I remember when I was growing up, tech industry has so many people that were admirable, and you wanted to aspire to be in life. Bill Gates, founders of Google Larry Page, Sergey brin, Steve Jobs (wasn't perfect but on a surface level, he was still at least a pretty decent guy), basically everyone involved in gaming from Xbox to PlayStation and so on, Tom from MySpace... So many admirable people who were actually really great....
Now, people are just trash. Look at Mark Zuckerberg who leads Facebook. Dude is a lizard man, anytime you think he has shown some character growth he does something truly horrible and illegal that he should be thrown in prison for. For example, he's been buying up properties in Hawaii and basically stealing them from the locals. He's basically committing human rights violations by violating the culture of Hawaiian natives and their land deeds that are passed down from generation to generation. He has been systematically stealing them and building a wall on Hawaii, basically a f*cking colonizer. That's what the guy is. I thought he was a good upstanding person until I learned all these things about him
Current CEO of Google is peak dirtbag. Dude has no interest in the company or it's success at all, his only concern is patting his pockets while he is there as CEO, and appeasing the shareholders. He has zero interest in helping or making anyone's life pleasant at the company. Truly a dirtbag in every way.
Current CEO of Home Depot, which I now consider a tech company because they have moved out of retail and into the online space and they are rapidly restructuring their entire business around online sales, that dude is a total piece of work conservative racist. I remember working for this company, This dude's entire focus is eliminating as many people as feasibly possible from working in the store, making their life living heck, does not see people as human beings at all. Just wants to eliminate anyone and everyone they possibly can, think they are a slave labor force
Elon musk, we all know about him, don't need to really say much. Every time you think he's doing something good for society, he proves you wrong And does the worst thing he can possibly do in that situation. It's like he's specifically trying to make the world the worst place possible everyday
Like, damn. What the heck happened to the world? You know? I thought the tech industry was supposed to be filled with these brilliant genius people who are really good for the world...
Well first of all, I don't personally think evil even exists.
Secondly, I don't think these people are any more or less "evil" than the rest of us. They just operate on a much larger scale that affects many more people. If any of us normal folk would be put under equivalent level of scrutiny as these guys with journalists combing thru our every social media post and paparazzis following us around combined with the intention to dig up dirt and contribute to the negative narrative that sells better than a positive one, we'd all look like them. Most people don't like Gates, Musk or Zuck because that's the conclusion they've independently arrived at. It's how they've been told to think by the media.
I'd ask how you define evil in this case. To me, an act is evil when the net detriment to the planet and its contents (including humans) is greater than the net benefit it creates, and the actor pursues said act knowing this. I'd argue it scales with the nature and context of the act. It's hard to say this isn't real. But yes, we all have the capacity for evil, and also can be complicit in other evils by dint of normalized behaviours (without necessarily being 'evil' ourselves)
I do agree that an absolute Evil doesn't exist, the same way an absolute Good doesn't exist. But we're a pile of writhing meat puppets on a moist, moldy rock - we don't exist on that level in the first place.
Well I'd say that for a person to be evil they'd need to be doing evil things with the sole intention of causing harm with nothing good coming out of it. Perhaps a good caricature of an evil person would be someone wanting to destroy the world including themselves. Admittedly such people absolutely does exists so maybe that debunks my own claim.
However if someone draws joy from causing harm to others I wouldn't still call it evil but more like extreme disregard; you don't care how others feel, only how it makes you feel. This is why I don't think billionaires abusing the system for their own benefit makes them evil because causing harm is a byproduct of their selfish goals but not the intention of them. Similarly someone like Hitler wasn't evil either because causing suffering to the jews was not the reason he set up the death camps but rather a way to achieve his other goals.