Evil? Genius? Evil Genius?

There’s been a lot of chatter swirling around the interwebs lately that all comes back to one central theme: bullying.

Wired Magazine’s April issue features Apple, calling them Evil/Genius and basically called them to the mat for being one of the biggest bullies in Silicon Valley.

Apple is irredeemably evil, behaving more like an old-fashioned industrial titan than a different-thinking business of the future. Apple operates with a level of secrecy that makes Thomas Pynchon look like Paris Hilton. It locks consumers into a proprietary ecosystem. And as for treating employees like gods? Yeah, Apple doesn’t do that either. [Wired]

Microsoft is currently being a big bully with Yahoo! as well, and are planning a hostile takeover, if it comes to that.

Microsoft just announced a $44.6 billion [dollar] offer for Yahoo. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer made the half-cash, half-stock offer in a brutal carrot-and-stick open letter to Yahoo!’s board of directors. [zdnet]

These two things, and the whole debacle between 1938 Media & Shel Isreal, which I’ll get into in a minute, got me thinking about bullying in general, and why we’re so up in arms about what I see less as bullying and more as people being straightforward, or honest. Sometimes, brutally so.

There’s been a lot of back and forthing and taking sides over Loren Feldman of 1938 Media and his puppet shows. And I’m not going to get into the history of it all, because frankly, if you haven’t followed it but are interested now, there’s this neat little tool out there called Google.

I’ll be honest, I think this whole thing is really funny. Loren’s videos amuse the hell out of me, and they’re immensely watchable. I’ve only seen the first Global Neighborhood that Shel did, and I was just turned off by it. I didn’t find it interesting; I had trouble watching it. A lot of other people felt the same way.

Some people (the ones who, apparently, don’t find Loren’s parodies as hilarious as I do) are calling Loren a bully, trying to call him out and give him shit about the videos, and claiming that he’s trying to use social media to leverage his own 15 minutes of fame.

But here’s the thing. Why are people getting their noses so out of joint over this? If Loren didn’t have a point, there would be no humour in these videos at all, and he wouldn’t have any audience. People wouldn’t get incredibly defensive. Case studies about personal brand destruction wouldn’t be written.Personally, I think it’s time that people got off their high horses, chilled out a bit and learned to take criticism. This is the crux of social media. Companies and people who want to be involved in social media, in any capacity, need to learn to take criticism and let it all hang out. Take your lumps, respond to them and grow from it. Evolve. And stop getting so caught up in something that’s just so obviously funny.

(image copyright and courtesy of Wired Magazine)