You've kind of tainted the answers you might get by leaving in the assertion that those that say they are out to make the world a better place are secretly wanting to make more money, but I'll bite.
I did my stint in a couple fintech and yes, I consider the industry evil. Not Machiavelli evil, or Saturday morning cartoon evil; but evil in the absolute banality sense.
They're out to make more money. Alright, how?
The answers vary, but invariably boil down to:
A) Make previously impractical value extractive transaction practical through automation augmented with ubiquitous connectivity. This is a winning business plan, but doesn't really make the world a better place for everyone. It just makes yet another financial extraction mechanism.
B) Make or exploit arbitrage possibilities through exploitation of information asymmetry to extract value. May be good for liquidity, but these micro-extractions of value don't tend toward creating a macroscale change, but nevertheless, more "value" is created. This suggests to me an artifact generated by fundamental constraints of the model rather than actual problems being solved.
C) Make something marginally "cheaper", but extract a small slice, multiply by economy of scale. This model maintains status quo, and never really pays off for the end user until someone really puts competitive pressure on another actor, yet with consolidation happy markets that competitor never tends to stick around long enough.
D) Loss lead, but monetize data. Should be self evident.
Making money just to make money is not in and of itself a virtuous goal for the world in general given money's fundamental purpose of being a promissory note on the improvement or capacity to follow through on a promise. If all you're spending time doing is making more I.O.U.s, your problem solving is never actually meeting the road and propelling society down the road of not having to worry about things they previously had to. This manifests in pattern where making more money in the face of climate change for instance, blooms like a good idea because you're making more money right now, but you're ending your fiscal yardsticking there. Feel free to replace "climate change" with any long cycle problem that can be exacerbated by putting it off til later in order to optimize on some more achievable and tangible metric now.
That's my two cents. It's the most boring kind of evil. The kind you can't really build up the motivation to fix, and even worse, bewitching in that even when you're pretty sure you've discovered that "neat trick", once you see it out to the end you realize you just did the same thing everyone else did, and didn't realize it.
I did my stint in a couple fintech and yes, I consider the industry evil. Not Machiavelli evil, or Saturday morning cartoon evil; but evil in the absolute banality sense.
They're out to make more money. Alright, how?
The answers vary, but invariably boil down to:
A) Make previously impractical value extractive transaction practical through automation augmented with ubiquitous connectivity. This is a winning business plan, but doesn't really make the world a better place for everyone. It just makes yet another financial extraction mechanism.
B) Make or exploit arbitrage possibilities through exploitation of information asymmetry to extract value. May be good for liquidity, but these micro-extractions of value don't tend toward creating a macroscale change, but nevertheless, more "value" is created. This suggests to me an artifact generated by fundamental constraints of the model rather than actual problems being solved.
C) Make something marginally "cheaper", but extract a small slice, multiply by economy of scale. This model maintains status quo, and never really pays off for the end user until someone really puts competitive pressure on another actor, yet with consolidation happy markets that competitor never tends to stick around long enough.
D) Loss lead, but monetize data. Should be self evident.
Making money just to make money is not in and of itself a virtuous goal for the world in general given money's fundamental purpose of being a promissory note on the improvement or capacity to follow through on a promise. If all you're spending time doing is making more I.O.U.s, your problem solving is never actually meeting the road and propelling society down the road of not having to worry about things they previously had to. This manifests in pattern where making more money in the face of climate change for instance, blooms like a good idea because you're making more money right now, but you're ending your fiscal yardsticking there. Feel free to replace "climate change" with any long cycle problem that can be exacerbated by putting it off til later in order to optimize on some more achievable and tangible metric now.
That's my two cents. It's the most boring kind of evil. The kind you can't really build up the motivation to fix, and even worse, bewitching in that even when you're pretty sure you've discovered that "neat trick", once you see it out to the end you realize you just did the same thing everyone else did, and didn't realize it.