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I might be typically-minding, but I think that most big tech companies are seen at least slightly negative by rats in general.
Apple and Google are obviously rent-seeking with their digital walled gardens. Apart from that, Google is an ads company, while Apple is making hardware for a slightly cultish consumer base. I prefer Android over iOS because the former is mostly open, but recognize that OS X is less of a walled garden than most Android devices are. Microsoft did a great job of becoming mostly irrelevant for me personally, which is much better than I expected. So far, they have failed to completely ruin github.
Reddit is a cautionary tale about what happens when you let a single company control a bit platform. Facebook was always mostly terrible.
Musk deserves a paragraph of his own. For someone who made his money with fucking PayPal, he really did some good for a time. Both Tesla and SpaceX were exactly the kind of companies society should want. Hell, he was Scott Alexander's go-to example of "high positive impact human" a decade ago. Of course, since he bought twitter, he has had a ton of negative impact on the world as well. Since xAI, I wish that whoever is writing Musk's role would try to write a realistic villain with actual coherent human motivations instead of just a Sieg-Heiling comic book caricature.
Speaking of LLMs, there is a sentiment among rats that many AI companies are actively working on extincting humans. Personally I hope that we will get wiped out by 'Open'AI with its callous disregard for safety rather than by Musk trying to build Grok from his own ego, the former seems slightly more dignified. Anthropic is probably one of the better ones as far as alignment vs capabilities is concerned.
Uber and Amazon are providing a useful service for customers, but it is apparent that their prices are caused by having people work in terrible conditions.
Most companies which I actually consider net-positive are not tech giants. Substack is filling a useful niche. Discord is still slightly useful despite working hard on enshittification.
I agree that monopolies are bad. If a company wants to grow from 0% market share to 5%, its incentives are likely aligned with broader society. If it wants to grow from 30% to 90%, the opposite is the case.
I'm not sure Tesla and SpaceX are actually "effective". Tesla did certainly do a lot of good in making electric cars "cool" but the product on offer is far shittier and more expensive than Chinese or even US automaker electric cars. SpaceX is a classic case of overpromising and underdelivering. It can't even do something the US government could do in the 1960s consistently.
I just bought a Tesla, and I didn't find any of the other American market very competitive on price, and none of them offered FSD.
I'm gonna be sad when we have our third kid and the MX is too small.
Congratulations, that's a nice problem to have.
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