What I'd love to know is: Assuming the founders pitched this idea for feedback to many people before getting this far, including to friends and family, didn't a single one of those people pull them aside and say: "Wait a minute, maybe stop and think about what you're actually creating here..." Could they find nobody in their circle of advisors who are able to empathize with low paid factory workers or at the very least point out the potential PR downside of this work? What kind of bubble are the founders living in? If I pitched this idea to a random sampling of 10 of my friends, I guarantee all 10 of them would retch in disgust.
The article points this out: both come from families owning sweatshop^W factories, so that's the bubble. They probably were applauded by their fathers for the good idea and execution.
But they at least went through a slightly-diverse undergrad university (Duke) and hopefully didn't spend it insulated from different kinds of people. Out of the thousands of students there, all of their friends happened to also be sweatshop heirs? I guess I just don't understand how someone, who's not royalty, can become a grown ass adult, never having had made friends with or developed at least some kind of empathy towards people unlike themselves.
>and hopefully didn't spend it insulated from different kinds of people.
Who knows? Maybe they could insulate themselves. Maybe they got a bunch of views but the ones that fit their current purview prevailed.
>never having had made friends with or developed at least some kind of empathy towards people unlike themselves.
people throw around the term too loosely nowadays, but psychopathy/sociopathy can be a legitmate explantion. Supposedly, CEO's have a disproportionately high amount of sociopathy. I wonder if its something you can develop from environmental factors?
In much of the world, working slowly as "number 17" was is viewed as a personal moral failing. Just as you might view a rude manager being chewed out as just, the founders here and their circle view the humiliation of this factory worker as correct and good.
Of course the exploiter doesn't have the moral failing in this. After all, the capitalist must profit as they can, and the proletariat suffer what they must. /s
Not to go too much into an ideological diatribe about class solidarity and such, I do wish that in light of cases like these, we as tech workers would reflect on the "worker" part and not get totally blinded from the exploitation of less fortunate people in different field. Consider me slightly cynical, though.
"Today, workers who get paid per week might not notice they are working slow, and be super surprised when they get a very small paycheck at the end of the week. But with our technology, we give them the early warnings, so they can speed up so their paycheck is bigger! See, we benefit them!"
It's all B.S. of course, but founders can be pretty convincing - charisma is one of the major requirements for their job.
And now you see them. Real, old world societies , with castes and strata ,where the royalty looks down on the peasants while paying lipservice to western idea. China, india, the middle east, russia. Welcome to the desert of the real.
