PieFedRoblox is a problem — but it’s a symptom of something worse
alyaza [they/she]www.platformer.news/roblox-ceo-interview-backla…
On Friday, the Hard Fork team published our interview with Roblox CEO David Baszucki. In the days since, it has become the most-discussed interview we’ve done in three years on the show. Listeners who wrote in to us said they were shocked to hear the leader of a platform with 151.5 million monthly users, most of them minors, express frustration and annoyance at being asked about the company’s history of failures related to child safety. Journalists described the interview as “bizarre,” “unhinged,” and a “car crash.”
And a case can be made that it was all of those things — even if Baszucki, in the studio afterwards and later on X, insisted to us that he had had a good time. In the moment, though, Baszucki’s dismissive attitude toward discussing child safety struck me as something worse: familiar.
Baszucki, after all, is not the first CEO to have insisted to me that a platform’s problems are smaller than I am making them out to be. Nor is he the first to blame the platform’s enormous scale, or to try to change the subject. (He is the first tech CEO to suggest to me that maybe there should be prediction markets in video games for children, but that’s another story.)
What people found noteworthy about our interview, I think, was the fresh evidence that our most successful tech CEOs really do think and talk this way. Given a chance to display empathy for the victims of crimes his platform enabled, or to convey regret about historical safety lapses, or even just to gesture at some sense of responsibility for the hundreds of millions of children who in various ways are depending on him, the CEO throws up his hands and asks: how long are you guys going to be going on about all this stuff?
The problem is capitalism.
Profits > Humans (in this case, children)
It’s even worse than that.
At it’s root, capitalism, as shown via Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” theory, infers that wealth equals virtue. To receive wealth is to have provided a benefit to society, and to be bereft of wealth is to contribute little while taking much. This system inadvertedly places a dollar value on the abuse of minors in Roblox: any suffering caused is of no consequence to the great good being provided to society, otherwise Roblox would go bankrupt.
CEOs and corporations take the moral high ground because they live within a system that tells them that wealth is virtue, and they are overflowing in wealth. Until we accept that the core principals of capitalism are flawed, we will never begin holding bad actor’s appropriately accountable.
It’s even worse than that.
We are somewhere between 5 and 7 years into the problems with Roblox being well documented by everything from major media outlets to national governments. It’s well past the point of blaming nievete or ignorance.
Parents are doing a cost benefit analysis and speculating that their kid won’t be one of the victims. They are paying to put their kids in harms way because they see the high liklihood of social isolation or temper tantrums to be a greater problem than risk posed by Nazis, and groomers.
It’s even worse than that.
I don’t know how, I just wanted to say it, too.
In fact I’d argue you’re not even going far enough: it’s even worse than that.
I would like to point out that Adam Smith “did not” suggest wealth = virtue. Wealth of Nations even have a whole book devoted to morality.
The current trend of equaling wealth to virtue came from Puritanism, Calvinism, which evolved into neo-liberalism now.
For more information about Puritanism and Calvinism and their relationship with capitalism, please refer to The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber.
He did not explicity state this, no. But the entire premise of the invisible hand metaphor is to show that a core function of the capitalist system is that it moves wealth to those that bring good to their society. The natural inference from this is that wealth is representative of virtue, ie, if Roblox was doing net bad things, it wouldn’t be worth millions.
Don’t get me wrong, fuck the various Catholic attempts to justify wealth as a virtue too, but the issue is as prevalent in the secular world as it is in the non-secular.
More “capitalists” need to read Adam Smith.
Shit, I knew that without reading the article.
In addition to the rampant pedophilia problems, did anybody else catch Baszucki talking about Polymarket integration? Yeah, let’s add gambling to the mix. /s
I have no idea why any parent would let their kid anywhere near this dumpster fire.
Yes. It’s a symptom of paedophile culture, which is based on patriarchy, toxic masculinity, racism, beauty standards, and rape culture etc.
Edit: And that children are largely seen as property, or not people by a lot of ‘adults’, especially in the US as they never ratified the UN’s convention on the rights of the child.
This isn’t the only way to help, but a big one would be giving children freedom, rights etc as laid out by the Youth Liberation movement. The more children are controlled and have no say, aren’t taught how to have boundaries and to consent or not, and don’t have those boundaries and (lack of) consent respected, and aren’t taught what sex is etc the more they will fall victims to these predators.
Of course there is more that needs to be done, but it is a good start.
Children are people, it’s time we started treating them like it.
While I agree with everything, I think this is more about fearing parents remove their children from the platform by knowing about the issue.
What probably needs to happen is them receiving an actually global scandal.
I think caregivers and children should definitely sit down and talk about it. Roblox is, for many reasons a predatory company. Just like most capitalists they don’t actually care about people, especially children. This has been shown not only in their lacklustre response to paedophiles, but also in their use of child labour to make them richer. Which they then do not compensate the children for fairly.
Agreed, that might help, I really really want Roblox gone, or controlled by those that actual utilise it for it’s allegedly intended purpose. The youth do need places online where they can be safe until what I talked above is implemented, sadly it seems nothing commercial is actually the way to do it, given the repeated reports of poor mental health, predatory behaviour etc coming from so called ‘child spaces’ on commercial platforms.
the interview in question, which opens with the following exchange:
I see Baszucki borrowed a few pages from the Trump handbook on how to bullshit until you’ve derailed the question so much, nobody even remembers what was asked.
It’s definitely been a thing before Trump. A lot of corporate and publicity speak is like this. Trump is certainly the most prominent, visible, and ’obvious through exposure’ figure and example of this right now though.
Roblox wants the future of communication to be via Roblox?
No they want to capitalize on pedos finding victims.
I wish we could find out what part of these ceo’s brains are physically broken and fix it by force. There’s the whole Grey area of like is this ethical but if we could determine this defect without any error I think it would be a breakthrough similar to curing cancer.
Biological and psychological variance is an Internet part of humanity. When you say this I’m immediately reminded of fascist ideals and efforts to ’normalize’ and ‘conformize’ people, and not just from this side of the spectrum. So I think this is a somewhat dangerous argument to make.
At large, it’s human nature to elevate these kinds of people, that’s why they end up in such high positions. I’m not sure we can change that. And that’s where regulations and requirements by law come in, as well as public record and press, to keep them in check.
I get the sentiment and frustration in your comment though.
I wholeheartedly agree. It does sound dangerously similar. Ultimately, the main difference would be that I don’t want to hurt people(also to be frank it’s straight up impossible and imaginary lol). I just want them to be compassionate. I think ultimately, they need empathy. Maybe if i phrased it that way, it would sound less messed up. But yeah, they need to have empathy and a guilty conscience. If we could make everyone have that, it would be a much better place to live.
Governments don’t seem to want to do enough about them. They’re willing to let millions of people die because of billionaires. It just seems absurdly cruel and we just have to kind of sit and watch or get trampled on too.