In its antitrust case against Google, the Federal Government filed a list of chats it had obtained that show Google employees explicitly asking each other to turn off a chat history feature to discuss sensitive subjects, showing repeatedly that Google workers understood they should try to avoid creating a paper trail of some of their activities. The filing came following a hearing in which judge Leonie Brinkema ripped Google for “destroyed” evidence while considering a filing from the Department of Justice asking the court to find “adverse interference” against Google, which would allow the court to assume it purposefully destroyed evidence. Previous filings, including in the Epic Games v Google lawsuit and this current antitrust case, have also shown Google employees purposefully turning history off. ↫ Seamus Hughes The fact that corporations break the law, and lie, cheat, and scam their way to the top is not something particularly shocking, nor will it surprise anyone. I can barely even get angry about it anymore – birds gotta eat, fish gotta swim, corpos gotta break the law, that sort of thing. It’s just an inevitability of reality, a law of nature. You know it, I know it, the whole world knows it. No, what really upsets me is just how easily they get away with it, and even if they do get punished, any fines or other forms of punishment are so utterly disproportionately mild compared to the crimes committed. It’s incredibly rare for anyone responsible for corporate crime to ever face any serious punishment, let alone jail time, and even in the rare cases where they do, they usually have some stock options or whatever left over from their employment contract that will ensure a lavishly wealthy lifestyle. Fines levied against corporations as a whole are usually so low they’re just a minor cost of doing business, to the point where one has to wonder why they’re even being levied at all. Compare this to us normal folks, and the differences couldn’t be more stark. Whenever we’re accidentally late on some small bill, we get fined automatically, with very little recourse. We get a speeding ticket automatically in the mail because we drove 5 km/h over the speed limit. Our tax agencies are stupidly effective and efficient at screwing you over for that small side hustle selling crap on eBay. And rarely do we have any effective, efficient recourse. And these things can quickly spiral out of control when you’re already living paycheck to paycheck – being poor is really, really expensive. And let’s not even get into how much worse any of this is if you’re part of a minority, like being black in the US, or of North-African descent in Europe. In this case, the illegal activities of Google and its executies and employees is on such clear display, and yet, few, if any, will suffer any consequences for them. If you ever wonder why so many regular people flock to political extremes, it’s exactly this kind of deep unfairness and inequality that lies at its roots. It’s dispiriting, demoralising, and disheartening, and primes the pumps for disenfranchisement with society, and thus the search for alternatives, upon which extremists pray. We either stop our continual slide into corporatism, or our societies will fall.
