A haunting reminder that rainbow capitalism is 100% about profit and convenience.
Corporations were never your friend. They were never going to defend you.
They were going to defend you for as long as doing so remained profitable.
I like to say that corporations will never go out of their way to be charitable. There’s always a bottom line, being it PR or direct profit. Even PR and Marketing spend has to eventually lead to increase in profit.
Or avoid a decrease in profit, which is why you get so many posturing bandwagons which slow down once enough people have forgotten that it won’t affect profits anymore, eg all the statements and policy, name, logo etc changes due to BLM in mid-late 2020
I had a management class years ago in college where the professor made the argument that in order to be ethical, every single action a business makes must be done to increase profits for its shareholders.
Charitable donation? Only if it increases public perception in a way to be justified by the cost.
Pay your employees well? Only if paying them less would cause you to lose them to your competitors.
The list goes on. It’s a very depressing way to look at the world. But as time goes by, I’ve realized just how accurate that professor was. Companies don’t give a shit about you and will turn on you the second it makes their quarterly numbers look better.
That’s the problem of thinking of companies as people. Company operate like ruthless people people they usually responde to several stakeholders that all control the company like an ouija board.
It’s not even “rainbow capitalism.”
This goes all the way back to women’s suffrage and the Civil Rights era.
They didn’t start accepting women into the workforce and blacks into the workforce because they saw them as valuable humans just for existing.
They realized they were leaving money on the table. If women had money, they could be marketed products, if blacks had money, they could marketed products. That was “opening up new markets.” Hiring them meant they would get paid and have money in their pockets to spend at your business.
Every single group that got attention and understanding was about being able to exploit them for more money. The only color they’ve ever cared about is the green on their money. This is also why it’s been such an uphill battle for anyone disabled, because if you can’t maximize your output by absolutely destroying your body and mind for capital: they don’t want you.
Further, if you get enough money to do some capitalism yourself and create something like “Black Wall Street” they’ll bomb the living fuck out of you to put a stop to it.
They never thought of us as humans, just as “Human Capital Stock.” We’re just units to be used and discarded like millions of mistreated farm animals every single day.
POTD
10 out of 10
Reading about the Tulsa race massacre is so crazy, like World War 1 planes, some say up to 12, others at least 8 of them doing stuff like: “… turpentine or nitroglycerin bombs being dropped and men shooting from planes”. Some also suspect the use of dynamite, so it’s possible they were quite literally dropping bombs.
Yeah, it’s essentially a weathervane or thermometer. You can indicate the state of a country by it.
At this point the US has joined the ranks of, well, grim theocracies. Not that the people at the top in the US worship anything but Mammon.
Right. If you react to this news with disappointment, and believe me I’m disappointed, maybe it’s more a wake up call the support was never real to begin with. I feel we’re better off without such hollow gestures. Then again I’m not a part of a marginalized group and maybe it’s not that black and white.
Wow Google’s licking boot like there’s no tomorrow.
Fucking shameful.
I’m not angry at this point. Just sad.
It’s disheartening how quickly everything was washed away.
Google managed to create a very clean image of themselves in most heads, but looking closer it is an ugly profit maximization machine. It cares about shareholders. If it cares about you, then probably for spying on you and learn how to manipulate you and others better. I hope people start realizing finally.
And let’s state it clear: Google could have a voice. They could object to the Musk-Thiel-Trumpian destruction machine. They could be there for the world. But they’re not. Not at all. They serve the money. And if it pays off, then they are willing to ruin peoples lives.
Google is on the wrong side of history.
Seems like their motto isn’t „don’t be Evil“ anymore for a reason.
It was limiting them. To truly maximize profits they need to strip off all limits. I’m not joking. Really not. This is why capitalism and fascism go so well together.
Can they even argue they following washed version of “do the right thing”
Well „the right thing“ says nothing. Doing the right thing can be making tons of money, which it apparently also is.
I am hoping that Google bites the dust from this. Having stuff like Peertube becoming common, would go a long way towards mitigating media moguls from controlling narratives. As we have seen, the media organs of the right are staying silent or downlplaying what has been happening.
Also, it would be nice if the folk didn’t have to deal with baseless copyright takedowns. A lot of culture has been lost to feckless corpotacracy.
I agree with your points, but what do you think are some of the specific things Google or other similar tech companies in such a similar capacity could realistically and meaningfully do object the Musk-Thiel-Trumpian destruction machine?
I would like to learn more
They could decide not to give 1M to Trump, but they did: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/09/google-microsoft-donate-trump-inaugural-fund They could use their reach and make a clear public statement: “we don’t support this”. But I’ve never seen any. They could give higher rating to actual useful information and try to show less fascist propaganda to people. I have to assume that’s going wrong as well.
Because of their giant impact, they send a message to all others. “We go with the fascists, we are not on the side of humanity but on the side of profit”. That creates dangerous dynamics.
Google has always been fuckers, they are still fuckers and going with the fascist flow they’ve proven that they will remain fuckers. Even if they switch side once the Trumpian monster stumbles, the can never be trusted.
This days it’s plain obvious. Before was slightly better hidden.
Literally nothing. A corporation, especially a publicly traded one like that, can’t do much but maximize (ideally long-term, but usually short-term) shareholder returns.
The Activision-Microsoft merger is a good recent example of this. During the anti trust trial, the CEO of Activision literally came out and said that he believes it’s a bad idea that will be bad for the industry and bad for the company in the long term, using the impact of consolidation in Hollywood as an example, but he has to side with the board. He’s basically legally obligated to.
I’m not saying it’s unjust or a bad system (and I’m definitely not trying to paint Bobby Kotick as a good guy), I just want to point out that corporations are very simple in their purpose, and nobody should be expecting anything more from them. If you’re disappointed that Google made this 180, that’s on you for falling in love with a corporation. They’re useful tools for producing goods and services, but terrible as a political tool for democracy.
But for some reason, it became popular to fetishize tech companies, and that spawned megalomaniacs like Elon, Zuckerberg, Horowitz, Thiel, etc who feel like they should be the supreme rulers of our civilization.
Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
We’re a long long way from those lofty goals of yesteryear, aren’t we Google?
The audacity to still have this quote up, right now, is off the charts.
This is a screenshot from today. Get fucked Google. What a fucking lie. You’re busy changing information to capitulate to a government that wants certain information hidden.
It’s true though, Google search does make it easy to discover a broad.
Hot broads in your area want to talk to you!
Hot shingles? In MY area? And I can lay them?
Don’t forget your Shingles vaccination before you lay them! You don’t want a Shingle Transmitted Infection. You know, an ShTI (pronounced Esh-T-I).
This was always going to happen. Companies in Germany when Hitler rose to power didn’t protest and speak up against him - they needed to sell his army goods. They made his uniforms and cars and didn’t say a peep about the extermination of people around them. The companies that spoke up were crushed. A corporation’s bottom line is their bottom line, no matter what horrors they need to assist in perpetrating.
The Nazis organized a closed door meeting with the leading German industrialists and told them about their plans to rebuild the German military to take revenge for WW I. They agreed and many of those same asswipes escaped the post war prosecution.
Now these closed meetings happen at MaraLargo
Most of the key people behind the Civil War and 1st Business Plot also were excused from justice, for the sake of soothing political tension. IMO, executing them would have been better for curtailing the corrosion of our society.
Remember when they removed “don’t be evil” from their code of conduct back in 2018
Pepperidge Farm remembers. And so do I.
“Do you remember a time when women couldn’t vote and certain people weren’t allowed on golf courses? Petridge Farm remembers. It was back in 2025.”
They also removed Holocaust Remembrance Day. Probably because it’s going to have to be renamed Holocaust I soon.
Corporations, at their core, are profit-generating engines—nothing more, nothing less. The corporate board’s one legal imperative is to ensure the shareholders see a return on their investment, by any means necessary. Morality? A marketing gimmick when convenient- not an operating principle.
All companies are evil. Google is not any more or less evil than any other company. The difference is they have a significant power base and therefore have a lot to gain or lose in the transition to fascism. They understand that Trump is spiteful and willing to bend and even break the law to punish those who defy him. They also understand he rewards those who bend the knee. Therefore, the most profitable path of action is bending the knee.
This should not surprise anybody. You substitute Google for any large corporation and they would have done the same thing. Don’t believe me? Google around (while you still can freely search for information) for the Coca-Cola saga in Colombia, where union leaders were getting forcibly suicided by narco-paramilitary death squads hired by Coca-Cola.
You know- the commercials that make you feel all warm and fuzzy around Christmas time with the polar bears and Santa Claus? Yeah, they’ll murder you if you threaten their bottom line. It’s just what they do.
There’s a simple math equation:
Let
P = Probability of getting caught,
F = Expected fine or penalty,
R = Potential revenue or profit,
Constants
α = The weight assigned to the probability of getting caught ( P ). If this constant is high, the corporation is more cautious… if it’s low, the corporation is willing to make more risks. In Colombia, this is much lower than in the US.
β = The weight assigned to the probable size of the penalty ( F ). A high β means there’s a serious potential danger. However, if β is low (like when Ford decided the cost of simply paying lawsuits from deaths due to known car malfunctions was probably lower than the price of recalls) then they’ll be more likely to push forward
γ = The weight assigned to the impact on their bottom line ( R ). For example, if Boeing thinks they will lose a lot of money from whistleblowers, they will find a way to suicide them. If the impact is small, then it’s not worth the potential risks.
C = ( αP ⋅ βF ) − γR
Let’s give an imaginary example. Let’s say a corporation is considering dumping toxic waste illegally into a river, potentially giving thousands of people cancer. Let’s say they’re gonna save $10M a year from doing this.
R = 10,000,000
The probability of getting caught is 10%
P = 0.10
The expected fine is $5M
F = 5,00,000
Let’s try out some constants
α = 1.5 ⇒ they’re somewhat cautious about getting caught
β = 1.2 ⇒ they’re moderately concerned about the penalty
γ = 2.0 ⇒ they’re really motivated by profit (maybe their profits went down 10% last year, a big no-no)
Plug in the values
C = (1.5 · 0.10 · 1.2 · 5,000,000) - (2.0 · 10,000,000)
C = (900,000) - (20,000,000)
C = -19,100,000
C is less than 0? Dump that toxic waste, baby. It’s the logical position if you’re trying to maximize profit. Sometimes you will get caught, but imagine you did this in a simulation 1,000 times. Most of the times, you will be more profitable because of it and therefore you dump the waste.
It’s like a poker player. If you get AA, you raise pre-flop. Sometimes you will lose on the flop to some dunce who goes in with 2-7… but in the long term, most of the time, you will win. Therefore it’s the right move.
This is what companies do. People need to realize and internalize this. They are profit generating engines. Nothing more, nothing less. They are not your friends. They don’t care about the environment. They don’t care about the future of the world or anything. Literally nothing at all.
They are a math formula and if destroying everything you love happens to be the most profitable move most of the time, they will do it without second guessing. Because they aren’t people. They are a machine.
All companies are evil.
Disagree. Publicly traded companies are amoral, so whether they do something good or evil depends on what’s profitable.
Healthy competition tends to make “evil” actions unprofitable. Google doesn’t have healthy competition, hence the current situation.
These companies aren’t the bad guys in the same way that weeds in your garden aren’t “bad.” If you don’t want weeds to take over, make sure there’s sufficient competition and incentives so desirable plants crowd them out, and stay on top of the handful of weeds that take root. We’ve neglected the garden for decades and allowed some truly nasty weeds in, but that doesn’t make the weeds “evil,” that means we were poor gardeners.
To me, apathy and amorality when the consequences are harm towards others is evil. It’s sort of like if a driver was in a rush and ran over a protestor on his way to work.
Sure, he did not wish any harm on the protestor. He just simply needed to get past them and chose the most effective and efficient path.
It’s an amoral act but the act (and the driver) is still evil. Evil is not just a mustache twirling genocidal dictator or sadistic serial killers… In fact, the amoral does infinitely more harm than the malicious. The Nazis did not come to power because of malice. They did not kill millions of Jews because of malice. They got there through apathy and amorality.
They didn’t want to kill the Jews at first- they wanted to deport them. But once they got them in the camps… it was impractical to supply enough logistical power to actually move them all. So while they figure out a plan, let’s have them do slave labor.
And then after a while, since we can’t move them, we may as well just kill them. It’s the most effective path to where we want to be. The driver driving over the protestor.
If this isn’t “evil”, what is?
Healthy competition tends to make “evil” actions unprofitable
Competition helps. I agree that this negative aspect of capitalism is exponentially magnified when monopolies form.
The thing is, in capitalist the wealth tends to snowball. Wealth is power and wealth buys influence. Look at how Disney singlehandedly changed copyright law when Mickey Mouse was about to enter public domain. Once you reach a certain size, you can modify the rules of the game. So it creates a self-perpetuating cycle.
This position we are in is the natural consequence of free market capitalism. I agree that free market is better. But this is the grown up version of free market. There was never going to be any other scenario but the one we are in.
We’ve neglected the garden for decades and allowed some truly nasty weeds in, but that doesn’t make the weeds “evil,” that means we were poor gardeners.
We can debate on the ontology of the world evil. It really is an interesting debate. But for all practical purposes, if the weeds are killing the crops that feed your family… what is the difference? Whether they want to kill you indirectly through starvation or don’t want to kill you- you’re dead either way.
I’m happy to say I’m officially degoogled in my personal life/computer.
I still have legacy accounts with gmail that I can’t migrate though.
Companies have decided to cut the crap and just focus on their core mission of being evil
Lmao, damn… I was done with them before this announcement but thanks for reinforcing my decision.
Honestly I wish they had a setting for only federal holidays. The ones where banks close.
I also want to be able to switch back to general holidays too though. These people at google are chicken shit cowards.
Honestly I wish they had a setting for only federal holidays. The ones where banks close.
Those are bank holidays.
Ok
They sent it all to the Gulf of Mexico…
Fuuuuuckkkk I wish I could degoogle again
Don’t be evil, lol
