I believe that this is classical behaviour of every share holder driven business. You can build on ideals from start, but once you acquire some position, money making is on the menu. Eg. deliberately worsening user experience for better revenue.
Possiblity to turn on heated seats in car you own for a small monthly fee is absurd yet very real. I'm looking forward to enshittification of current AI tools.
Yeah it's not that the people involved have no ideals, it's that the company structure as a whole doesn't, and over time that structure will eventually outlive, corrupt, and/or overpower the ideals of the founders or other principled individuals at the company.
The first two are definitely "heroes who lived long enough to be villains"; Oculus is more of an "I recon" due to how it was seen right up until getting bought by Facebook.
But in the stock market, it is almost impossible for companies like Anthropic or any successful startups not to become villains (profit first no matter what). Anthropic especially needs to burn huge amount of money, so they need a lot of funding. The only way to keep founders' idealism is probably to copy Zuckerberg. Divide stocks with and without voting-power and trade only no-voting stocks.
All of Meta's VR stuff should rationally be cut loose and refunded if it were all about greed. That stuff only survives because Zuck is a nerd who wants it to happen (but it's not going to.)
Well, they were just totally doing it the wrong way - with the result being ugly corporate distopia. They could haver just looked at what paople are using VR for & improved it to succeed.
VRChat is thriving and some other similar envronments being quite popular as well.
Just give people something that they actually want and make it nice and people will like it - huge surprise!
Oh sure. I don't want to say everybody are driven by ideals and not greed, but that even people with strong ideals and good intentions can do a lot of bad by being blinded by those same ideals.
Maybe it’s just more visible now but it seems like these companies are really accelerating in their evil lately. Probably because they know this admin’s going to do jack shit to protect people. Would be funny if it wasn’t also so scary.
> Maybe it’s just more visible now but it seems like these companies are really accelerating in their evil lately.
Well I mean they have no incentive to behave any other way, if anything they are rewarded via the shareholders. Number goes up when they perform mass layoffs. That tells you everything you need to know.
Unchecked power deteriorates empathy as classes drift further apart — an inevitability of un(der)regulated capitalism driving unprecedented inequality. This accelerates when the billionaire class seizes the levers of power and dismantle entire regulatory bodies like the Epstein class has done with the US government.
Yea, this romantizing of a past is doing no good to us. For example, It's weird how people romantize back breaking work on farm as "simple life". But I guess this was here with us every time. Grass is greener somewhere else and was greener in good old times.
hah yeah same goes for blue collar trades type jobs, it's weirdly romanticized here. My mom's side of my extended family were all blue collar types in West Texas, ranch hands, truckers, welders, that sort of thing. All of the men were basically crippled by 55 from using their bodies to make money and died in their 60s of various diseases. My father's side is all white collar and they're all still around, my dad is a minor pickleball celebrity in FL at age 80.
When I see slogans like Google’s “Don’t be evil,” it always comes to mind that when it stopped being useful, they shifted to something like “Do the right thing.”
It’s important to remember that a company’s primary purpose is profit, especially when it’s accountable to shareholders. That isn’t inherently bad, but the occasional moral posturing used to serve that goal can be irritating.
Possiblity to turn on heated seats in car you own for a small monthly fee is absurd yet very real. I'm looking forward to enshittification of current AI tools.
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