Yelling fire in a theater has never been a problem, it was only a metaphor used to defend the ridiculous supreme court decision that handing out flyers opposing the draft during World War I was an immediate threat to life and should therefore be banned.
No one ever called for bans on yelling fire in crowded places. The US government called for bans on distributing pamphlets that went against their first attempts at imperialism.
Sounds like you're pigeonholing Damore (of Google Memo fame) the same way that you don't want to be. You should read the original memo, and not an opinionated summary of it, it's not long. You may find that you were sold a lie about it.
I've read the 10 page memo several times. I strongly disagree with his central ideas. However, I see them as political thoughts. Political thoughts I strongly disagree with. And the way I look at it, he was fired because of two things.
1) He had right wing political ideas which most people at Google strongly disagree with.
2) He wrote them down in a shared work forum.
I've read second hand accounts of many unusual ideas which have been shared on internal Google forums. I agree with lots. I also disagree with lots, both left and right.
But it was only the guy on the right who got fired. I'm not aware of anyone ever getting fired from Google for expressing far left political ideas. Let me know if I'm wrong on this.
It's 2020. Today's lesson is that if I have an idea out of the accepted mainstream of my company, and they are on the right, then keep my mouth shut, or I'll be fired. If the idea is on the left, I can go ahead and share my thoughts.
Corporations work by providing a product or service that customers believe to be worth more than the dollars and cents they're paying for it. It's inherently consensual. The only way a corporation begins to generate revenue is literally by attempting to please as many customers as possible.
Yes, but the problem is not when the corporation is small, but when it is large. With increased power, it can reach the levels of a nation-state in affecting people, and it is unchangeable as there is no mechanism, unlike voting, to change its behavior. You may say that the customer is always right and so will choose a different product, but this can only be done with a free market, which does not exist currently, and can only exist with strong governments free of monetary influence, as I said before. Sure, pockets of free market, competitive behavior exist, but for large corporations, they are near oligopolies, and people can't switch to another provider. See healthcare, colleges, ISPs, and so on.
Either way, one should be wary of large organizations, regardless of their type such as governmental or corporate.
What meaningful changes have people affected in democratic republics in the recent past? Companies that don't keep up with customers' desires go out of business all the time.
8 hour work days, no child labor, Social Security, FDA. Look at anything that came out of the Great Depression and New Deal. Things would be a lot worse if governments ceded all power to corporations, which they basically did in the Gilded Age. To be clear, I also want what you wrote, healthcare, benefits, and parental leave, among others, but those only come about through strong governments.
Corporate power comes, largely, through government power. Corporations coopt the government and use its power to protect or enrich themselves. Why would corporations want to weaken that?
I am much less worried about corporations corrupting government than the “moral majority.” Corporations have never lobbied to pass laws against interracial marriage - which was illegal in some states until the 60s. Nor did they try to make it felony for adults of the same sex to be in relationships. There were laws against “sodomy” in some states until the 80a.
I’m worried about both. The moral majority was invented from whole cloth by wealthy individuals usually affiliated with large companies. It’s a farce that benefits corporations and their owners and lends them political support for their economic actions that does not logically follow.
One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (Basic Books, 2015)
It's understandable because of Corporate law in the US that a public business wouldn't stand too firm against government overreach because it may impact future business,
apple can do it because apple isn't a desktop provider to the government and doesn't have a market in danger in that space.
"Conspiracy" makes it sound like the US government hasn't been building the largest spying apparatus in history over the past 2 decades. Reality says otherwise.
I'm enjoying the amount of pushback this is getting here on HN, given that we all probably think we're not victim to this, and are actively exposing ourselves to be.
No one ever called for bans on yelling fire in crowded places. The US government called for bans on distributing pamphlets that went against their first attempts at imperialism.