Alibaba’s decision to fire five employees over the “snatching mooncakes” incident has sparked a great deal of discussion, so I’ll offer a few remarks of my own.
First, I think Alibaba’s handling of this affair is utterly baffling.
What the programmers did was write a script to replace manual clicking; they accidentally clicked too many times, and then, before any order was actually completed—meaning no actual loss had been caused—they proactively reported the matter, only to be swiftly fired within a few hours.
Of course, many people also stood on Alibaba’s side and thought the firing was well deserved. But they were often mistaken about the basic facts.
The most basic accusation against the programmers was “cheating,” and Alibaba’s initial announcement emphasized exactly that, saying that “the little employee in the security department, as a defender of the platform’s rules, used tools to cheat and crossed the bottom line of integrity.”
But so-called cheating always involves breaking some rule. So did the act of using a script to snatch mooncakes violate any rule? In fact, Alibaba surely did not issue a clear set of rules for the mooncake-snatching event in advance and explicitly write in them that scripts were forbidden. Therefore, any claim of rule-breaking can only mean violating some unwritten tacit rule. But is the use of scripts generally regarded as improper in the IT industry? Clearly not.
Using a script is not the same as exploiting a vulnerability. A normal script merely programmatizes and automates actions that people can perform in a browser. For example, “click when the button lights up” is something a person staring intently at the screen with quick eyes and nimble hands can accomplish; the script replaces and augments human action, without damaging the platform itself.
So does this kind of human enhancement count as cheating? The boundary is not clear. For example, when swimmers use stimulants or propellers to enhance themselves, that is cheating; but using higher-tech sharkskin swimsuits and more effective training methods is not cheating. Whether a certain means of enhancement is acceptable depends, on the one hand, on custom and convention, and on the other hand, on its harmfulness.
A similar case can be seen in the “ticket-snatching” apps for train tickets. Many internet companies, including Alibaba, provide ticket-snatching plugins, and such browser plugins are nothing more than scripts. Although the legitimacy of these ticket-snatching plugins is also disputed, in that context the internet industry was basically on the side of supporting them. This shows that, absent explicit rules, Alibaba may not have expressly permitted scripts, but at the very least it could not treat a ban on scripts as an unwritten rule.
A later Alibaba announcement no longer stressed cheating or rules, but instead emphasized power and trust: “Many people ask why we handled this so severely. Because Alibaba is a company that truly delegates power into the hands of every ordinary little employee, and the foundation of delegating power is the instinctive trust between the organization and its employees. Only a team built on trust can go the distance and fight hard battles.”
This statement is nonsense in itself. If this were a startup of a dozen or twenty people, then constraining power through mutual trust might still make some sense. But for such a huge company, to insist on trust—and instinctive trust at that—instead of clear rules as the foundation is a bit hard to swallow.
Moreover, this claim contains a huge confusion: it implies that the fired programmers abused power. In fact, that is obviously not the case. If the mooncake-snatching program had been written by them or they had been responsible for maintaining it, and then used their authority to find a backdoor in the program and exploit that backdoor to snatch mooncakes, then we could say they had abused the power delegated to them. But the issue is that all they did was write a script that anyone could write and use. Even if one were to say they “abused” something, it would be an excessive use of their “ability,” not their “power.” Any other employee participating in the mooncake snatching, so long as they had some programming skill at all (and a very elementary level would suffice), could have written the same script. These programmers had no special advantage in terms of “power” whatsoever; at most, they had a bit more technical ability. And their ability or skill was not “delegated” to them by the company; they acquired it themselves.
If the programmers used any kind of “power” in the mooncake snatching, it was nothing more than the freedom to use their own work computers. They could install their preferred browsers and plugins, or even write a plugin themselves. This so-called power is probably something every employee possesses. The ones truly abusing power in this incident were clearly Alibaba’s HR department. They used their life-and-death authority to fire these employees at top speed. In the name of “values,” they exercised their power without having to follow any explicit rules. As long as, based on these so-called values, they “couldn’t stand” certain employees, they could immediately kick them out the door. And then they wrote an announcement, full of talk about how “we must learn to revere the power in our hands.” They claim to have delegated power, they claim mutual trust, but in fact they are always standing in a superior position looking down on everyone else. After firing people, they still have to deliver a bit of “earnest instruction.” But do they themselves revere their own power? The programmers’ “power” was nothing more than controlling their own computers—presumably under surveillance besides—whereas their power was the ability to decide the fate of rank-and-file employees at any moment based on personal likes and dislikes (what they call values).
One example cited by some supporters of the firing is that Facebook and other Silicon Valley companies fire Chinese employees who bring guests into the company to eat free meals. But one major difference between these two things is that those employees who brought people to freeload meals were not exploiting their own ability, but rather a privilege.
Exploiting technology to find loopholes and exploiting privilege to find loopholes are completely different things. The former is precisely the way technological innovation occurs. Suppose we are in a world of technological stagnation, where the “how to do” of anything has a fixed pattern—that is, written or unwritten rules. If everyone faithfully follows the established routines, then there would be no need for new technology at all; new technology would have no place in the life-world as a whole. The reason new technology can be embedded into a world that already seems to be functioning perfectly is precisely that this seemingly perfect world always has loopholes to be exploited. And so-called innovators are nothing more than people who, by means ordinary people have not yet thought of and with technologies ordinary people have not yet mastered, seize the initiative in some gap that still allows room to maneuver.
Alibaba’s rise itself was also, in many respects, the result of “finding loopholes.” For example, in Taobao’s early days, transactions were all conducted without invoices and without tax, and in fact many sellers had no business qualifications at all; they were operating in a gray zone outside policy regulation. This was not clearly illegal, because traditional regulations were designed for the operations of brick-and-mortar stores, and there were no explicit rules for online shops. Online transactions could be regarded as private transactions between individuals, and therefore could potentially avoid business tax. In a traditional commercial environment, this kind of individual operation is hard to scale up—it can at most become a street stall—but with the help of new internet technology, it may develop to enormous scale.
But once the relevant authorities wake up and move to regulate it, such gray zones naturally have to be eliminated sooner or later; regulation and taxation are entirely natural consequences. Taobao’s rise depended on its rapid expansion during this time lag, before regulation had become strict, to the point that later revisions to the regulatory rules for internet business had to be drafted with Alibaba’s face in mind. Imagine if Alibaba had, from the beginning, insisted on its so-called “values”: even though they had not been regulated, they would still act with self-restraint; they would do nothing that challenged convention; they would refuse to use new technology to gain petty advantages; they would only allow shops that were legal and compliant within the traditional framework to open online stores on Alibaba, and they would never allow tax payments to be discounted in the slightest. In that case, could your Taobao ever have become so prosperous? Now that Alibaba has become prosperous, it is gradually downplaying Taobao, pushing Tmall instead, and also downplaying individual shops while standardizing everything. But this is precisely because technological innovation in online shopping has basically run its course; Alibaba has already drilled out of the original loophole into a new sky. Yet if Alibaba wants to create the next innovation, it will still have to continue “finding loopholes.” For instance, their “Yu’e Bao” and “Ant Huabei” innovations in the financial world are also about exploiting the loopholes in the traditional financial system. If one strictly followed the tacit rules of financial activity maintained by the traditional banking industry, could Yu’e Bao have been launched at all? When Yu’e Bao first came out, it did indeed face disputes over legality, and was even warned by the securities regulator for lacking the proper filing. If the securities regulator at the time had learned from Alibaba’s HR department and fired anyone it didn’t like on the spot, could Yu’e Bao have gotten off the ground?
Alibaba’s firing of several programmers is not, in itself, a big deal. We know nothing at all about these programmers’ usual behavior; perhaps the firing merely lacked a pretext. But what I object to is precisely that “pretext.” This pretext reflects the arrogance of those in power, and it reflects the contempt that “power” shows toward “ability.”
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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