So it’s the shareholders and the board who are at fault then. I’d posit that anyone holding Google stock is part of the problem and responsible for their continued pattern of anti-user and anti-consumer behavior.

Shareholders who don't want to maximize their share value are very strongly incentivized to fire themselves.

It's actually late stage capitalism that is at fault.

Line must always be going up, and if it doesn't go up as fast as someone thought it would then we make it go down.

If line goes sideways we sell and make it go down.

It must go up. Always up. Or it will go down.

You can’t blame the system and pretend none of that lands at the feet of people willingly engaging with it for their own benefit.

Some of it absolutely lands at the feet of the people willingly engaging with it, but there are far, far more people who are caught up in and and only go along with it to have a roof over their head.

I don't think the burger flipper at McDonalds, the stocker at Walmart, the barista at Starbucks, the bartender at the bar down the street, the person working the register at the gas station, or the picker at Amazon (just to name a few) share in this blame. They're all trying to eke out an existence for themselves and their families.

Has nobody heard of paying dividends? It is a perfectly acceptable way to have a company with stable profits. But no, anti-capitalism cliches combined with warmed-over rapture logic and Marx's idiotic teleological view of history.

I'm a fairly libertarian moderate but tyranny-by-proxy is still tyranny.

Yes. That's the bravery part.