Comment by readthenotes1

Agreed: expecting Alphabet not to do the evil greedy thing is like expecting a lion to become a vegetarian, it just isn't going to happen.

I don't know the author, but I do know that it's very much possible to work for organizations whose values and ethics are extremely compromised, and to mindfully participate in their work because you can also do a lot of good for a lot of people while you're there.

It's a complicated cost/benefit tradeoff: are the opportunities for world-improvement available with the resources of an ethically compromised organization worth the world-damage done by your participation (either your presence alone lending legitimacy/size to the org, or by work you may be called upon to do that directly or indirectly does harm)?

If you think there is a simple answer to that, you're wrong.

Like, sure, a lot of people delude themselves into thinking they're not doing harm because they like money or hate change. That's bad, and separate from what I'm describing above: that you can work for a deeply flawed org and accept the cost of your participation in those flaws in return for benefits that you can others can achieve with the resources offered by that same flawed org.

I wonder if in a few years, there'll be heads of Google paraphrasing the old skit "You know, in hindsight, allowing autonomous AI drones to carry fusion bombs was a bad move, but for that one quarter we really earned a lot of shareholder value"

The same that believes in HR marketing like Do No Evil.

Not only that but his outrage is narrowly focused on contemporary US politics. Billions of people access food, shelter, medicine, education, etc, only by the rapidly diminishing leverage their labor provides (or doesn't provide) them. These people presumably never so much as picked up a book, or evenly briefly entertained a thought about a person outside their own immediate social circle.