alt Hacker NewsClass warfare generalizations have become the safe outlet for internet rage because going after CEOs and billionaires is most “punching up” construction that is generally relatable.
An unintended side effect that I’ve noticed is that it normalizes bad behavior of CEOs for those who invest a lot of “CEOs bad” grist (Reddit, Threads, even Hacker News). When someone, usually early career, takes a job with a bad CEO after years of reading “CEOs bad” content online, they can go into a learned helplessness mode because they think the behavior they’re seeing is normal. They don’t believe changing jobs would help because they’ve learned from social media to believe that their CEO’s bad behavior is actually normal.
This has becoming a frequent topic when in a rotational mentorship program where I volunteer: Early career folk join some toxic startup and stay because the internet told them all CEOs are like this. We have to shake them free from those ideas and get them to realize that there are good and bad companies out there and they have options.
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I think it's true that there are more bad CEOs than good CEOs. I've seen good CEOs turn into bad CEOs, but I've never seen a bad CEO turn into a good CEO. I assume it does happen, but there's a strong cultural pressure (and many hundreds of millions of dollars) pushing bad CEO behavior and very little other than personal ethics pushing good CEO behavior, and when the incentives look like that, swimming upstream is hard.
> We have to shake them free from those ideas and get them to realize that there are good and bad companies out there and they have options.
Not everyone does have options, though. This is why instead of telling people to just avoid the bad CEOs, workers should unionize and collectively bargain against the bad CEOs. I'm sure I'll be seeing a lot of class warfare generalizations about "unions bad" in response to this suggestion.
“No war but class war” rings as true in 2026 as it did 40 years ago
>normalizes bad behavior of CEOs
>They don’t believe changing jobs
Um, yea, where did you get these ideas.
Most CEOs want to be CEOs for the potentially vast amounts of wealth they can make from the position. When you're making 20-200x the average person going back to a regular job is pretty much out of the question.
Then when you start making that kind of money you quickly become disconnected from the rest of humanity. [Insert meme: "How much does a banana cost? Like $10 dollars?]
Vast wealth disparity commonly causes the issues that you are saying being normalized by people online, so I think you'd need quite a bit more evidence that is the case then with the already existing hypothesis.
>Class warfare generalizations have become the safe outlet for internet rage because going after CEOs and billionaires is most “punching up” construction that is generally relatable.
Mainly because "CEOs and billionaires" have fucked us over time and again, with their with their lobbying and bribing, with their power grabs, with their consolidation of news, entertainment, streaming, and social media properties, with their participation in the millitary industrial complex, with their censorship and partisanship, and with their rent seeking and worsening of their products...
> Class warfare generalizations have become the safe outlet for internet rage because going after CEOs and billionaires is most “punching up” construction that is generally relatable.
The endless re-rise of Marxism has made people assume that any punching is appropriate in the first place, and it's just a question of who. Saying "these are the people it's okay to punch" is dystopian.
> Early career folk join some toxic startup and stay because the internet told them all CEOs are like this.
I literally did this 12 years ago based on this reasoning, its good you're trying to counter that with the next generation.
With that said, I do wish there was more discourse around systemic issues rather than the usual finger-pointing towards rival social groups. Unfortunately I feel like our language gets in the way, systems issues are more abstract, but "bad people" are more visceral and easy to talk about.