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So I’ve been thinking about the mechanism by which Google ensures that its engineers systematically engineer Chrome to make ad blocking harder, without just coming out and telling them to. I have a silly and long-winded analogy: let me try it out. 1/
Imagine you’re the CEO of a major oil and gas company and you inadvertently (financial crisis) find yourself the owner of a popular electric car manufacturer. These cars are so popular that they’re killing your gas stations: you even have to mention them in your 10-K.
The obvious solution would be to shut down sales of these cars, or re-engineer them all to use gas. But you can’t just do this because it’s too obvious and politically fraught. 3/
One day an earnest and well-meaning safety engineer shows up in your office. He’s concerned: dozens of drivers have been injured because their battery ran out on the highway and they had to hitchhike. He has a proposal: fit every car with a gas tank and always-on engine.
Now, if you were actually interested in selling electric cars, you might show this person the door. After all, a modification would utterly destroy the value proposition of your product! Yes, there are real risks. But life is risk, and this does not represent a good tradeoff. 4/
Of course, your interest is not to sell electric cars. Your interest is to make sure this pesky electric car business stops cannibalizing your lucrative gas station business. 5/
So instead of acting in your (car) customers’ best interest, and protecting the value proposition of your product, you just: do nothing. You step out of the way. Make sure your engineers know that you have their back, and safety is a number one priority. 6/
The beauty of this is: nobody ever has to give an order like “take this pesky electric car business out behind the woodshed” because your earnest and well-meaning safety engineers, left unchecked, will do it for you. 6/
Anyway, this has been “lessons in the extremely obvious” but I offer it as a dual explanation of why it’s possible for Google engineers to be acting with good motives, while also unwittingly advancing the company’s unsavory business objectives. 7/
Because the alternative is that all these people I respect are collaborating to make the world worse, and I hate that. 8/8
