> There's no Bond villain at the helm. It's good people rationalizing things.
I worked for a few years at a company that made software for casinos, and this was absolutely not the case there. Casinos absolutely have fully shameless villains at the helm.
Interesting. A year ago I joined one of the larger online sportsbook/casinos. In terms of talent, employees are all over the map (both good and bad). But I have yet to meet a villain. Everyone here is doing the best they can.
That may very well be the case. But I think this is a distinct category of evil; the second one, in which you'll find most of the cigarette and gambling businesses, is that of evil caused by indifference.
"Yes, I agree there are some downsides to our product and there are some people suffering because of that - but no one is forcing them to buy from us, they're people with agency and free will, they can act as adults and choose not to buy. Now what is this talk about feedback loops and systemic effects? It's confusing, go away."
This category is where you'll also find most of the advertising business.
The self-righteous may be the source of the greatest evil by magnitude, but day-to-day, the indifferents make it up in volume.
It's not indifference, it's much more comically evil. Like, they're using software to identify gambling addicts on fixed incomes, to figure out how big retirees' social security checks are, and to ensure they lose the entire thing at the casino each week. They bonus out their marketing team for doing this successfully. They're using software to make sure that when a casino host's patron runs out of money and kills themselves, the casino host is not penalized but rewarded for a job well done.
At 8am every morning, the executives walk across the casino floor on their way to the board room, past the depressed people who have been there gambling by themselves the entire night, seeing their faces, then they go into a boardroom to strategize ways to get them those people to gamble even harder. They brag about it. It's absolute pure villainy.
I wouldn't know if this is a fair characterization of other companies, but it certainly isn't anything like what I observe here. If you can't name names, I'm going to guess you just made this up.
We had a few dozen customers, and "percent of wallet" (figuring out how much money they walk into the casino with vs. how much they leave with) is a standard metric in casino marketing everywhere. You can figure out their paycheck based on them coming the same day of the week and losing the same amount multiple times, and market to then to ensure they lose their whole paycheck more often.
It's trivially easy to spot gambling addicts in the data, and in markets with better protections for gambling addicts they have to approach marketing quite differently. In some places you're allowed to ban yourself from the casino, and it's super illegal for the casino to market to you, so there are tons of protections to prevent all emails, texts, phone calls from hosts, physical mailers, ads of any form from reaching you.
The suicide anecdote is what caused me to quit. I'm ashamed to admit I asked my team to use an "IsDeceased" flag in the calculation for host bonus compensation, for when a patron dies while assigned to them. After that, I tried to transfer to the non-casino corner of the business where they were trying to sell our software to sports stadiums, and when they killed that off a few months later, I left the company. This was circa 2016, at a casino in the rust belt, but I'm not going to get more specific than that.
Some people like to smoke. I find it disgusting myself, but as long as people want the experience I see no reason why someone else shouldn't be allowed to sell it to them. See also alcohol, drugs, porn, motorcycles, experimental aircraft, whatever.
We can have all sorts of interesting discussions about how to balance human independence with shared social costs, but it's not inherently "evil" to give consenting adults products and experiences they desire.
IMO, much more evil is caused by busybodies trying to tell other people what's good for them. See: The Drug War.
I disagree. The health burden from smoking is approximately the same as death toll as the sum of all in the Holocaust, but smoking does it every nine months. And 1.3 million/year of those are non-smokers who are dying because they are exposed to second-hand smoke: https://ourworldindata.org/smoking
Even when the self-righteous are at their most dangerous, they have to be self-righteous and in power, e.g.:
There are jobs in which one may find oneself where doing them poorly is better for the world than doing them well.
I think you and your colleagues should sit back and take it easy, maybe have a few beers every lunchtime, install some video games on the company PCs, anything you can get away with. Don't get fired (because then you'll be replaced by keen new hires), just do the minimum acceptable and feel good about that karma you're accumulating as a brake on evil.
I worked for a few years at a company that made software for casinos, and this was absolutely not the case there. Casinos absolutely have fully shameless villains at the helm.