theory: a big difference between people who hate corporations and people who don’t is the extent to which they like interacting with human-shaped things. some people like human shaped things and the sort of amoral profit maximization of companies feels alien and sociopathic. other people like the predictable API that companies provide.
IDK man. I mostly don’t care that much about either. I’m extroverted but quite picky about people and don’t particularly feel drawn to “human-shaped things” in general. I don’t particularly hate corporations, but surely corporate capitalism seems very far from ideal. And their drive doesn’t seem alien or sociopathic to me.
But now I realize that I’m actually confused by what you mean by “human-shaped things”.
like, you would expect normal people to be courteous in daily interactions, to have goals in life, to have the typical human follies, to fundamentally have some amount of kindness and empathy for their fellow man, etc.
whereas interacting with a company can feel like being trapped in a Kafkaesque bureaucracy; companies don’t really have that many terminal goals other than money—certainly the vast majority of humans care less about money; with the exception of heavily founder-controlled companies, companies generally don’t really have pride or envy or sloth or so on in the way a normal human would, even though they are constituted of normal humans—corporate failures are much weirder and often due to coordination failure; corporations don’t really empathize with people except insofar as it is useful to make money—in any human we’d consider this very transactional and maybe even sociopathic
further evidence: people love small businesses, and medium sized companies that give very strong small business energy. people hate it when PE firms take over small businesses and make them more efficient.
if there was a guy who stood there swinging a scythe to cut grass and didn’t seem to care or feel bad or really respond at all to accidentally cutting someone’s arm off, we’d consider them uncaring and sociopathic. similarly, if we think of, say, an insurance company as a person, then when it declines someone’s claim and leaves them destitute, it’s reasonable to think of that person as uncaring and sociopathic. you can argue all you want about the economics of how insurance can only work if you do this but for the individual people who interface with this, who are not used to thinking about economic systems, but deal with people every day, it feels like a human using a loophole to justify not caring, and not feeling any empathy whatsoever.
Companies want to consume everything, including peoples’ lives, in order to make themselves richer and bigger. People are “resources” to a company.
Lawnmowers just want to cut your grass, the only resource all they ask for is petrol, and (crucially) they don’t want to consume it exponentially to make themselves bigger and cut exponentially more grass.
If Lawnmowers were people, they’d be those weird obsessive monomaniacal types who’re generally harmless but a bit difficult to talk to. Lots of them would be on LessWrong.
You could form a bond with a lawnmower (or a lawnmower-person), just as you could form a bond with a motorcycle or a family heirloom. Sure, it would essentially be one-way affection, since the lawnmower just wants to do its thing and is only nice to you insofar as you also benefit from short grass—but it wouldn’t want to consume you, control you, or enslave you. Try to form a bond with a corporation and it’ll eat you alive.
i mean most companies won’t eat you alive? you can form a bond with the coca cola company in the same one directional way as the lawnmower and it’s not like they will take advantage of that to extract every dollar from you. in fact basically only like Facebook, tiktok, etc are like that, and even then they’re not that bad; they’re no worse than an abusive human partner
theory: a big difference between people who hate corporations and people who don’t is the extent to which they like interacting with human-shaped things. some people like human shaped things and the sort of amoral profit maximization of companies feels alien and sociopathic. other people like the predictable API that companies provide.
IDK man. I mostly don’t care that much about either. I’m extroverted but quite picky about people and don’t particularly feel drawn to “human-shaped things” in general. I don’t particularly hate corporations, but surely corporate capitalism seems very far from ideal. And their drive doesn’t seem alien or sociopathic to me.
But now I realize that I’m actually confused by what you mean by “human-shaped things”.
like, you would expect normal people to be courteous in daily interactions, to have goals in life, to have the typical human follies, to fundamentally have some amount of kindness and empathy for their fellow man, etc.
whereas interacting with a company can feel like being trapped in a Kafkaesque bureaucracy; companies don’t really have that many terminal goals other than money—certainly the vast majority of humans care less about money; with the exception of heavily founder-controlled companies, companies generally don’t really have pride or envy or sloth or so on in the way a normal human would, even though they are constituted of normal humans—corporate failures are much weirder and often due to coordination failure; corporations don’t really empathize with people except insofar as it is useful to make money—in any human we’d consider this very transactional and maybe even sociopathic
further evidence: people love small businesses, and medium sized companies that give very strong small business energy. people hate it when PE firms take over small businesses and make them more efficient.
if companies were people, they would be uncaring sociopathic humans. but if lawnmowers were people, they would also be uncaring and sociopathic
This counterfactual is too underspecified to evaluate it. (It’s not counterfactable.)
The companies one is less underspecified because at least you can somewhat model them as agents.
if there was a guy who stood there swinging a scythe to cut grass and didn’t seem to care or feel bad or really respond at all to accidentally cutting someone’s arm off, we’d consider them uncaring and sociopathic. similarly, if we think of, say, an insurance company as a person, then when it declines someone’s claim and leaves them destitute, it’s reasonable to think of that person as uncaring and sociopathic. you can argue all you want about the economics of how insurance can only work if you do this but for the individual people who interface with this, who are not used to thinking about economic systems, but deal with people every day, it feels like a human using a loophole to justify not caring, and not feeling any empathy whatsoever.
Companies want to consume everything, including peoples’ lives, in order to make themselves richer and bigger. People are “resources” to a company.
Lawnmowers just want to cut your grass, the only resource all they ask for is petrol, and (crucially) they don’t want to consume it exponentially to make themselves bigger and cut exponentially more grass.
If Lawnmowers were people, they’d be those weird obsessive monomaniacal types who’re generally harmless but a bit difficult to talk to. Lots of them would be on LessWrong.
You could form a bond with a lawnmower (or a lawnmower-person), just as you could form a bond with a motorcycle or a family heirloom. Sure, it would essentially be one-way affection, since the lawnmower just wants to do its thing and is only nice to you insofar as you also benefit from short grass—but it wouldn’t want to consume you, control you, or enslave you. Try to form a bond with a corporation and it’ll eat you alive.
i mean most companies won’t eat you alive? you can form a bond with the coca cola company in the same one directional way as the lawnmower and it’s not like they will take advantage of that to extract every dollar from you. in fact basically only like Facebook, tiktok, etc are like that, and even then they’re not that bad; they’re no worse than an abusive human partner