I had an earlier post listing various resources, originally from a drug-related debate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10729233 https://news.ycombinator.c

I had an earlier post listing various resources, originally from a drug-related debate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10729233 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10729233 (That you use straw men like opposition to all forms of social organization implies to me you don't have a background on these issues at all, though.) A consistent pessimism for mankind should involve rejection of authority beyond corporate villains. As for rejecting various parts of consumer culture, how would I participate in web 2.0 while rejecting walled gardens? Web 2.0 is a useless term, but since we can assume it refers to social media that is intrinsically walled gardens, you simply do not participate in it. However, that you can't isn't strictly true. Metcalfe's law would make it harder since you'd need to restrict yourself to smaller social sites. Yet you're deriving utility from sites like HN, clearly, so this "Web 2.0" distinction strikes me as elusive. There's plenty of mitigations to lower your exposure to walled gardens while still nominally using them, it's not necessarily a binary proposition of accept/reject. Though, who ever said that rejecting consumer culture would be easy? Going outside any grain involves forgoing opportunities. Your paragraph about profits is a tautology. Of course unquantifiable (psychic) profits are different and unrelated. Value and profits are not the same thing, and it's a red herring to bring up things like childrearing (which babysitters and nannies do for profit, nevertheless). How does this defy the intrinsic existence of profits and their neutrality? And, certainly, someone may indeed find value and derive profits (psychic or monetary) from conserving fish stocks or any other environment. Not only that, markets can be environmentalist. Check out these guys: http://www.perc.org/ http://www.perc.org/ Difficult as it is, the debate around the obesity epidemic is certainly heading in that direction. No shit, people make decisions ex ante that prove ex post to have been incorrect (by whatever measure). I am unsure of what you intend by invoking the obesity epidemic (I''m presuming specifically for the USA?)