Earlier quoted context omitted.
It could have been a platform that enlightens, informs, and uplifts people instead of exploiting attention and anger, and profiting from misinformation. You can make money by making people feel good instead of bad. You can be rotten.com, or you can be Pixar. You have a choice. An organization with integrity will look at not just how much money they're immediately making, but whether they're pushing the world towards…
I did not respond right away, because I wanted to process it properly. I tried to imagine a world you describe and, I will admit, it does sound better than what we have. The problem, as is often the case with things that sound nice, however, is that we got here by not accounting for human drives. Those needs are not channeled in any way. For example, you say that companies ought not to seek maximum profitability in s…
Companies have to make money to exist and survive— but optimizing for money above literally all else is a choice. Again, the word for that is "greed", and it's optional. The leaders of a company can steer towards it or away from it; the company will follow where they lead, raise or lower itself to the standards that they (fail to) set. I worked for 10 years at a successful, well-known company which emphasizes quality over easy money, and it's maddening to see people claiming that such a thing is impossible. It's really not.
This is the exact perspective that I'm talking about. It's the perspective of the GM manager in the 1980s who'd insist— despite all the evidence to the contrary— that Toyota's worker-positive, lean production strategy is impossible. Not only is he wrong, but he'd be losing money because of his lack of imagination and his unwillingness to raise the bar out of the dirt.
It's the attitude of officials in second- and third-world countries, who see corruption, fraud, and abuse— the bottom of the moral barrel— and shrug their shoulders; they justify it to themselves, to others, to the public under the mantra "it can't be helped; the bar cannot possibly be any higher. It's too much to ask". Lo and behold, those countries are economically irrelevant, while countries with higher institutional integrity exist and dominate all around them. Lowering the bar doesn't help them.
Given all the examples available, "a company with high standards" is not "theoretical" at all. Saying so is but an excuse to insist on a pitifully low bar. And it's disappointing to me to encounter the perspective that "behaving with integrity" is beyond conceivable.