Meet the boss of technology, as the former boss – TechCrunch

"Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." It seems strangely funny now that anyone has ever dreamed that the technology would be different. But we did it once. We were going to create new societies in new ways, we thought, not like the amorous industrial monsters of old. The corporate cyberpunk villains of the '90s were fresh in our imagination. We would not be like that. We were going to show you that you could become rich, do a good job and treat everyone who worked for your business or interacted with it with the utmost decency at the same time.

Of course, Google was the poster of this poster, whose fifteen-year-old code of conduct included the motto "do not be mean". This is no longer the case, and the symbolism is only too appropriate. Since this sentence was removed in 2015, we have all witnessed widespread badual harbadment, including 13 top executives fired for it. Maven Project; and dragonfly project. Internal reactions and mbad disengagement have resulted in retractions and changes, thanks to Google employees rather than management … and we now see many reports of management retaliation against these employees.

Facebook? I mean, where do we begin. Rootkits on teen phones. Disaster of privacy after the disaster of privacy. Admissions that they have not done enough to prevent the violence perpetrated by Facebook in Myanmar. Sheryl Sandberg personally commissions opposition research on a Facebook reviewer. And these are just stories from the last six months alone!

Amazon? Think about how they overwork and underpay delivery drivers and warehouse workers. Apple? Think about how they "deny Chinese users the ability to install VPN and E2E messaging applications that would allow them to avoid widespread censorship and surveillance," said Alex Stamos of Stanford. Microsoft? The big lady of the Big Five has mostly evolved into a respectable and unobtrusive company, but has recently seen "dozens of" reports of badual harbadment and discrimination ignored by human rights, as well as requests for information. cancellation of the HoloLens military contract.

These are the five largest publicly traded companies in the world. It's far from "absolute power", but it's much more than the technology industry had before. Have we avoided corruption and complacency? Did we do things differently? Have we been better than our predecessors? Not half of what we hoped to return in the dizzying first few days of the Internet. Not a quarter. Not an eighth.

And it's mostly free. Google did not need to create a censored search engine for China. They do not need money – it's already a giant money printing machine – and the Chinese do not need their products. Amazon does not need to treat its lowest-paid employees with vicious disregard. (That's right, they finally – finally! – raised their minimum wage to $ 15, but they could very easily afford to significantly improve their wages and working conditions.) Facebook does not need to … behave more and more like a company whose leadership is largely made up of wide-eyed cultists and / or naughty twirls, by and large.

Google should have promoted the organizers of their walkout, but there at least you can see why they did not do it. Fear raw. The only thing that really scares the management of large technology companies, more than regulators, more than competitors, more than climate change, are their own employees.

Have the modern mega-bodies inherited from their ancestors the obsession with growth at all costs, a religious impulse to throw all their stitches on the world, so it is not yet enough that each of these companies earn billions of advertising and trade to spend on their famous "moonshot" projects – and now sometimes infamous -? (Do not tell me about the fiduciary duty to maximize profits.) Senior technology executives can interpret this "duty" as they see fit.)

Does not any organization large enough and rich become, in its upper part, a nest of so-called Game of Thrones starlets, playing political power with their personal projects and their personal careers, whatever the costs? and the repercussions? (At least when they are born from hyper-growth, it is obvious that Apple and Microsoft, although mature, although imperfect, still seem, by far, the least unacceptable Big Five, and Facebook most .)

I do not want to get the impression that I think the technology industry is guilty of ruining everything. Not at all. The biggest thing that the financial sector has ever done is convince the world that it is the technology which are the main drivers of inequality. With regard to the many media that seem to be trying to refine the results of the last elections, as well as all the other ills of the world, to technology, well –

But the existence of bigger failures must not blind us, and we do not know if we have failed in an old or new way. Accepting this failure is, at least for people like me who were once stupid / optimistic enough to believe that things might be different this time, an important step in trying to build something better.