Don’t Be Evil?
I was speaking with someone recently about Google and their mantra, “Don’t be Evil”.
“They are evil,” he said. “I don’t trust them. They’re way more evil than Microsoft ever was.”
Now, evil is a subjective term. Google is a company, and they want to make money. They want to make money by using our information, on us, in an effort to make us give our money away. Not to them, mind, to whoever. They connect people who want to spend money with the people who have what you want to spend money on, and for this they collect tiny little fees… but they collect billions of tiny little fees, and turn those into huge mountains of cash.
But to get you to give up your money, they have to know you. They have to first get you to give up your information. And the best way, it turns out, is not to beast stomp throats like Microsoft, which is overtly evil. No, the most effective way is to make us happy. To lull us into joyfully flinging ourselves into whatever doom they’re engineering. insideously evil, if they are indeed evil.
They may be. My friend might be right. But if they are, it turns out that I don’t care. Their brand of evil makes my life easier, and me happier.
Evil is good.
i too have been navel gazing about evil for awhile now. I was even railing against the machine, got me evil panties in a twist and everything.
It still makes me sigh deeply, the supreme court giving corporations human dignities and all among other things, patents on genetic code… What will all that lead to, i ask?
Then when exhausted i thought…. there has always been evil, big evil and little evil. Now the Black Plague.. that was evil, slavery throughout the evolution of man, that was/is hugely evil. And there will be evil in the future. The key is learning to deal as effectively as possible in the midst of all the evil, much like you state above.
And evil is only good when it’s the good kind of evil…
(evil happy valentines!)