this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2025
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I have to wonder: did they seriously mean it when they made "don't be evil" their company motto way back in the day? I'd be open to the idea that they were sincere at the time and then had their brains broken and their souls corroded by extreme wealth.
Or, maybe they were being dishonest even back then, and that mercenary attitude is what you need to succeed in Corporate America.
Don’t mean to burst your bubble but if you’ll look at what the founders of Google are saying today you’ll find that they’re on par with Googles current leadership. Then again, we can’t know if they were like this from the start or if it’s just the wealth and power and corrupted them.
Google went public & since before they did that they were (had to be) absolutely dead-set to become a monopoly & exploit that position via experience enshitification (but they had to first make sure they de facto didn't have any competition - launching gmail helped a lot).
There was still a period of a few years where Google was saying "we won't show ads" but was valued on the market into billions (whilst having no profit but promising extreme revenue growth any year now - they were being valued on their potential for ads).
Much like Uber - the strategy is to shovel enough capital for the company to undercut the competition by any means necessary & then squeeze the market.
And founders kept stocks, so they'll say they want Google to kill all puppies in the world, slowly & painfully, if it nets them even more free wealth.
(Free I mean without any labor, just capital ownership.)
It's not even Google now.
It's Alphabet.
Oh fuck that makes so much sense now.
It's difficult to describe the world in the pre-social media age. There was a time when Google was just a cool software company building cool things, and the don't be evil motto was probably genuine.
Software used to be an thing that you would buy and use if you needed it. It came on a disk. It wasn't this ever pervasive network of always on tools living in our homes and devices working to cultivate the ultimate consumer unit
When they weren't raking in tens of billions of dollars in government surveillance contracts and state-sponsored media ad buys? Probably.
But Google is under completely different management in 2025 relative to what it had at the outset in 1998. Perhaps the company's commitment to "Don't Be Evil" was violated the day they IPO'd. But Larry Page and Sergey Brin aren't in the driver's seats anymore. They sold their souls to join the oligarchy. Perhaps they assumed they could do more with an infinite line of credit than a rising star social media company. Or perhaps Google simply wouldn't be allowed as the global leader in search without spreading its cheeks and admitting corrupt bureaucracies to puppet it from below.
There was a time in the early 2000’s when tech companies got their customers by being better than the alternatives instead of just being obscenely wealthy and buying out all competition.
They removed the old motto from everywhere official many years ago. Don't be evil... Until you get enough market share that you don't have to care anymore.
Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.