Google’s story over the last two decades has been a tale as old as time: enshittification for growth. The once-beloved startup—with its unofficial “Don’t Be Evil” motto—has instead become a major Internet monopolist, as a federal judge ruled on Monday, dominating the market for online search. Google is also well-known for its data-harvesting practices, for constantly killing off products, and for facilitating the rise of brain-cell-destroying YouTubers who make me Fear for Today’s Youth. (Maybe that last one is just me?)
Google’s rapid rise from “scrappy search engine with doodles” to “dystopic mega-corporation” has been remarkable in many ways, especially when you consider just how much goodwill the company squandered so quickly. Along the way, though, Google has achieved one unexpected result: In a divided America, it offers just about everyone something to hate.
Here are just a few of the players hating Google today.
I disagree, I think it is basic human/biologic that drives us to grab up resources and hoard them to ensure survival/reproduction/future generations. Capitalism is just a vehicle in which we are capable of expressing that biological greed on a global scale.
I’d argue that capitalism is unnatural because even if we work from the assumption that resource hoarding is natural, it’s also necessary to take into account the fact that evolutionarily, humans got to where we are via traits like altruism, cooperation and forming communities. Capitalism is far from natural — it’s an insidious subversion of human nature
Cooperation and community are not altruistic. You literally can’t do 99.9999999% of the work required to build a civilization — nobody can — so cooperation benefits ME, until greed benefits ME more!
I’m not saying that cooperation and community are not the most beneficial for humanity; just that selfishness is an evolutionary trait that stretches back hundreds of millions of years longer than community, or rearing our young.
I agree that there’s a strong incentive for even entirely self-interested people to cooperate. I was listing altruism as one of many pro-social behaviours, not as a subset or requirement for cooperation
All negative basic human instincts are like this though, but it’s greed that we allow to grow unfettered. Anger is considered socially acceptable until you go berserk and start killing people and breaking things. Lust/sex is fine, until you start humping everyone and everything you see in the street. Greed has no upper bound like these though. And it’s high time that we started imposing some sort of control to stop this growth.