Most companies are sociopaths. They never do the right thing unless it is in their self interest. That is how most corporations are structured: they must act in the interests of their shareholders, or the board gets replaced and so does management.

The legal construct of “corporation” is pathological; but as long as we have it, we need independent oversight. The government has shown that it is incapable of that oversight. They allow mergers routinely even if it means that there is less and less competition.

Consumers don’t behave in a smart of informed manner. As you wrote, “companies are rewarded based on how well they play to our primitive egos.” People only respond with their wallets when the media sources that they trust consistently send a message — people follow what others are doing, not what make sense for them. Most people act like sheep in that regard.

There is a total lack of leadership today on all fronts. We have chaos: special interests all around competing with average people in the middle. The two political parties are two big special interests, that survive by enraging and mobilizing other special interests. Pathological. No one is advocating for average people. There is no leadership anywhere whose goal is to make things better for us — average people. Except, in some cases, individual state attorneys general are suing big companies because the Federal government won’t. Some individual states are showing leadership on climate issues too.

There has been a consistent trend toward increasingly broken technology that is less reliable and more hackable, yet no one is responding with their wallets to reward the products that are more reliable. Instead, the entire IoT industry has become stunted because people don’t trust the technology: everyone suffers. People are too inundated with information to have time to read up on which products are trustworthy and which are not, so they make across-the-board decisions.