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What's any large company (say, over 10,000 people), in any other field than tech, that you positively like? If you're like me, you'd struggle to name one.
The issue here is that human psychology is wired for dealing with people. We like people who are strong and make the right 'I am your ally' sounds, and dislike people who fail these regards. The root of these instincts is evolution--the proto-humans that used these metrics to make the right intra-tribal alliances reproduced--and are thus deeply, deeply, deeply, wired.
An emergent property here is that people tend to really dislike those they find ingenuine. People whom make 'ally' sounds but don't follow through are not just enemies, but resource pits too. In my personal experience, I would say people dislike the ingenuine even more than they dislike pronounced enemies, although a citation is definitely needed here.
A large company can never make 'ally' sounds for too long. The charismatic founder must eventually leave, and profit incentives forever whittle away at any mission state, and there are too many employees for any consensus-making, so eventually all corporations must land, politically, in some spot between 'wishy-washy' and 'generic corporate positivity'.
But does this dislike make corporations 'evil'? I don't think that's entirely fair.
Corporations are amoral. They will always do exactly what leads to greatest increase in stock price, or their c-suite will be sued for not doing so. Amoral might not be 'good', and amoral is very dislikeable, but amoral is not evil.
What, for many, is fantastic about big tech is that it's a true 'nerd meritocracy'. This might be where the reverence you're seeing comes from. Most high-paying fields outside of tech place a high premium on social skills (sales, business, finance, politics, law) or else are not true meritocracies (academia, also law). For the smart but less socially-inclined, big tech broadly is high-paying (strong) and wants to hire people like you ('ally').
They're mostly large manufacturers and some resource extraction companies. If we look at smaller companies there are a lot more.
What makes big tech vile is the same bad impulses that exist in other industries dialled up to eleven due to scalability, network effect driven lack of competition, cultish customer behaviour and finance driven lies. For example, everyone hates rent seekers and tech are just currently the best and most visible ones at it.
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