A friend sent me this about Ken Auletta’s new book about Google:
Many books have been written about Google, even though we’re all pretty familiar with the company to begin with, but what makes Ken Auletta’s Googled interesting is that it’s a history of the company as told by the incumbent sociopaths. These are the people Auletta has spent his life covering: the media moguls who tried to acquire and conquer their own empires of content and delivery. And to them what’s most shocking and galling about Google’s incredibly rapid rise is that instead of being engineered by a fellow sociopath, it was largely done by normal, decent people plainly applying the forces of new technology.
“What has Google ever done for the world?” ask the sociopaths at various points throughout the book. “All they do is steal other people’s content!” To a normal human the question is ridiculous — it’s almost impossible to imagine life without Googling for something, checking your Gmail, or watching videos on YouTube — but sociopaths aren’t used to doing things that create value for people. They’re just interested in conquering more and taking control. When Disney bought ABC for $19 billion, it didn’t improve most people’s lives in any real way, but it did let Michael Eisner regain control of the company he once ran.
So naturally the sociopaths are outraged that their control is being taken away. Newspapers, book publishers, television companies, ad agencies — their businesses are all failing, while Google’s is on the rise. The sociopaths may be outraged, but this is exactly what’s supposed to happen. Most people don’t have a vested interest in whether ABC does well or even continues to exist. What they want are good television shows at a reasonable price, and if they can get those from Apple and Google instead of their local cable company, then bully for Apple and Google.
I’m sure it’s possible to lay it on too thick about how great google is and what great guys the founders are and so on, and perhaps this piece does this. But having just read an article about Rupert Murdoch, I was struck by the differences:
Murdoch’s son-in-law Matthew Freud—married to Elisabeth Murdoch, and one of the most well-known P.R. men in the U.K.—explained to me what he believes is the essence of Murdoch’s approach to business: Murdoch is not a modern marketer. He runs his business not on the basis of giving the consumer what he wants but through more old-fashioned methods of structural market domination. His world, and training ground, is the world of the newspaper war—a zero-sum game, where you wrestle market share from the other guy. Curiously, his newspaper battles have most often involved cutting prices rather than, as he now proposes to do on the Internet, raising them. (Murdoch has contributed as much as anyone, with his low-priced papers, to the expectation that news is a de-valued commodity.)
I don’t know who or when this happens, but it seems the lesson “greed is good” was so thoroughly internalized by much of the media that monopolists like Murdoch (and even outright crooks) are now lionized. Whether they create a product that people like and want or just find some way of ripping people off doesn’t matter. What matters is that they’re worth a lot of money.
arguingwithsignposts
Again for those who missed it:
BJ gets a shout out in the Wired article about the URL shortener being pulled.
NobodySpecial
It’s interesting to see that people who have rejected social Darwinism as applied in our economic system doing better in any field than the ‘sociopaths’ or whatever you want to call them.
Of course, a good question to ask now is, ‘What does Google plan on doing about Bing and other competitors?’
geg6
Same as it ever was…
Same as it ever was…
Same as it ever was…
Welcome to the new Gilded Age, folks.
SGEW
I’m starting to feel that we need a new term other than “sociopathic” for the unethical attitudes of certain people in power (e.g., Murdoch, Lieberman, Eisner, et. al.); people who pursue worldly domination with little to no thought for the people crushed beneath their heels, but are (probably) not technically sociopaths (the mantras “Greed is Good” or “Look Out for Number One” or “FYIGM” are not (necessarily) based on neurological disorders).
Using such a specific, clinical term not only takes away from the legitimate efforts to help those who have debilitating mental illnesses, it lessens the impact of the descriptor for those who are probably, in fact, actual sociopaths (e.g., Dick Cheney, Bill Kristol, etc.).
“Anti-social” isn’t nearly strong enough (and has other meanings). “Crypto-Sociopath” sounds awful. “Socially Irresponsible” is too mealy-mouthed. “Evil” might work, but it’s a loaded term (to say the least). Any other ideas?
DougJ
I’m starting to feel that we need a new term other than “sociopathic” for the unethical attitudes of certain people in power (e.g., Murdoch, Lieberman, Eisner, et. al.); people who pursue worldly domination with little to no thought for the people crushed beneath their heels, but are (probably) not technically sociopaths (the mantras “Greed is Good” or “Look Out for Number One” or “FYIGM” are not (necessarily) based on neurological disorders).
I agree. I don’t know what the word is though.
kid bitzer
“republican”?
Sentient Puddle
Capitalist?
NobodySpecial
Since I’m a firm believer in the KISS principle, I use the term Asshole.
Kryptik
Gekkoians? Gekkites? Atlas Thugged? Dumbass’s Free Marketeers? You-Tool-itarianism (As in, You’re All Tools For Me To Use)
I honestly think trying to attach a simple label on them diminishes how galling they are.
bystander
They’re just interested in conquering more and taking control.
Rape and pillage used to be the territory of barbarians. But, barbarian isn’t a pejorative to those following Murdoch’s approach. It reminds me of theToddler Rules of Property.
* If I like it, it’s mine.
* If it’s in my hand, it’s mine.
* If I can take it from you, it’s mine.
* If I had it a little while ago, it’s mine.
* If it’s mine, it must never appear to be yours in any way.
* If I’m doing or building something, all the pieces are mine.
* If it looks just like mine, it’s mine.
* If I think it’s mine, it’s mine.
bystander
Well, you get the idea. Obviously, the “edit” made it worse. If I edit again I’ll probably disienvowel the mess.
MBunge
Before we cannonzie the Google folks, let’s recall that their little business is only about a decade old, so there hasn’t been much time for their inner-sociopath to come out. Also, I suspect in another decade or so the fact that Google is to information what Wal-Mart is to physical stuff will become a bit more obviously problematic to people.
Mike
Blue Raven
@Kryptik:
Randian Thugs. Gekkoids. Gone Gekko. Greed addicts (greedicts?).
Perhaps, but this is a real phenomenon and needs a real label. And I agree that “sociopath” is a bad word to use. We’re talking about people who may have genuine emotions in other situations but turn them off for business purposes. This could be its own psychiatric disorder, but sociopathy isn’t it. Labeling doesn’t always diminish. It often illuminates.
Zifnab
In the aftermath of the 80s and 90s greed and stupidity boom, I don’t think you can stress enough the value of companies like Apple and Google.
I thank my lucky stars every day that greed and short-sighted stupidity so often seem to go hand in hand. Had the media organs been as savvy as their health care counterparts, we’d still be locked in the digital dark ages the way we’re trapped in capitalist hell-care.
:-p
scudbucket
It’s easy enough to imagine a society where rich people still have extraordinary amounts of money, but poor people are sheltered, educated, engaging in meaningful work, have access to health-care… The question is – why isn’t this imagined society real? One reason is the inadequacy of markets to actually redistribute incomes in a way that is beneficial to the lowest level earners. (To the extent that this hashappened, credit must surely go – in part – to the collective pressures applied by worker’s unions.)
But another reason this imagined society isn’t real is the rapaciousness of the wealthy. Rockefeller, for example, had the Pinkerton’s murder striking miners rather than pay them a livable wage. (Question for libertarians: was the Ludlow massacre a result of too much government regulation, or was Rockefeller merely a sociopath? ) John D.’s public image did take a hit on this, which was corrected through the emerging field of propaganda. His over-all ‘approvals’ went from the teens to high 70’s in only a few months. The same use of propaganda – buoyed by the success in shifting the Rockefeller approvals – was used to ‘manufacture’ public approval for entering WWI.
And, concomitant with the birth of modern propaganda was the death of the truth: not because people were now systematically lied to (that had always been the case), but because there was an apparatus in place designed to intentionally, purposefully, and efficiently change the content of people’s beliefs. Sickness became health, war became peace, indifference to human suffering became a glorious efficiency of the invisible hand, etc., etc.
Colette
Every time I see the word sociopaths in the heading of this post, my brain substitutes “sociopants.” Every. Time. Maybe that’s the word we need.
bago
That literally is the definition of a corporate charter. A CEO is chosen to make money, not product. That’s the inherent risk in going public.
trollhattan
FWIW I use misanthrope as my go-to term for someone who’s a half-step from full-on sociopath.
Kinda dated but does the job.
ploeg
Following Veblen, you could use “predators.” That, for better or worse, would take the implication of mental illness out of it, though the resulting term is still hardly complimentary.
Jager
I spent many years in radio, I was part of the generation who put Rock on FM. It was a selfish move because we weren’t getting the music we liked on the radio and we couldn’t convince the owners of AM stations to change the music they were playing. Imagine being a Beatles, Stones, Dylan or Joplin fan and having to sit through Strangers in the Night by Sinatra or Immpossible by Perry Como to get to Positively 4th St. It sucked. In the late 60’s and early 70’s nobody listened to FM, only 15% of the population had access to an FM radio. In a 5 year span listening habits completely changed, by the mid 70’s 85% of music listening was on FM. What happened then? The value of FM stations skyrocketed, a station we bought in 1971 in Boston for 1.2 million was worth 10 or more by the late 70’s, that got the money boys attention. At the time they were held back by the FCC rules, one AM, one FM in a market and no more than 7 markets total. A shit load of lobbying for almost 20 years got the restrictions on ownership dropped and created mega companies like Clear Channel, Citadel, Cumulus and others. The original charge of broadcast ownership was to serve your local community and the original broadcasters did it well. In the days before deregulation we did news on on our music FMs, real news, we broke stories, reflected the politics of our audience. Every station had its own sound, some good, some bad, but unique, original and local. If you drove across the county you heard different sounding stations in every market from Boston to LA, it was cool and interesting. When the banks, Wall Street and the Venture Capitalists got involved we lost local broadcasting because they don’t give a shit about the audience, the community or the people who made radio part and parcel of everyday life, they don’t embrace technology (our HD Digital system is designed to protect the big ownership groups and is different from the rest of the worlds system) of any kind and they have created a product that deserves to die. The lesson of what happened to radio is a lesson that is being repeated over and over in the good old USA in almost every business. If the bankers could come up with enough money to buy Google they would and they will, they then will squeeze the all that is good out of it, collect their fees, declare it dead and move on!
cyntax
Randiopaths? Galtoholics?
Fuckwads presents problems for writing headlines.
Maude
They say I have mine, that makes them miners.
cyntax
Randiopaths? Galtoholics?
Fuckwads, though succinct, presents problems for writing headlines.
theturtlemoves
Yeah, I think it is probably possible to lay it on a little too thick in light of fun quotes like this from their CEO: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” So, they will use your data for whatever they want and if that bothers you, you must be guilty of something. Link. Anyone who thinks Google operates out of pure altruism and not to create an ever-expanding market for its core ad-delivery business isn’t paying attention. Android? Ads on phones, targeted by location. Gmail? Ads in email app, targeted by keywords and user data. These guys aren’t making billions of dollars by sharing the love, man.
DougJ
Before we cannonzie the Google folks, let’s recall that their little business is only about a decade old, so there hasn’t been much time for their inner-sociopath to come out.
I agree. That’s why I thought the article laid the Google worship on a little thick.
scudbucket
@DougJ: I don’t know what the word is though.
‘avaripaths’ (pathological greed): sounds to like a course for curing ED, or a form of yoga
‘meany-paths’: but this is just silly (meanypants??? really???)
‘kleptopaths’: not technically accurate; implies something more mundane
‘MIGS’ (morally insane greedbag shitheads): well……
‘Greedbaggers’: not precise in this context, but a useful term nonetheless
Damien
As a person in one of the creative fields, I’d also like to point out that pretty much the only reason that people get entertainment of any sufficient quality is because someone, somewhere pays for it.
Google doesn’t want to do that, they want to give everything away for free to drive their advertising revenue, which they then won’t share with those whose content they’ve stolen.
I really, really hope you guys like YouTube series, because that’s pretty much the quality you can expect from now on.
Legalize
All of these assholes look like Christian Bale to me. So, “Little Batemans”?
Cerberus
@scudbucket:
This place is real. It’s called Denmark. Or possibly France. Or maybe Sweden.
There’s a whole suite of European nations where the rich fully understand the importance of a socia.listic base standard of living for the proles and full living wages (with money for minor luxuries).
And it rewards them handsomely. The farmer I rented from when I first arrived may have claimed there were no rich and no poor, but he had a giant farm with two decent sized houses on it, a separate vacation house in Germany, art, a decent sized TV, and two adequate cars, as well as subsidize a daughter doing horse rearing in Switzerland and enough money to take several vacations a year and an overseas vacation at least once every two or three years.
So, if that’s not rich, that’s at least immensely comfortable. The problem is that our rich feel they are entitled to seventeen mansions, twenty cars, and a helicopter solely used to fly between solid gold yachts. And that sort of “I have no idea what to do with all my money” obscene wealth is probably unsustainable with democracy…On the other hand, the royal family of Denmark looks like they do all right for themselves.
scudbucket
@Cerberus: Yes, I was a bit obtuse here. The ‘imagining’ I was referring to was US society, and it was in the context of some recent posts/comments on BJ re: political economy. The question I was focusing on is why institutions in the US normalize what is quite clearly (at least to me) an immoral distribution of enormous wealth. Excessive greed is not only tolerated here, but lauded, while the consequences of that greed are obscured from view or justified with propagandistic sloganeering.
disappointedGOPer
Aaron’s been spending too much time with Paul Graham.
Colette
Well, since we are speaking of sociopaths … Another Republican party official who can’t take no for an answer, using his official position to
make friendsinfluence peoplestalk women. But hey, they were Republican women, so they were asking for it, right?Garrigus Carraig
@scudbucket: Calvinism is often held responsible for this phenomenon.
Wile E. Quixote
@SGEW
Why not sociopath? The people you cite above have done far more damage than the average garden variety sociopath who kills a few people or molests children. Why should we accord them any more respect than we do common, garden-variety sociopaths?
SGEW
@Wile E. Quixote: In a way, it’s not a question of respect, it’s a question of accuracy.
Actual, clinical, “garden-variety” criminal sociopathy is identifiable and, in many cases, treatable. It is a mental illness. What we are looking at here (the “IGMFY,” “Greed is Good,” “Let Them Eat Cake” ideology, and its practitioners) has no such excuse.
And in point of fact, I may have less “respect” for people such as Rupert “Enemy of Democracy” Murdoch than I do for a full-blown clinical sociopath, who has something fundamentally wrong with their brain, neurologically speaking. A sociopath has restricted agency when it comes to their behavior (“he knows not what he does”), and is less morally culpable for their actions, maybe [But: Is Dick Cheney actually a sociopath? Is he actually suffering from a clinical mental disorder? Was [Godwin Violation] a sociopath? Should they be less morally culpable for the evil they have done, because of a neurological glitch? This is another question, really.]
PJO
Google is a for-profit business like any other. It exists to maximize shareholder value. Currently, it does that primarily through advertising, which is less than transparent because it consists of advertisements popping up in search results, rather than as pages stuck in at random in a newspaper or magazine. But Google wants to make money any way it can, and when it has the opportunity, it will do so, especially if it can use its size to push out competition. (One of its goals is to monopolize online publishing in the long-term (similar to photo rights with Corbis) — if you want to download a book, you will have to get it from Google, and if you are an author, you will get what Google wants to give you.) Further, Google maintains all of a user’s personal information for years — what you searched for, what you bought, what you looked at. Google wants to make money off of that information. What Google offers may seem to be free, but you give up your privacy, and perhaps more, in exchange.
Notorious P.A.T.
That’s awesome DougJ ) Thanks for posting it.
I’ve seen estimates that 5-10% of our country have antisocial personality disorder. Nothing I’ve witnessed in the business or political community makes me doubt it.
Notorious P.A.T.
[“Evil” might work, but it’s a loaded term (to say the least). Any other ideas?]
You think “sociopath” is too strong but “evil” isn’t? It’s wrong to suggest Rupert Murdoch has no conscience but kosher to say he works for the Devil?
Notorious P.A.T.
Here’s what I want to know: if a person behaves as if they have no conscience, consistently and continuously. . . what are we supposed to think about them? Believe them when they say “I have a conscience! Deep down, I’m a good person!” Well shoot, why would they lie?
Glenn Fayard
I thought there was a society where the rich were loaded and the poor were taken care of. Wasn’t this Europe, present day?
SGEW
@Notorious P.A.T.: I didn’t say it was too “strong,” I said it was imprecise. Misleading, perhaps.