mass of humanity slides into a morass of continuously demanding that an uncaring universe be bent to their perceptions of how it should be, rather than how it actually is.

The parties in question that started out on such a hopeful path are now decidedly hostile, I do not dispute that. But the reason they became so is not because of their nature, it is the swamp which they waded through.

This whole thing is predicated on the notion that there's an "ugly mass of humanity". And yet people, as a whole, are generally nice more often than not.

Nice is not really the point, though. You can be perfectly polite and simultaneously violently hostile to the idea that you should understand anything about the way that things actually work, and that the structure of civilisation will simply construct itself around your demands and protect you from any of those details.

And that process which does take place and largely constitutes what passes for modern life is then under the power and observation of parties who do understand how the underlying sausage gets made, how the parties whom they serve think and how they will react and behave. Is it any wonder they then proceed to arrange their products and services to benefit from the nature of the parties whom they serve, even in an increasingly ruthless fashion?

If people behave like cattle en masse, sooner or later a rancher will show up.

Most people are "nice", which is the same as being polite. Few will go out of their way to be good, which is not the same thing.

Apathy to suffering (and by extension other evil) is the same as being evil, especially when you are benefiting by it. Admittedly, good and evil is a spectrum - but there is a lot of apathy going around.

Yeah, "nice" is a wishy-washy word. I think most of my fellow humans are decent, by which I mean that I think they want to do the right thing, provided it's not too costly.

My faith in my fellow humans has been shaken lately, I'm afraid, by the number of people in my local grocers not wearing masks, despite a big sign on the door saying that mask-wearing is mandatory (it is - that's the law at the moment, around here).

I am constantly baffled by this notion that criticisms or calls to act against people who have "succeeded" are just expressions of petty jealousy or not understanding the genius of the successful, that we should instead be rooting for people "succeeding" to any arbitrary degree. How nonsensical. Yes, people who "end up succeeding beyond their wildest dreams" are often terrifying, and for good reason. Success at scale comes with power over other people, and as many throughout history have observed, concentration of power tends to do a lot of harm to a lot of people. This is probably inevitable, and we can get to a pretty satisfying explanation of why from first principles: People's needs are individual and varied. The more power any single entity has over them, the less likely that entity is to be willing or able to take everyone's needs into account, and the more their decisions can harm people whose needs they don't take into account (or whose needs are misjudged), let alone people they've decided to work against with that power. The ontological question of what constitutes "evil" may be too nebulous to be interesting. I think it's more valuable to state a goal: preventing power from concentrating, whether it be in governments, corporations, or the wealth and influence of any individual. If by "success" we mean accumulation of power and influence, it is absolutely worthwhile and I would argue even necessary to limit the degree to which people, institutions, and any other entity that can usefully be considered to be concentrating power can succeed.

I think you misunderstand me because I don't disagree with anything you're really saying here. In fact you observe that success at scale results in the accumulation of power over other people, and that's exactly my point; If you succeed at scale, frequently you do it by exploiting the well exposed attack surface of the, and excuse me for using this term but I need to be blunt to get the severity across, "useless NPC".

Useless NPC demands X, provider provides X, provider observes useless NPC's consumption of X and models the behaviour of useless NPC to a very high degree of accuracy allowing them to exploit the attack surfaces of useless NPC by providing and charging for the exact things which those attack surfaces guarantee useless NPC will demand, and in so doing accrues power at scale.

All of this has a genesis in the attack surface of the useless NPC. You can't model and manipulate independent, self-reliant people who understand the nature of the world well enough to provide for themselves what you would otherwise be providing for them in an exploitative way, and the harder you try the more clear it is to those parties that what you're doing is exploitative, whilst the exact opposite is true when the exact same behaviour is modeled against the useless NPC.

And unfortunately it seems that the majority of the world is constituted by useless NPCs, the very fact that these exploitative agents prosper again and again when their strategies are tailored to be most effective on those useless NPCs and are repellent to the small minority of civilisation not constituted as such very clearly demonstrates that.

Maybe you'd say this is victim blaming, maybe that's fair, but it is as far as I can see over the entirety of my life watching very closely an accurate description of the way that civilisation tends to evolve. And we don't expect that attack surfaces won't be exploited in technology, instead we harden those attack surfaces, minimise them as much as possible, fix the afflicted targets rather than just expecting that they won't be exploited.

I don't see how the same logic should not be more broadly applied.

What's your elevator pitch on how google is one of the most evil organizations? How did you become convinced?

"Surveillance Capitalism" by Zuboff is far from an elevator pitch, but goes into some great detail on how Google more or less singlehandedly developed modern surveillance capitalism (the art of turning behavioral surplus from users of your product into predictive models and products you can sell to others, or, roughly, "Why everyone hoovers up everything they possibly can and tries to big data learn it for advertising").

The argument is that nothing inherent in our technology requires this particular outcome - that the techniques of surveillance capitalism were developed, by specific people, at a specific point in time (when Google needed money desperately), and turn out to be exceedingly profitable.

Unfortunately, that also turns out to be exceedingly human-toxic. Machine learning flips the usual quality/quantity tradeoffs, and in order to get the highest quality, requires the most quantity. It's not that Google/Facebook/Twitter want to know a lot about you. It's that their profits are based on them knowing everything about you.

And that then leads to the whole "engagement" problem that is most of the modern internet. Google... collects a lot of what it needs by nature of mostly being "the internet." YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and affiliated companies gather what they need by trying to ensure, by hook or by crook, that you spend as much time as at all possible on their platforms. Your time is literally their money. So out of this you get all the nasty little human psychology exploits that modern platforms use to "drive their users nuts" and keep them coming back, and the nature of the content, and what it's doing to their brains. Drive them down some crazy conspiracy theory rabbit hole? Great, they'll spend more time on your platform looking for more stuff (cough YouTube cough). Genocide in some exotic foreign language you don't care enough to learn to moderate? Whatever, it's engaging (Facebook?). And so on.

So the "elevator pitch" I'd use is that the reason the modern internet (and as a result most of consumer tech) is so rabidly human-toxic in most of the commonly used forms is a direct result of Google inventing the technologies that require that sort of engagement as a feed into the profit engines they've decided to use.

Wow! Well summarized!!

Has Larry Page made any public comment about Google's surveillance capitalism at all since retiring?

Has any journalist asked him lately how he feels about "Don't be evil" in the context of his Alphabet stock holding?

I'm not commenting or judging on Page - just curious to hear his contemporary thoughts about the company he founded. I've heard nothing at all from him since he retired from the organization.

> [Just rich people saying rich shit, OP feigning shock and awe]

> Animal Farm is truly an important read .

Doesn't sound like it taught you much.

Cynicism isn't a synonym for intelligence.

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