Evilness is when profit is the sole concern

Published on 2025-05-09.

When a company is small it's easy to care about the good and the evil it does, but when a company gets big, typically profit becomes the sole concern and that is when evilness takes root and starts to spread.

You start out a couple of guys with a great idea, the idea concerns itself with solving a specific problem and you're passionate about solving this problem in all the right ways, without compromising your core ethical principles and the values you believe in. Then you need funding in order to grow and you get some investments. The investors invest in order to make a profit and that is their primary concern. This can happen in several different ways, but for simplicity sake, let's just say that you enter into a form partnership with a couple of rich guys.

After a while the rich guys starts talking about optimizing profits by saving money. One way to save money is on cutting specific procedures, procedures you have put in place e.g. in order to make your product more secure. Those procedures are time consuming and you can save at least half of the costs if you cut these procedures away.

So what do you do?

This is a very simple example, but imagine this on a large scale with a stock-based company and millions of dollars in investments. Many investors do not care about anything other than profit. They do not care about human life and they do not care about animals or the environment.

I worked at Google as a third party contractor back in the days when Google truly cared about search results, I know because the work I did was about improving search results and removing junk from the search engine.

Back then companies had just begun paying for search results. Such results were discretely presented on the right side, besides the "organic search results", and they were only offered when they were truly relevant and useful to a search query.

If you searched for something unrelated to any kind of product or service, nothing but relevant organic search results were displayed and Google didn't try to stuff crap you didn't need in your face.

We had the secret "Google Manual" or "Google Bible" (I cannot remember the name). This manual contained a bunch of hardcore principles that dictated how to determine when a website was relevant for a specific search query and a lot human intervention, fact checking, double checking the work of others, etc. went into the process.

For example, no single individual could affect search results, several independent people, had to agree, and safety measures were in place that protected websites from being unjustifiably removed or lowered in search score. But if e.g. a blogging website was used solely to earn money on advertisement then such a website was either removed from the search results or at least it was "punished" by being moved to the very end of the search results.

Google had major success and the rest is history. The "Do no evil" sign was removed from the main office and suddenly it wasn't about providing good search results, it was about how to get people to buy stuff they didn't need, such that Google could profit more from the advertisement platform they provided to companies.

Today Google is a horrible search engine, almost useless.

I left Google before all of this happened, but I know people who worked there afterwards, people who cared about the work they did, but things changed so much that it was not the same company any longer.

Now, I want to address you! You, the reader of this blog post.

Do you want to affect the world in a positive way? I'm sure you do, most of us do. It's just very difficult in the face of all the evil in the world right? Whether it's Big Tech, politics and war, the environment, etc.

Well, it's important to understand that every little choice you make has a direct effect on what's going on. It doesn't have an effect on everything at once, but it has a very important effect nonetheless.

E.g. do you own an iPhone? Or a Macbook? Do you have a Tesla vehicle by any chance? Do you use Google Maps? Do you use Facebook, Instagram, or any other Big Tech social media platform?

Every time you purchase a product or use a service, you're directly supporting the company that provides the product or service and you're putting money into the pockets of the people who own the company (even when the service is "free of charge").

By doing so, whether you like it or not, you also support the work the company is doing, how they do that work, and every thing else that is associated with that particular company. You are after all, a part of the reason why the company is a success!

Now, ask yourself this: Are you able to look yourself in the mirror and be proud about the choices you make or are you in denial?

Are your opinions shaped by popular media? By conformity to majority? By following hype? By succumbing to weakness rather than facing the discomfort of doing what is right?

Be truly objective! Take a hard look at the reasons you mention to yourself and others for the things you do. They will reveal the truth about you.

Then own up to the fact and start making better choices!