this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2023
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"Do no evil^1^"
^1^ unless we can make money from it.
There's a reason that doesn't appear on their site or in their docs any more. It was a canary clause.
Any organisation that needs to remind themselves not to be evil is already intrinsically evil.
Very overtly and loudly claiming a quality which should be self-evident in oneself, one's company or one's nation invariably means it's not really there.
"People's Democratic Republic"
"The Greatest Democracy In The World" - Lots of US politicians, including those activelly engaged in gerrymandering and passing vote supression laws.
The dictum, supposedly from Einstein, about only the universe and human stupidity being infinite, needs to be ammended to include hypocrisy.
The country with the most Freedom™*
*Freedom™ must be redeemed in Freedom™ tokens; sufficient Freedom™ tokens entitles you to trample others' Freedom™; insufficient Freedom™ tokens entitles you to die in the gutter
I think they changed it didn't they?
I think it's "do the right thing" now
For the shareholders
Ahh, much more leeway
Right - "Do no evil" uhhh... Is that not your default setting?
Not anymore: they ditched it for "do the right thing (for my wallet)" a couple years back
I mean... "evil" is arbitrary, right?
Not arbitrary enough that they thought they could keep saying it. They ditched that about a decade ago.
"It's evil not to make as much money as possible", Google founders. C-suite and board, probably.
Actually, their slogan was "Don't be evil." But they revised it recently by adding a comma after the first word.
I feel like there's scales of evil here Google starts to need to highlight on a whiteboard