- Google. The canonical “don’t be evil” meme origin.
- Meta. Adjacent “they trust me, dumb fucks” meme origin.
- Apple. Least of all, but still fits: PR pushes double on privacy, but their interests are not their end-users, they just happen to align on some points as they’re not in adtech business.
- Microsoft. The classic case for getting slaps on the wrist, Gates said one thing he’d do differently is sending lobbyists earlier, or something to that effect, didn’t he?
- Amazon, Netflix, Uber, Airbnb and many more are still all variants of the same story. It’s not a lie that everyone nowadays expects most megacorps to fuck people over if there’s money in that.
That’s the Order of “Feel for It Again”, with oak leaf clusters already, no? Something’s cursed in this industry, every company that sells software to individual people ends up the same when they become gigantic and endowed by wealth and power, even if they were decent in their early days. They all become those blind heralds of paperclip^W shareholder value(tm) maximizers, and I’m finding myself struggling looking for an exception.
Am I to believe this time it’s going to be any different, to set those - not baseless, I’d say - cynical expectations aside? Any signs there’s a change?
So, I disagree - it’s obvious, given the ad-adjacent end-user-facing megacorp context, OpenAI is right there. Cynical - sadly so, yes. But I’m sure it’s obvious: the idea of such a possible direction comes up pretty quickly and reliably so.