(Continue down below for an amusing rant - trigger warning maybe?)
Now it’s just part of insatiable corporate greed and the current sad reality.
I wonder if Zuck lets his girls use Instagram all day long or if Andy would gift his own toddler (if he had another one) this beautiful tablet. Probably not, he’d have a full time nanny to keep the kid busy.
Alas, these folks are the symptoms and the real problem is systemic folks. Companies are chasing targets to please…drumroll…the shareholders. Yes, each one of us holding index funds are also culpable. It’s a SNAFU. We’ve been sucked whole into the system and escape is hard (especially with the newly proposed Dell bank account for kids that can only be used to invest in stocks).
The ol' "The real evil overlord is just you and me" retort is a bit undermined by the existence of products like this one that actively constrain people's actions and pressure them to perpetuate the system. Like, who gave the order to design that product?
It's also not true. "Companies" on their own don't do anything. The operational decisions are made by CEOs and board members who do have a lot of leeway to decide how they want - and often do have an ideology they follow.
Shareholders are also not "you and me" in the common case - especially not with index funds, where you have zero agency to influence the market even despite being a shareholder on paper.
Significant amounts of shares are held by wealthy individuals or other companies with humans at the top - people who are in the same social group (or often the same individuals) as those in the C-suite.
At the level of wealth concentration we are in, I think talking about the "billionaire class" is more constructive than talking about "shareholders" and then noticing full of surprise that we all are shareholders.