Zuckerberg and Zygmunt Bauman

Mark Zuckerberg, when asking his people to spy on competitors through less-than-ethical means, said "you should figure out how to do this." This demand was obeyed with no apparent pushback even when it involved hacking and using customer devices, without their consent, to spy on competitors. Even if Mr. Zuckerberg had never intended to have his team do “wiretapping”, his request was seen as an end that justified any means.

This reminds me of Zygmunt Bauman's critique of bureaucracy in Modernity and The Holocaust.

He makes the case that bureaucratic systems, like large companies*, require people to enter an "agentic state". Bauman defines this as "a condition in which [a worker] sees himself as carrying out another person's wishes". This makes it "psychologically easy to ignore responsibility". This way of socializing workers to only follow orders and not think ethically on their own is in Bauman's words the "opposite state of autonomy". Bauman goes on to say that these kind of “rational” and “value free“ (his words) systems of dispersed responsibility were a contributing factor to the Holocaust.

*Perhaps large companies are now our main bureaucratic systems, more powerful than some states. They are now the ones that give orders that rob people of their autonomy. Byung Chul Han goes even further to make the case that we’ve all internalized this agentic state and do the bidding our our economic system without even being asked—-perform, achieve, burn ourselves out—-the bureaucratic taskmaster now lives inside us. He calls this the “achievement society“.