On March 15, 2010, I started a new job at Google. The fourteen years since that day feel like a century. The title of my announcement was Now A No-Evil Zone and, OK, I can hear the laughing from ten timezones away. I tried, then, to be restrained, but there are hardly words to describe how happy and excited I was. I had escaped from the accretion disk the former Sun Microsystems was forming around Oracle, that blackest of holes. And Google, in 2010, was the coolest place in the world to work.
Let me quote myself from a little bit further into that piece, on the subject of Google: “I’m sure that tendrils of stupidity and evil are even now finding interstitial breeding grounds whence they will emerge to cause grief.” Well, yeah.
This is in my mind these days as I’m on a retired-Googlers mailing list where the current round of layoffs is under discussion and, well, it really seems like the joy has well and truly departed the Googleplex.
↫ Tim Bray
The honeymoon phase with the technology sector is well and long over, and we’re deep into an unhappy, unpleasant, joyless marriage now – and the fault lies entirely with the big technology companies themselves. They promised they’d change the world for the better, but they lied – and still lie – about the price.
Sad but for generation after generation, time immemorial humans think some great thing is going to come along. Like religion or the car or the internet or some new form of government etc and in the end humans always, always muck it up!
What was the last thing, oh yeah bitcoin, gonna free the world of government control over money! Yeah ok turns out it’s better to keep your money in a bank that’s over seen by the government because bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme!
We just have to admit that people will be people. Don’t ever trust that most people will have your best interests at heart.
Yeah maybe Larry Page and Sergey Brin really believed in do no evil but then they became the same people they didn’t believe in, rich guys who don’t know anymore how it is to be regular and pay taxes and things of that nature. Then they took the company public and it’s no longer in their control now run by people that only care about their bottom line.
My father used to remind me that those that chanted “do not trust anybody over 25” later chanted “do not trust anybody below 30”.
The price is such that, if the price is paid, the world is a worse place.