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Last edited Thu Mar 12, 2026, 08:58 AM - Edit history (7)
It is very popular with those Zuckerberg and Marc Andreessen tech creep types.
Alison Taylor wrote a piece I found very useful during the bleakest years of my life about how corrupt institutions use metaphors of war and sports:
https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1076&context=public_integrity
I used to read that piece over and over for solace in 2016-2017, to convince myself I wasn’t insane, back when the media fawned over Facebook, Google etc and bullshitted about their hollow faux progressivism. I knew what they were. I won’t ever forget or forgive those hell years which culminated with the death of my mom and another 4 years of hell.
Taylor’s article has aged well. It is succinct and almost every word of it is gold just like this other brilliant piece by Ruth Cain from 2017 on mental health.
Another widely-referenced study discusses how corruption becomes “normalized” in organizations through three mutually reinforcing processes: institutionalization, rationalization, and socialization.
During institutionalization, a corrupt decision or act becomes embedded in corporate structures and processes.
During rationalization, self-serving ideologies develop that enable individuals to justify corrupt behavior. And finally, during
socialization, embedded systems and norms induce new employees to tolerate corruption and view it as permissible.
This model helps explain why individuals engage in corruption that would otherwise violate their internal moral framework. As the authors describe in a second article, “One of the most intriguing findings of the white-collar
crime literature is that corrupt individuals tend not to view themselves as corrupt.” Another sociological study elaborates on the self-rationalizing ideologies of corrupt organizations, including denial of responsibility, denial of injury, denial of the victim, and an appeal to higher loyalties (such as loyalty to co-workers).
Building off of this literature, my study found a highly consistent view of how a culture of corruption manifests within an organization.
Corruption seems most likely in organizations where growth is a fetish, insecurity is rampant, and high performance goes unquestioned. Rules and processes put in place to promote integrity may be
selectively enforced and easily evaded, as shown in many recent cases under anti-bribery statutes.
The Growth Fetish – When the Ends Justify the Means
Corporations exist to make money, grow revenue, and satisfy shareholders. Financial reports depend upon an inflexible quarterly calendar and budget targets that often assume continual growth. Many interviewees said that
firms that overwhelmingly emphasize growth are more vulnerable to misconduct. For example, Volkswagen’s push
to dominate North American markets in diesel vehicles contributed to unethical conduct by employees.
A culture that emphasizes that “the ends justify the means” may exacerbate this problem. Employees may face sales targets higher than industry peers, justified by the need for market dominance at any cost. As one interviewee
commented: “There are techniques to exaggerate the urgency and seriousness of the need to win—the sense that
‘this is what it takes to survive’—which short-circuits ethical reasoning.” Reducing corruption risk therefore requires an active emphasis on values and behaviors that consider how growth is achieved, not just whether it is achieved.
This may require creating an alternative narrative about corporate identity and success criteria, as well as a long-term commitment to ethics, sustainability, and engagement with all corporate stakeholders, not just investors.
Selective Blindness and Plausible Deniability
Interviewees agreed with regulators that leadership plays the most critical role in determining whether a firm’s
culture is vulnerable to corruption. Employees mirror leaders’ behavior, which can create group norms that tolerate corruption. Interviewees mentioned arrogance, complacency, and opacity as leadership traits that encourage corruption. FIFA President Sepp Blatter’s initial refusal to resign after the indictment of several high-level FIFA leaders is a recent example.
Leaders who set unrealistic targets based on opaque considerations yet keep themselves
personally disengaged with frontline operational concerns may implicitly encourage corrupt activities while maintaining plausible deniability. Autocratic command-and-control structures make employees fearful and reluctant to share concerns. One expert commented: “What people watch is whether management is doing anything to cook the books when they need to, which sets the tone that it’s okay to break a couple of rules to get things done.”
Complex Organizational Systems
The complexities of doing business across time zones, markets, and product lines have led companies to implement
organizational matrices and to diffuse responsibility. Shared responsibility may empower employees and improve
information flow, but must be complemented by clear lines of accountability. Otherwise, corruption will always be “someone else’s problem.” The General Motors ignition switch scandal presents an example of managers failing to make overall connections in the absence of clear responsibilities for organizational risk. An organizational change expert who worked in the energy sector argued: “Much literature concerns a mythical ethical man making decisions with the facts in front of him; this isn’t real. The realities of hierarchy mean that thriving in an organization involves suppressing bad news, which means that taking responsibility is hazardous. The
decision maker checks only that the paperwork is complete, and those who complete the paperwork are relieved of responsibility for the decision—then everyone is protected individually, but it can add up to widespread harm.”
High Pressure and High Rewards
Companies that pressure employees to meet high sales targets through rewards and penalties that disregard ethical
considerations are more vulnerable to corruption. Many firms facing bribery charges, such as GlaxoSmithKline in China, used sales-based compensation schemes that failed to account for local market conditions.
If one sales team hits unreasonable targets by paying bribes, all teams feel pressure to cut
corners, creating vicious competition that escalates misbehavior.
During institutionalization, a corrupt decision or act becomes embedded in corporate structures and processes.
During rationalization, self-serving ideologies develop that enable individuals to justify corrupt behavior. And finally, during
socialization, embedded systems and norms induce new employees to tolerate corruption and view it as permissible.
This model helps explain why individuals engage in corruption that would otherwise violate their internal moral framework. As the authors describe in a second article, “One of the most intriguing findings of the white-collar
crime literature is that corrupt individuals tend not to view themselves as corrupt.” Another sociological study elaborates on the self-rationalizing ideologies of corrupt organizations, including denial of responsibility, denial of injury, denial of the victim, and an appeal to higher loyalties (such as loyalty to co-workers).
Building off of this literature, my study found a highly consistent view of how a culture of corruption manifests within an organization.
Corruption seems most likely in organizations where growth is a fetish, insecurity is rampant, and high performance goes unquestioned. Rules and processes put in place to promote integrity may be
selectively enforced and easily evaded, as shown in many recent cases under anti-bribery statutes.
The Growth Fetish – When the Ends Justify the Means
Corporations exist to make money, grow revenue, and satisfy shareholders. Financial reports depend upon an inflexible quarterly calendar and budget targets that often assume continual growth. Many interviewees said that
firms that overwhelmingly emphasize growth are more vulnerable to misconduct. For example, Volkswagen’s push
to dominate North American markets in diesel vehicles contributed to unethical conduct by employees.
A culture that emphasizes that “the ends justify the means” may exacerbate this problem. Employees may face sales targets higher than industry peers, justified by the need for market dominance at any cost. As one interviewee
commented: “There are techniques to exaggerate the urgency and seriousness of the need to win—the sense that
‘this is what it takes to survive’—which short-circuits ethical reasoning.” Reducing corruption risk therefore requires an active emphasis on values and behaviors that consider how growth is achieved, not just whether it is achieved.
This may require creating an alternative narrative about corporate identity and success criteria, as well as a long-term commitment to ethics, sustainability, and engagement with all corporate stakeholders, not just investors.
Selective Blindness and Plausible Deniability
Interviewees agreed with regulators that leadership plays the most critical role in determining whether a firm’s
culture is vulnerable to corruption. Employees mirror leaders’ behavior, which can create group norms that tolerate corruption. Interviewees mentioned arrogance, complacency, and opacity as leadership traits that encourage corruption. FIFA President Sepp Blatter’s initial refusal to resign after the indictment of several high-level FIFA leaders is a recent example.
Leaders who set unrealistic targets based on opaque considerations yet keep themselves
personally disengaged with frontline operational concerns may implicitly encourage corrupt activities while maintaining plausible deniability. Autocratic command-and-control structures make employees fearful and reluctant to share concerns. One expert commented: “What people watch is whether management is doing anything to cook the books when they need to, which sets the tone that it’s okay to break a couple of rules to get things done.”
Complex Organizational Systems
The complexities of doing business across time zones, markets, and product lines have led companies to implement
organizational matrices and to diffuse responsibility. Shared responsibility may empower employees and improve
information flow, but must be complemented by clear lines of accountability. Otherwise, corruption will always be “someone else’s problem.” The General Motors ignition switch scandal presents an example of managers failing to make overall connections in the absence of clear responsibilities for organizational risk. An organizational change expert who worked in the energy sector argued: “Much literature concerns a mythical ethical man making decisions with the facts in front of him; this isn’t real. The realities of hierarchy mean that thriving in an organization involves suppressing bad news, which means that taking responsibility is hazardous. The
decision maker checks only that the paperwork is complete, and those who complete the paperwork are relieved of responsibility for the decision—then everyone is protected individually, but it can add up to widespread harm.”
High Pressure and High Rewards
Companies that pressure employees to meet high sales targets through rewards and penalties that disregard ethical
considerations are more vulnerable to corruption. Many firms facing bribery charges, such as GlaxoSmithKline in China, used sales-based compensation schemes that failed to account for local market conditions.
If one sales team hits unreasonable targets by paying bribes, all teams feel pressure to cut
corners, creating vicious competition that escalates misbehavior.
Except it is not just denial of the victim, it can be active demonization of the victim as mentally ill, an addict, themselves somehow compromised.
It is vicious to the core and the number of people who passively or actively support it to the bitter end (even some decent people..can’t entirely blame them..who would want to go up against these mobsters who was not personally harassed to the point of losing all patience?) has taught me that no one will pitch in seriously who is a part of that network. One has to do it oneself.
I owe it to my friends, colleagues and doctors since they are not corrupt, but normal humans who don’t want to be fired in this bleak hiring landscape. As Jon Stewart said about Al Sharpton, only someone with no prospects can do it.
I fully support my own 3 labs, a sundry random scientist I bumped into from a large, unwieldy and casually managed lab headed up by another of those dazed by actual responsibility types of pis (small is beautiful), doctors (oncologist/oncology nurse) especially.
I know they don’t lack integrity and it was an added annoyance that one might end up as the beagle that ass Marjorie Greene sheds crocodile tears over..Beaglegate 2.0-now with humans!
Dr. Fauci did not deserve that. I chose publicly funded hard science over and over as it is one of the least corrupt professions out there by and large whatever RetractionWatch or Ioannidis tell you. Because the fraud rates are still very low (much like the rewards) unlike the private sector. And it is just disgraceful to shill Google “agents” and other such rot that just make work harder. Those are joke “ethics”. Is there any concept these guys will not pervert?
Errors are made by all humans. But which ones a society obsessively focuses on tells you a lot about the society. Deregulation in defense contracting and the private sector with punishing levels of surveillance of relatively modestly and far more commensurately or even underpaid public sector workers, doctors and publicly funded scientists of the least sleazy and social climbing types is the goal.
Blackstone Inc which is taking over hospitals in my corrupt state is another matter.
This was the best piece I ever read on this bullshit of claiming random people are mentally ill using the Reefer Madness playbook.
As a marijuana user I was very vulnerable to such parasitic “care” and cringey “humor” no doubt. I feel sorry for the doctors..and “The Citadel” should be required reading for medical students as they navigate the corrupting siren songs of these tech companies as workloads explode on this overpopulated hell planet:
https://theconversation.com/how-neoliberalism-is-damaging-your-mental-health-90565
Who wants the validation of corrupt hospitals for some sort of rubber stamped legalization of marijuana as opposed to the honest thing?
It is very lucrative for corrupt hospitals (as distinct from individual typically honest medical doctors) pushing some kind of mapping or coercive therapy and other bullshit.
And Human Terrain Systems was a perfect example of how ideas with some potential get corrupted by deregulation. I am not surprised that it collapsed under the weight of sexual harassment and fraud allegations. The times I was sexually or otherwise harassed it was a defense contractor and another gig worker type is my guess. Employees with decent working conditions and stable jobs are probably less likely to behave like that.
The crowning insult was proliferation of corrupt “street art” shilling harassment as a “wake up call”, when I have been awake since 2011 and steadily losing patience.
Give me back my street/home/neighborhood is my clarion call to these parasitic creeps and the corrupt data scientists and researchers behind them.
Chris Ketcham gets it. Ecotourism, influence etc are industries I loathe. But no amount of damage to someone else’s life or resources can bring shame to these types:
https://www.christopherketcham.com/hyper-visitation-the-fate-of-the-national-parks-and-tourism-takeover-in-a-small-town/
This sort of thing in okay in the US. Not in a corrupt state like mine. I do not know how to be more clear than that. Let this state and these systems do the bare fucking minimum of common human decency before forcing trashy “smart” projects.
And that with no knowledge by any but the most corrupt locals and some Indians who don’t even live here.
No one my family or I would have anything to do with in India would participate in this trash.
I use marijuana at my own risk. It isn’t a sleazy quid pro quo. And I alert my mj company which provides an honest service at a reasonable price (though now I go through the larger outlet since I suppose I am too high risk on the short term as a patient..I feel bad as that probably eats into my small mj company’s profits).
These kinds of people live in the US and shit over here. This creepy guy Ragy Thomas was a perfect example. I am infuriated. It is culturally blind. A fucking fusion of the worst of both cultures. An embarassment to everything:
https://news.vanderbilt.edu/2025/01/23/from-lidar-to-ai-vanderbilt-is-helping-redefine-nashvilles-traffic/
In my state this is going to result in harassment and malpractice charges. This is a sleepy little town and you won’t drive a disgraceful race to the bottom further and gloss over. I can retort to a person I met with “you must have mistaken me for someone else.”
(The lights keep blinking off and on and something just fell outside).
I read this piece in 2014 and liked it. Never expected it to get this personal:
https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2014/sep/26/fake-street-art-sucks-perrier-replaces-williamsburgs-nelson-mandela-mural-with-huge-advertisement
This model of globalization will only stop when Indians like who are nothing like Steve Bannon or Tucker Carlson start to push back.
These are the worst people.
Chris Ketcham gets it. He is left. He is not a corporate consultant shilling a sweatshop labor and stupidity built fraudulent (and rickety) “bridge” that destroys any actual affection or respect in communities and enriches people like these:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/investigations/private-equity-reduces-patient-care-enriching-investors-senate-report-rcna186636
Job thought boils were bad..he should see the shit I have seen. I wouldn’t say boils are better but at least its a tie at this point.
Not one of those pieces is from a shady or questionable source (though I should download all the pieces over the years that went towards forming my worldview about corruption of this type in these hell years as I gear up to pushback. There is a cloying level of inter-group solidarity among all these fraudulent and conniving hucksters. And the leadership that is not outright corrupt still never offered any meaningful support or had common decency or shame. The least they can do now is not embarass themselves further. I would be really pissed off if the people I would blame the least got thrown under the bus as I was and the worst -people I never knew or at most briefly around 2011-2014 - continue to skate. What is with these guys?
This should set the gold standard in medical data and exploitation of disposable, non voluntary human research subjects like yours truly. Medicine is not an area to scam people peddling gaming, retaliation and harassment to force marijuana users into degrading shit as the system sits around best case going “durrrrr”.
They never did their jobs. These admin types. At least they can back off:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/university-north-texas-corpses-dissected-unclaimed-bodies-rcna170478
The always execrable NYT talks about this sleazy guy Mitesh Bohra in this piece. Most of these are Graeber’s bullshit jobs. It is this why pervasive trash will result in a court case I file here in India targeting every participant I found objectionable, which would be most of them.
I really have to ask..does no one have any shame?
https://www.cnbc.com/2015/08/17/data-crunching-is-coming-to-help-your-boss-manage-your-time.html
I read that in disgust when it came out. There was another one about gamification in the workplace. That absolute creep Alex Pentland, now fittingly at the eternally sleazy Stanford, has a bunch of creepy little surveillance as a service companies: Cogito etc.
Shoshana Zuboff did a good job of dissecting Pentland. Ben Waber is another such creep (Humanyze)
With this creepy Google guy who wouldn’t recognize a conflict of interest if it bit him in the ass, Thomas Insel, guys like Pentland and those sleazy people Andy Ng and that Woebot woman muck around in mental health while that creepy Sebastian Thrun shilled subpar edtech at some point much like his local creepy counterpart Byju Raveendran. It is a ball of sleazy, corrupt special interests commodifying and perverting human life and breaking the web of life, with conspiracy theorists on their own lousy platforms like Facebook deflecting from the precise issues mangling the human brain or the web of life with no expertise, common sense or oversight, which is then used as a strawman attack on serious complainants.
Someone with a brain should help these idiots out and teach them to separate gray areas like private marijuana use in your own room (and fuck your sleazy “fall monitoring”. The pretense of concern is the truly disgusting part).
Dr.Fauci cares..these fuckers are parasites. I plan the harshest and most draconian legal pushback possible locally. Other people can foul up their own countries. I don’t want this shit in my street. This isn’t a corrupt, creepy, sleazy Si Valley stronghold. Thank you very much. It is a corrupt, creepy, sleazy communist stronghold. What do you take us for?
We have our very own local creepy, corrupt indigenous low and high tech perverts. Why the fuck would we want imported low and high tech, non local, corrupt perverts?
This kind of fusion is not recommended.
Equal opportunity pervert bashing rights! Not which of these foul sleazy cults would I like to be a part of
..
I have been informed that I can be negative. I contend that everyone else is “addicted” (a favorite canard used to shove randoms into shitty hells) to rose-colored glasses.
I have been watching this wretched stuff grow in vociferous and often incoherent indignation for 14 years and have had enough.
Besides, if one doesn’t, based on this crowd so far, this will be their next move and this not being a sad Diplomacy Game but the real world, a trail highlighting potential retaliation is essential.
India is generally pretty cool. But people like these behave like this:
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/kozhikode/NITC-lets-off-guilty-prof-with-warning/articleshow/34659859.cms
(That guy is a friend of the creepy defense contractor who sexually harassed me. My dad dislikes that creep and was unhappy when I started visiting this creep’s lab to learn some optics at a time when I was dazed and embittered after my last job. Within three months he sexually harassed me and I sent a crazy email to my really cool postdoc mentor saying I wanted to retract all my work. Such bs. I would not retract a single piece of my work, but I was being endlessly punished those days..which is fine..I am pretty hardy and it has only left me certain that this must never fly. But in my confused state I thought retracting all my work and dropping out of society would make it stop.)
This was my former employer’s strategy in the US..attack, slander and retaliate is the playbook. The less tribal, the more difficult and more solitary the human the better. And I never even complained mind you. I was just trying to leave and escape, which I now perceive as the type of thing they could use for their stupid blackmailing ai agent bullshit so that shamblog guy can whine 🙄:
https://www.indiatoday.in/world/story/attempt-to-intimidate-experts-worried-over-serum-institute-s-rs-100-crore-lawsuit-against-vaccine-volunteer-1745598-2020-12-01
This guy thinks he has problems..I wish I had problems this spurious:
https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-me/
But I am seriously worried about this type of stuff here. Like the SIL lawsuit, this stuff is meant to intimidate if one manages to get traction:
https://www.newsdrum.in/national/defamation-case-hc-advances-hearing-in-akbars-plea-against-priya-ramanis-acquittal-10914183
Good for Priya Ramani..go her..that is actually giving a shit over promoting such types.
Most actual actual whistleblowers and complainants aren’t like these grift this way and then turn whistleblower and grift again like: Frances Haugen, Sarah Wynn-Williams, that Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Yasha Levine has referred to with what I perceived as veiled mockery, the unspeakably stupid and awful Tristan Harris..
It is such bullshit. First you grift in one direction vapidly driveling with egregiously flattering crap like “Google is NOT a festering pile putrid trash with nothing much except a shitty search engine, some calendars and delusions of grandeur!” “Facebook will connect the world!”
The there is the predictable volte face and crocodile tears.
Actual whistle blowers like Daniel Hale and that Fannie Mae whistleblower go to prison and lead shitty lives.
And these people are the minority anywhere..these grifters and players, but they have an outsize role in society. There was this other cool Indian guy, Hemant Kappana, who blew the whistle on Volkswagen and returned to India. Very different from people like Ellen Pao who go work for Kleiner Perkins and the sue.
I have never cared for histrionics and unlike the genuinely nice whistleblowers like Daniel Hale, Hemant Kappanna, the Fannie Mae lady, Priya Ramani etc, while I am not cynical about people, I rarely buy into stories about human society being well aware of how humans treat animals and earth. That is a fair indicator of how systems will end up treating humans as we go on and on having children while yelping unbelievably about falling birthrates as every system gets strained and along with the bullshit faux concern about human life whether it is the awful Betsy Hartmann, Liz Bruenig, Ben Wray Jacobin types or the pro-life nuts, actual concern for human life goes down.
I was worried but then I realized I am not like those whistleblowers who are really nice. Sure I would never be sleazy or transactional. But my logical core operates on this: “you can go around solo or in a cult making a nuisance of yourself and I am not entitled and I don’t need your shit and I will stay in my lane. But once you start encroaching more and more and more and taking me for a fool, it is not pugilistic puffery. It is that you were stupid enough to put yourselves on display to a large number of people with no stake in your grift who are mostly presumably baffled, but without your constant sleazy war on the human gut instinct, odds are no one will sympathize with your logically inconsistent palaver. Whereas I am just minding my own business and living within my means in a democracy.”
My lack of high flown ideals as much as sleazy transactionalism could really help take these truly ugly and loathesome creeps out.
Because what honest human can finally fail to hear the alarm bells ring over parasitic encroachment that depletes you, me and earth as Sundar Pichai/Larry Page/Sergei Brin/Marc Andreessen/Reid Hoffman/Mark Cuban/Vinod Khosla/Paul Singer(fair and balanced!)/Ambani/Zuckerberg and their molls fart into gold-laced smart underwear and shit into gold toilets while defrauding you and me?
Like this is not a good story - the harjinder singh story and it is not pro immigration to yield to lobbying groups as bad as Cato and Aei etc. These are not good stories:
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/University-of-Manavallu-In-Silicon-Valley-a-dodgy-Chinese-Telugu-alliance/articleshow/50295648.cms
https://www.wlrn.org/commentary/2025-08-28/harjinder-singh-undocumented-driver-florida-immigration
Immigrants of all kinds are undergoing immense stress and strain of all kinds in America right now. And through no fault of their own. But again these parasitic lobbying groups and ceos and companies that exploit blue collar or even high skilled immigrant labor without a shred of genuine humanism while parasitic economists and Ben Wray celebrate a race to the bottom with mechanical bullshit about “GDP growth” and celebrities trot out canned statements that exacerbate these roiling tensions, the one thing that is missing is any actual recognition of the human faces of these conflicts which Bishop Marian Budde wrote about in vivid and moving terms.
The point is that to defang these Steve Bannons, Tucker Carlsons, Matt Walshes, Ann Coulters and other founts of poison you cannot lose your humanity or be mechanical. Humanism cannot be dialed in.
It is why I love Yasha Levine’s or Christopher Ketcham’s and many others’ distinctively human style than no GPT can override:
Honesty about overpopulation, finiteness and limits to growth not pseudoscientific tosh economists trot about a form of growth that increasingly does not even offer cheap baubles and merely buggy bloatware that somehow one should suffer is the need of the hour.
I rather like the movie American History Ex. As movies go it is acceptable. I generally disapprove of movies and music as forms of media that have muscled out paperback books which I love but no longer enjoy as much.
But movies can communicate stuff canned statements are poor at. The protagonist at one point grasps that the Steve Bannon style nazi demagogue manipulating him exploited him to the hilt and let him go to prison while constantly inflaming his passions, but never did any time himself (which even Steve Bannon did). The same can be said about purveyors of hate on these rubbishy platforms who let other people get swayed by their grift and destroy their lives, but stay safe themselves.
These are diseased economies, policies and rampant deregulation and junk and they will lead no one anywhere good.
There is no Fenn’s treasure on my street. Just entrapment given how I would certainly end up pushing back against this racket unyieldingly.
And that was stupid to fail to recognize.
I posted about the immigrants languishing in hells yesterday for no reason. And I look at these crass, vapid and arrogant idiots on my street over the last 5 years and the creepy forces behind them, drunk on their own bullshit that they are infallible and can continue to get away with harassment and exploitation as many thought they too would for 14 years.
I am grimly determined to ensure that they won’t.
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