Comment by ninjahawk1
11 days ago
I think that large companies having next to no consequences is in large part due to capitalism doing what it does over a long period of time. There’s a deeper and deeper consolidation of money and power the longer time goes on it seems like.
If we think back to the various lawsuits Facebook has gone through, they paid out about $10 or so per individual affected, totaling a few hundred million dollars, which they would make in a couple months for selling user data and whatnot.
This is something that every company gets away with mainly I think because of just how large their wealth actually is. It’s difficult to actually punish a machine that acts almost like infrastructure. Punishing an individual is easy.
I don’t know if there’s really a solution at this point, maybe we could’ve prevented this reality at some point in the past but I don’t think that without actual global collapse it would be something that can be retroactively changed, and I don’t know if global collapse would necessarily lead to a better future.
I think that for one, Zuckerberg should be in prison, if someone oversees a massive theft like this, I think they should be held criminally liable. Same the CEOs of Anthropic and OpenAI for their parts in the massive theft that took place. They should all be doing prison time.
The reason I don’t think they will is that their investors probably have a good amount of leverage over anyone who would prosecute them, so it would never make it that far.
> It’s difficult to actually punish a machine that acts almost like infrastructure.
It's not at all. There is zero reason this couldn't be applied to Zuck. [0] There's also no reason why fines couldn't be 10% of global revenue, or more.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/20/business/evergrande-found...
I agree that they should, my point is that it’s difficult for several real logistical reasons. These companies for one do a large amount of lobbying and fundraising for political campaigns, they do control most digital infrastructure, with AI expanding are securing multi trillion dollar datacenter funds, etc.
There’s a ton of money at stake for the weathly aristocrats. They push politicians to delay or do things in favor of the companies above the people, and like I already said punishment is hard specifically because how do you fine someone with infinite money? They will just get more.
That’s not a punishment. I think that personal liability to the actual CEOs is the only way to get around this, leadership is generally never held responsible which means they can do whatever they want and the company bails out their greedy decisions.
It’s late stage capitalism and there’s no clear answer at least from my vantage point. Maybe if plug it into Claude it will give us a more coherent answer.
> and like I already said punishment is hard specifically because how do you fine someone with infinite money?
This isn't true though, if they had infinite money they wouldn't be spending every single second of their waking existence trying to get more of it and move higher on the leaderboard. If your opinion is that Meta/Zuck wouldn't care about being fined a year's worth of global revenue, or in his personal case, 90% of his net worth, then I'd really like to hear why. Because it contradicts all of their actual actions showing that all they care about is hoarding as much money as possible, meaning they'd very much care about it being taken away. Maybe I'm missing something.
ZUCK: PUBLIC ENEMY # 1
I mean, total societal collapse would absolutely suck, and there's indeed no guarantee that whatever will replace it won't fall into similar traps eventually, but if things actually are as you describe them, it only can get worse and worse indefinitely, until we get to global collapse anyway.