Corporate Psychopathy

For most of my adult life, I've been observing corporations as they engage in genuinely destructive behavior and churn through humans like sacks of meat. It's easy to spot abuses in the video game industry, and we have a tendency to laser-focus on those specific abuses rather than relating them to their less-specific root causes. This is understandable, as the industry does have plenty of its own challenges, between the ever-changing demands of technology and a passion-driven talent pool which lends itself quite well to many forms of exploitation. However, the roots of the abuse in the video game industry connect to deeper socioeconomic issues, which are gradually eroding quality of life for the vast majority of people. Back in 2010, these observations motivated me to spend quite a bit of time making a game all about the grotesque nature of corporate culture, by extrapolating it into a world of dystopian violence.

My own experiences in the realm of corporate abuse have been rather varied, and I became quickly disillusioned with the video game industry after experiencing my first crunch at the tender age of 18. I've spent most of my career with my own ideas of what I'd like to be working on, and those ideas have almost never aligned with consumer demand, so I've generally just used industry work as a way of paying the bills while pursuing my passions on my own time. This doesn't make me immune to all of the typical industry worker pitfalls, and I'm still often a victim of my own standards for quality when a project isn't adequately funded or scheduled. However, this neutral poise has allowed me to maintain a healthy level of personal and emotional separation from the work, which has saved me from a lot of potential torment. Even still, in having to rely on industry work to support myself and my family, one experience in particular stands out as the one that finally exceeded my personal threshold.

To be suitably vague, some time ago, I was wronged by an organization and had to sign away a bunch of rights in return for some rather paltry compensation. I still regret doing so. While my wife reminds me that I was just putting the needs of others before myself in financially challenging circumstances, I feel like this is the common case in these "individual vs. organization" scenarios, so the fact that my hand was forced provides little comfort. After signing my rights away, thanks to a couple of individuals reaching out to me at some risk to themselves, I was informed of more ugly behavior within the organization, and discovered that I had been unfairly represented (to say the least) by individuals within the organization after the fact. I was powerless to do anything by this time, however, as I'd already put pen to paper. I also had to protect the people who took a risk in reaching out to me, which prevented me from engaging in any kind of direct confrontation.

One lesson there was "trust no one in business, whether or not they seem like friends", and it certainly demonstrated that making every effort to be honest and transparent with company ownership is more likely to result in punishment than reward. In many cases, it seems that these people have forgotten how to speak the language of truth. The thing that really sticks with me, though, is how intrinsically my experience relates to broader corporate culture. I can probably thank this experience, in part, for forcing me to further contemplate how and why the system is the way it is, and for giving me greater motivation to actually bother writing articles like this one.

It's easy to vilify the individuals involved here, or write them off as "toxic", as they're prone to doing to those employees who don't adhere to their own corporate dogma. However, these individuals, while certainly engaging in scheming and manipulative behavior, are just working within socially and legally accepted constraints to produce the "best results" for themselves and, supposedly, their organization. Even when that means engaging in genuinely sociopathic behavior, that behavior is typically not seen as such, and rather is seen simply as a necessity in enacting a business decision. No matter the type of person you are when you start out in business, it's incredibly easy to be swept up in this process.

The video game industry does get a little more problematic than some other industries at this point, because ego tends to occupy a bigger part of the picture when attribution is involved. Even when you're a highly valued member of an organization, bruise the wrong ego, and your livelihood can be put at risk. In some cases, this even sparks conflict between owners, and one owner might end up happily throwing another under the bus to save face. In an ideal world, the size and configuration of an insecure business owner's genitals should have nothing to do with an employee's financial security, but in reality, the two are very tightly linked together. If you live in America, whether "my ego was hurt" is legitimate grounds for employee termination varies by state. In many states, unfortunately, that reason is just as good as any.

In the event that an owner is a terrible human being, but still business-savvy enough to keep their company afloat, the only thing that might keep would-be employees out of the fly trap is the nebulous notion of reputation. Unfortunately, reputation is completely unreliable. Former employees can be resentful for the wrong reasons, which taints the well to begin with, and allows abusive owners to dismiss small numbers of complaints with relative ease. Additionally, active employees may be afraid of speaking out or may be unaware of the abuses that have taken place. Combined with the fact that it's almost trivial for a corporation to legally silence an individual, reputation is all but useless in keeping people safe from abusive employers.

Dysfunctional business owner personalities run incredibly rampant in the video game industry, and while saying so isn't going to win me too many friends in high places, it does warrant saying. However, because this is also a factor in other industries to varying degrees, I don't think it's worth doing more of a deep dive into how and why it presents slightly more of a problem in the video game industry. The real purpose it serves here is to highlight the hypocrisy of this corporate duality. Supposedly, we're making cold and calculated business decisions in dealing with our workforce. At the same time, however, a bruised ego is greater cause to destroy an employee's livelihood. We don't say so outright, of course, and we pretend that A and B are not connected, but they are very much connected. Likewise, an employee's challenging personal/financial/medical/etc. circumstances aren't necessarily cause for keeping that employee safe from the next round of layoffs. We can't make such personal considerations. We must put the business first, for the sake of all employees.

We like to say that none of it's personal, but in fact, it's all personal. Making the choice to cut an individual off from their means of survival is personal, no matter how the individual making that choice might wish to detach from it. Our global society is now dominated by capitalism, and many of us don't have any kind of workable safety net to catch us when something goes wrong. Despite the fact that almost every human on the planet is reliant upon this system for their survival, we've completely removed human empathy from the equation.

Because of this, corporate culture has become a breeding ground for psychopathy. Even those who start out as well-intentioned, fully empathetic creatures are unlikely to get past a certain point on the corporate ladder without succumbing to some degree of sociopathy. Full-on psychopathy is rarely acknowledged or admitted as part of the culture, but it often manifests simply as the result of a well-practiced sociopath experiencing some form of petty emotion. Psychopathic owners/managers don't tend to influence smaller companies all that much (because it isn't beneficial to reveal their lack of empathy in smaller groups, for much of the same reason that psychopaths were more often punished in early society's smaller tribes), but once a company has swelled to 100+ employees, you'll start to see it reflected very clearly in the company culture. People who aren't psychopathic in nature will begin to feel defensive, fearful, and/or combative as a result of the social atmosphere and policies. People who are psychopathic will flourish.

This all circles back to the fact that psychopaths have been prone to flourishing in positions of power throughout history. This has shaped the world we live in today. This is why the corporate world is the way it is. It isn't because it's productive or beneficial to human beings to remove empathy from the equation, it's because it's been beneficial to each generation of psychopaths, and they've shaped culture and society to suit them. This really does go all the way back to the fact that psychopaths had the advantage in a day when it just took a rock to the back of someone's head to claim power.

Whether we're talking about a small business owner who's putting some form of greed or pettiness above the health and well-being of an employee, or someone who's working 40+ hour weeks for wages that still can't put food on the table without the assistance of food stamps, we're talking about the same thing. The results of a disgusting corporate culture which has been stripped of all humanity, and now reflects a way of life that no human was ever meant to live.

Many companies will claim that they are not part of this corporate culture, usually in the form of some incredibly inauthentic language from someone in HR or PR, depending on which side of the company you're standing on. You might have noticed that these companies are starting to sound a lot like cults, with the language they use surrounding "company values" and the complete life package they're selling to their prospective employees. You'll hear plenty about a healthy work-life balance, the importance of diversity, and all kinds of other flowery bullshit from any company that has to pay a reasonable wage to attract skilled workers. However, those companies are ultimately peddling the same poison as the companies that are happy to let their employees work full-time in return for wages that would see them starve without government assistance. The primary difference in approach stems from the company's wealth and talent requirements.

In the end, none of this is the direct result of some vast psychopathic conspiracy. It's the result of powerful, often psychopathic individuals shaping corporate policy to suit themselves. This was the inevitable result of allowing financial power to influence government policy, and it's been happening (in slightly different ways) across the world in every country that's part of the global supply chain. We've told the world that this is how business should operate, and we've handed these tainted policies over to a population of perfectly reasonable business owners. In return, many of those business owners have evolved into monsters to thrive under these policies and rise to the top in a world that seems to value financial success above all else. This means that we're artificially breeding empathy out of human beings, starting at the top.

Why is an old video game programmer writing about all of this crap? Well, I've lived with it for long enough, with some uniquely challenging personal and financial circumstances to help broaden my perspective. Now I've got a daughter who's going to have to live through the near-dystopian aftermath of the same crap. I figured it was about time to do my part in trying to point out the disease that's eroding our collective quality of life as we sit here, even if no one gives a shit.

So, don't be part of the problem. Don't buy into corporate culture. Don't assume that intelligence automatically grants perspective. Don't join the Cult of Optimism and assume that the rest of humanity is going to sort itself out just because you have a job that you love and humanity "generally seems to be making progress." Don't claim to be a libertarian, then support an agenda that gives corporations power over every facet of your life. Don't be complacent for as long as someone is starving to death while someone else is eating two Whoppers because there was a 2-for-1 deal. Do look underneath the bullshit and the superficial rationale for whatever the divisive policy of the day happens to be.

I see a lot of activism in the video game industry, oriented around these very specific, often purely social problems that many people perceive to be industry-specific. It seems like people very rarely relate those problems to these broader underlying causes, and the video game industry is not alone in falling prey to this worldview. Addressing symptoms is fine, but if you don't focus on the underlying disease, you're just going to keep running into new symptoms.

If we could collectively recognize the corrupt and anti-human core of corporate culture, perhaps we could finally begin to act against it. For that to happen, we need to recognize that most of our ailments, in all forms of capitalist industry, have a common cause. I'm not sure that it's even possible to remove corporate influence from socioeconomic policy at this point, but the first step to trying is confronting those individuals who are "just doing their job" by taking money from corporate superpowers to push a diseased agenda. It's incredibly easy to justify doing evil when you're just doing your job, and it's even easier when you're just gradually contributing to a well of poison instead of pulling a trigger.

Update: There's now a cleaned up (and ever so slightly more optimistic) copy of this article on Medium.

Update 2: In keeping with the "stream of consciousness" motif of this post, I thought I'd come back and talk about this. If you've ever had to fire someone, and you weren't drinking the corporate Kool-Aid at the time, you were probably left with the sensation of blood on your hands. It strikes me that not everyone really understands why this act is as terrible as it is, which is in part because corporate culture conveniently pushes aside the vital matter of individual ethical responsibility. Let's talk about that!

Let's say you're a small business owner, or you're just the stooge who's been saddled with the responsibility in a larger corporation. When it comes time to fire someone, you're the one to pull the trigger, which means the ethical responsibility for the action falls upon you. If you've found yourself in this position, you should be beyond the point of consent. You've looked at the current socioeconomic climate, and you've accepted it. You've chosen to participate in the system and therefore have implicitly granted that the lives of other individuals may and likely will be destroyed as a result of your actions. Does this make you uncomfortable? If no, congratulations, you're a born sociopath. If yes, continue.

So you're quite uncomfortable with this ethical responsibility. You'd better find a justification. You don't have any choice, you have to work within the constraints provided. Right? Wrong, you had a choice. You could have chosen not to participate in the system. However, you're worried about your own success and survival. In other words, you're working to ensure you don't meet the very same fate you'll be consigning others to as part of your ethical and professional responsibility.

Well then, the system is the way it is for a reason, isn't it? It's natural selection, a time-honored solution for thinning the herd. But wait, this is wrong too. The selection process is most unnatural, where the presence of an individual's safety net may have very little to do with that individual's fitness and ability. Indeed, fitness and ability may even be fully removed from the logistics employed in deciding to terminate the individual, in as much as the individual's ability relates to what is very likely an esoteric skill set. We could not hope for any greater example in defiance of natural selection than the current POTUS, after all. The selection process brought about in our current capitalist system very much embraces our most objectively destructive traits, rather than those traits most likely to lead to genuine success and prosperity for the species.

So there you are, working in a broken system that's catered to the detriment of your own species, making the hard choices. Justifying the hard choices, telling yourself it's for the good of the company, a necessity in preserving the safety of those employees who remain. But can you really say you're there for any kind of altruistic reason? Can you even really say it's progress without knowing somewhere deep down that you're lying to yourself? If you possess the awareness to conceive of the whole picture as it relates to your current station, you will invariably be troubled. You should be troubled. The responsibility should feel horrible, because the system you're passively facilitating is working to the detriment of all but the worst the species has to offer.

The solution isn't a simulator to train you into accepting those responsibilities and carrying them out with "efficiency". The solution is to walk away and pursue what you know is right through whatever means possible. No one should be comfortable with participating in this system for as long as capitalist success is directly tied to individual survival. This is a blatantly broken system geared toward exploitation. This is why it feels horrible to fire someone, and it feels even more horrible once you've understood the weight that it carries for you as a participant in this system.

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Rich Whitehouse

July 31, 2019 at 10:11 pm (CST)
Yeah, I think it's true that most developers don't have the luxury of refactoring whenever they feel like it, primarily due to resource constraints. That tends to lead to regular debates over standing technical debt. Then there are those fork in the road moments, where you have to ask yourself something like "do we keep using our internal engine, or do we switch to the engine that has a team of 100+ people working on it?" The right answer for any game development studio that doesn't have a gigantic engineering team is pretty much always "yes, switch, even though that engine still sucks pretty hard in a few ways." It immediately hurts, but in the long run, it's the only way to avoid annihilation. So to totally run with this analogy, I'd relate the situation of "trying to meaningfully enhance the American majority's quality of life by enacting new policy without tackling the lobbying industry" to "making the next Call of Duty for MS-DOS using the Build engine." It could technically be done. The end result would look nothing like what people were hoping for. Adding useful features that seem trivial would involve a lot of work and jumping through hoops. And so on.

addr_ceo

July 30, 2019 at 10:31 am (CST)
It's also very coincidental that you mention the embedded bug problem in web design. My CTO and I have a fair amount of lively discussions when it comes to balancing 'the best way for now and the right way for always'. But even last night, we spent hours going over the reasons we needed to revamp our API structures because of some glaring security flaws that we had been working around. I see how the profit motive can push things, but for us, that's just a matter of survival. If we were profit positive on a consistent basis, we'd be spending loads of time on code cleanup to prevent headaches for future engineers. Frankly, I don't see how the accountants and other money people don't understand this problem.

addr_ceo

July 30, 2019 at 10:27 am (CST)
The embedded bug analogy really puts the problem in a context that's digestible. Take the new Uber CEO, who came along to right the wrongs of the company made by the founder. Did he fix anything? Just the public image, unfortunately. Drivers are still underpaid, and yesterday, they announced that they'd be firing a third of their marketing people. To your point about automation... the ubiquity of these technologies is why I'm here, after all. And why not let a little roomba do our dirty work? It will improve lives, one day, but I think we're going to see some big problems as a result of the shifting economy. I talk with a lot of people about how UBI should work if, and when, it becomes a thing. Right now the gig economy jobs are filling a lot of the gaps, but they're enabling the data collection that's feeding the AIs what they need to know to automate those gigs. It's a mess. One solution I've considered is for companies to essentially pay royalties for the data collection, directly to individuals, but that just delays the problem, ultimately.

Rich Whitehouse

July 28, 2019 at 6:54 pm (CST)
As somewhat of a tangent, I think the web of policies that's resulted in this pro-psychopath corporate culture directly relates to one of the worst tendencies we have as humans when working on group collaborations. When we see a problem somewhere deep inside of something we've built together, we say "well, we can't start over now" and just keep building on top of it to try to remedy the problem. This is visible everywhere in tech. In web tech, we build on horribly inefficient protocols and end up coming up with extravagant solutions to weed out data inefficiencies elsewhere in the pipeline. There are lots of instances where we've continued to build onto standards even after recognizing a serious flaw that we can no longer address without breaking some other perceived cohesion. Kronos loves to do this. DICOM is another example of a standard with ancient roots that completely dominates in medical software despite having insane flaws at its core. The very implementation of a transfer syntax at the heart of the standard is ridiculous, for example, and arbitrarily enforces mutual exclusion of commonly overlapping data representations. There are so many examples of some system or standard having some serious initial misconception, and even after people have noticed that misconception, everyone still just goes with the flow and keeps building on top of it. I really think current socioeconomic policy is the same thing, except in this case, powerful organizations are rabidly defending the status quo for their own purposes, and rather than just being inconvenient and wasting time for engineers of the future, it's resulting in lots of actual human suffering.

Rich Whitehouse

July 28, 2019 at 4:41 pm (CST)
Thanks for the kind words! Yeah, I think if more people actually had direct exposure to that CEO culture you're referring to, there would be a lot more outrage over how it's twisted our overall values as humans. It would be interesting to get a random sampling of business owner personalities from America in the 60's and compare that to a random sampling from today. I suspect you'd see a huge shift in values and priorities. It seems like the 70's really marked the descent into the anti-human core values that dominate today. As for policy-level solutions, that could go dozens of ways. Shared equity is a model quite a few companies are voluntarily adopting, but again, it's got the same problem as royalty sharing. Even when it happens, it's really prone to corrupt influence, and trying to formally regulate something that fuzzy would be incredibly problematic. I think a higher priority for protecting individuals is just giving them the same rights and protections a corporation has. When you go to work for someone as an employee, you're generally doing it as an individual, not behind your own LLC or anything like that. It leaves you really naked and vulnerable, while the people operating behind the corporation don't have nearly as much at stake. Individual rights and protections for employees are really sorely lacking. Aside from that, separating capitalist success from an individual's basic survival ability is also something that just has to happen. People are suffering way too much despite working 40+ hours a week at really shitty jobs. Automation is going to force us to address this at some point, it's shortsighted and ultimately just stupid and greedy to push against it. But then, if you solve that problem with some kind of basic income, you're basically going to have to overhaul the entire economy to avoid the market adjusting around that basic income to more or less negate it. Pretty much every solution goes down a rabbit hole like that. I'd go on, but I really need to fix linebreaks being eaten on the comments here at some point. I think a security patch broke it. Ultimately, we have a giant ball of rubber bands that has to be untangled, and attacking any one aspect of it at a time while trying to keep the rest of the ball intact isn't going to do the job. As long as corporate interests are working to maintain cohesion of the whole ball, no one is going to be able to impact it meaningfully.

addr_ceo

July 28, 2019 at 9:33 am (CST)
I think you're right on the money -- our stance toward profitability has already put me in an underdog position among some of the other CEOs in my area, because they look at me as an engineer that doesn't belong in the C Suite. Which is funny because we're in Kentucky, of all places. Not super posh. I like what you're saying about finding a way to find a policy level way to fix this, though. Our system rewards ruthlessness, which I can appreciate at the right times, but I hate seeing people get cast by the wayside. Do you think mandating employee ownership in corporations would be a good start? I often argue with hard-left communists about how an ideal business *should* work, and the common answer is 'workers cooperatives to create efficiencies in production' which sounds... a lot like an employee owned business to me. Side note -- I creeped your site pretty hard last night and played an hour of corporate fury. Unfortunately, I had forgotten that I'm terrible at beat em ups. Still, I'm impressed at how much your Swinecraft (nice) team put together. The Doomba project brought me here originally, which, I think is absolutely awesome. Our team is secretly working on an autonomous cartography project that's similar in some ways.

Rich Whitehouse

July 27, 2019 at 11:10 pm (CST)
You sound like you're genuinely trying to make it by doing the right thing. It's hard to live by your own code of conduct in the corporate world as it stands, because it will almost certainly disadvantage you at some point. It just comes down to whether you can survive in a broken culture without straying from those ideals. I encourage everyone to try their best in doing so, but ultimately, we need to drill "human decency" in somewhere at the policy level or the good guys will just keep getting stomped by the people who don't care.

addr_ceo

July 27, 2019 at 10:41 pm (CST)
Interesting take on exploitation that seems to be baked into the tech giants. I've been burned by a few large companies for IP in the past, which led me to start my own team. But now, my team is growing, and the stakes continue to get higher. We all want the company to succeed because we all own some of it, and share profits. I'm worried about what the future could mean for what I've put together. From my own experience, I've brought on software engineers that were let go after the platform they were hired to build was in a workable state. None of them had equity from the past startups they worked for. It blows me away, still, to see this, because the entrepreneurs in my community are so full of shit when it comes to actually making a real impact. They'll net 90 people and cut them loose without batting an eye. For better or for worse, I've kept everyone we've ever hired on our dev team for as long as they wanted to stay with us. When a project wraps, we give everyone a week or two to work on what they think is the best addition to the platform we've built together. Sometimes, it's not obvious how one of our tangent projects will pay off, but I think it's good to let my team have the chance to follow their own interests. It's a tradeoff -- yes, I've hired them to do a job, but I want them to care about me and the company. I think the only way to keep talented people on board is to return the favor -- but maybe not in the way that Steam has their rolling desk policy. That just seems messy, but maybe people like it? I just hope I don't become one of the assholes you're talking about if we do make it as a company. We've all worked too damn hard for anyone to take this away from us, but I understand how it can happen, as you say, little by little by people "just doing their job". What do you think? Any ideas on how to stick it to the man without becoming him?

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