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"...But these days, it seems like every other day I read a chilling anti-tech rant, usually written by someone smart, articulate, and (like me) lefti
by DanielBMarkham 9y ago
"...But these days, it seems like every other day I read a chilling anti-tech rant, usually written by someone smart, articulate, and (like me) leftist..."
There's an extremely interesting thing going on. Observing the mess tech has made does not seem to be related to political affiliation. I know people on the left, right, and center that are all beginning to realize that we're creating a dystopian future, not a happy one.
As a libertarian, I'm concerned that we've created "Knowledge Overlords" with Facebook/Google/Apple/Amazon/etc the likes of which mankind has never seen. They know all, they see all, they tell us what's true or not. And no matter how much they have, they only want more.
Even more disturbing, they're coopting efforts to fix other areas. Don't like Nazis? I don't. Never cared for criminal gangs or terrorists. Some of these folks should be left alone. Some of these folks need action by society. But our overlords have decided that these people should cease to exist. So they're using their huge infrastructure to deploy AI to intercept these people's communications to the rest of us and mute them.
Now whether you like this or not -- and I don't -- let's honestly look at what's happening. These giants are creating a walled garden internet that no new provider could hope to emulate. They've got censors, filters, hoards of people watching cat pictures being posted, on the lookout for a stray boob or white supremacist. Their talking point? They're helping us. They're taking a stand for what's right, helping the internet be a better and safer place. Maybe so. But they're also preventing any new Googles, or any new Facebooks. All they need to do is keep making their filters better and better to the point where the public demands them and they're impossible to reproduce by startups. Competition? Problem solved.
What this tells me is that this nirvana we're in, where people of all political persuasions agree there are serious problems, is not going to last. Instead these companies will position themselves with certain political causes and then anybody who disagrees will be accused of being a political wanker. In my example above, in the states at least, if I tried to defend the ability of loser Nazis to post online, people would automatically lump me in with some group, perhaps the alt-right. The tech companies are taking their quest for domination and turning it into just another political issue -- one that might go for decades unresolved as the usual suspects argue about it.
Right now most all reasonable observers agree there is a problem. We all used to agree on most all of the aspects of the problem. That's decreased to 70-80% agreement as these companies politicize things. Look to see it decrease even further as they continue to "help" us with various social issues they find troubling.
General agreement is being turned into just-another-political issue. In kindness, I think this is because for every thousand really smart SV entrepreneurs, there is but a tiny number of them who actually think about and understand the societal implications of what they are doing. Perhaps these big companies are cynically manipulating the discussion to prevent any action. Perhaps they just don't know. In either case, the effects are the same. Good intentions don't count for much.
There is much darkness here.
- mbrock 9y agoI'm curious about your thoughts on reconciling libertarian ideals with the desire to limit the power of corporations.
- DanielBMarkham 9y agoLibertarianism gives me a philosophical foundation to reason about political issues that is outside the usual partisan structure. It's also an ideal, not a club of people wanting to gain, hold, and exert power. So you never reach a perfect world. If you want to be a libertarian, you'd better be prepared to compromise. With everybody. Both of these attributes differ us from most political folks. I will continue to use Nazis as an example of "a group we all hate". They've been around in the states forever and we have traditionally tolerated them. You can substitute various other groups or causes. There is effectively no difference between having the government ban Nazis from demonstrating in the public square and Google preventing them from showing up in seach results. Sure, if there were a dozen search engines, each with 5-10% of the search market, you could make a great case that search!=visibility/speech. That argument cannot be made today, at least in the U.S. Today not only can internet giants shut you down, they can make you think you're speaking to the world when you're only speaking to yourself (hell-banning). That's all kinds of fucked up. What's happening is that governments are effectively delegating powers of surveillance and censorship to large corporations, which gain and hold their power through government collusion. When Facebook sucks up to China to gain a foothold, claiming that any kind of openness beats nothing at all, it's not Facebook that is using China. It's China that is using Facebook. Sure, may look different to Zuck and the other cats in SV, but I can assure you that from the government side of things, they are well aware of exactly what's going on. I think that internet companies in general made a devil's bargain back in the 90s: sure, the net is free, but in return for us tracking and recording everything you do, we'll give you even more free stuff! Who doesn't like free stuff? And it's not like when you're using the internet that you can observe how you're being tracked. As far as most people believed (and still want to believe, really), it's free stuff and there's absolutely no cost at all. It's been a decade or two. Now the devil must have his due. Nobody cared that Google was recording your searches. But now that everybody is recording everything, it's not such a pretty world we've created. I do not believe governments should limit corporations "just because". I do not believe we should limit the power of governments "just because". We want to limit complexity and maximize marketplace competition, whether it's in the government sector or corporate sector. That's good for everybody. In the states, the federated system we used to have allowed folks to pack up and move to another state if they didn't like their government. So I think your question is assuming that there are two different things that I would feel differently about, government and big corporations. But these two things do not exist independently of one another. What's happening is that the role of Big Government and Big Business are becoming conflated. We are centralizing everything and creating a winner-take-all marketplace, whether it's the political parties running for office or the internet giants competing for mind-space. There are no options. There are no choices. Instead of various experiments leading to better stuff for everybody (in both government and the private sector) it's just becoming a big free-for-all for domination. In fact, in most cases domination has already been decided. You don't think that voting Republican or Democrat is really going to change much, do you? Sure, maybe around the edges. Perhaps once every decade or two you might get a huge social program. But no matter who wins, it's the same people. The same policies. No matter whether you use Google Search or DDG, your ISP is still tracking everything. We pretend there is much more diversity and freedom of choice than there actually is. When corporations and governments use one another to take away our choices and create society that nobody in their right mind would want to live in, something must be done. Busting up the big companies is probably the easiest, but it's honestly just half of the problem. If we could all agree on just that half, I'm a happy guy. But I doubt the players will allow us to do so.