a corporate petri dish teeming with sociopaths

Крупные корпорации используют жесткие социал-дарвинистские процедуры, вроде генетических алгоритмов, для отсева "малоперспективных" сотрудников (читай: людей, не одержимых навязчивой идеей прибыли любой ценой):

In the new documentary, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Enron CEO Jeffery Skilling is portrayed as kind of "incandescently brilliant" cult leader espousing a bizarre Darwinist ideology.

Skilling's favorite book is Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, which isn't a bizarre book by any means, but Skilling took the ideas of Dawkins-style Darwinism to a new level by instituting a performance review policy at Enron that worked like a genetic algorithm for people. Every year, all employees were rated from 1 (best) to 5 (worst). The more money you made for the company, the better your rating. (Skilling was fond of saying that money was the only thing that motivated people). Skilling mandated that between 10 and 15 percent of the employees had to be rated as 5s. And to get a rating of 5 meant that you were fired. This review process was dubbed "rank and yank."

It's no surprise that this algorithm resulted in a corporate petri dish teeming with sociopaths who were taped in phone conversations laughing at the thought of stealing money from "grandma millies" who were hit with unafforably high utility bills, and urging on the California wildfires by chanting "burn baby, burn!."

Ага. Я ж давно говорил, что книжку Докинза The Selfish Gene нужно сжечь. На том же самом костре нужно сжечь всех этих доморощенных корпоративных социал-дарвинистов. Burn, baby, burn!

Мэддин и Корнелл

Мэддин, мне кажется, просто-таки обязан снять фильм о Джозефе Корнелле. Все его излюбленные атрибуты налицо: сюрреалисты, грамофонный джаз, забытые звезды немого кино, лаковые штиблеты, кофе с кремовыми пирожными, ретроманиакальность ...