8 ms·

"The root of the issue is ... capitalism" FTFY. The structural issues mentioned in the original article are inherent in a free market economy. Democratic dep

• genzoman 9y ago
  I have no idea why so many people choose to give any government more and more power. This is similar to a cultural nuclear weapon. Maybe it will work in the right persons's hands for an agent of good, but really, over the course of time, is limiting what people can hear going to be a good thing for them? How can you tune your personal BS meter, if you never hear any BS? Who watches the watcher? There is no singular policy that will solve global, complex problems. Sometimes capitalism isn't the answer, sometimes it is. Sometimes regulations are the clear answer, sometimes not.
  • ako 9y ago
    Given free hand, corporations can be just as dangerous as governments. I don't know why you would trust corporations more, since their only goal is to make money.
    • mobilefriendly 9y ago
      >just as dangerous as governments Corporations don't have nukes or concentration camps.
      • ako 9y ago
        Corporations have nuclear power plants that can be just as dangerous. Corporations can feed the masses miss-information, that may lead to destabilisation of a society by making them vote for the wrong person.
        • ako 9y ago
          Corporations build unsave factories that kill 1000s when collapsing (see Bangladesh). Corporations will add addictive substances to food and sigaretes you increase sales, in the process killing millions.
      • CamTin 9y ago
        They could easily get them if we didn't prevent them from doing so.
      • bubinubn 9y ago
        The Black Hole of Calcutta is a widely known example of what can only be considered a corporate concentration camp of the (at the time privately owned) British East India Company...
        • hyper_reality 9y ago
          That is a bad example indeed. The event of the Black Hole of Calcutta, where soldiers were rounded into a tiny dungeon which few survived, was perpetrated against British soldiers working for the East India Company by the governor of Bengal, Siraj ud-Daulah.
    • cabaalis 9y ago
      At least with a corporation you understand their goal completely.
      • nitrogen 9y ago
        Not really, unless you can listen to every meeting or conversation and read every document.
    • SmirkingRevenge 9y ago
      I agree. The danger isn't simply "Big Government" or "Big <Whatever> Corp.". It's the concentration of power, whether by private or public entities. Private entities will abuse/buy/influence any power structure that happens to exist, to server their interests.
  • kadenshep 9y ago
    > is limiting what people can hear going to be a good thing for them? I mean we currently have the exact opposite problem. We can definitively answer that people hearing everything and anything is quantifiably a bad thing for a good-sized portion of the population. See here[1] and here[2] for some quick examples. >Who watches the watcher? Transparency is not antithetical or exclusive to any system that allows information to be properly editorialized. Dystopian hypotheticals kind of fall flat on their face when we have practical problems that run completely counter to some far off totalitarian future. The worst part about the media landscape for me is not the massive maze of crap you have to wade through, it's that there's enough people willing to lend credence to some part(s) of that maze of crap. It can often remove any hope of a reasonable foundation for a conversation on whatever topic. I think the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle[3] applies well to this topic. >The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it. The current U.S. political landscape is a perfect example of this. We have people buying into certain political mythologies (either outright lies or just plain conspiracy theories, in regards to certain political factions and general policies) with no factual basis and it's wasting what is essentially valuable political capital at an alarming rate. And disappointingly, the actual conspiracies we do have evidence for are disregarded by the very same population that seems to be completely incapable of discerning and analyzing information (or misinformation) in general, across any field. Say, I don't know, climate change. [1]: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1065912917721061 http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1065912917721061 [2]: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ejsp.2331/epdf http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ejsp.2331/epdf [3]: https://www.slideshare.net/ziobrando/bulshit-asymmetry-principle-lightning-talk https://www.slideshare.net/ziobrando/bulshit-asymmetry-princ...
  • jayess 9y ago
    The baffling conceit here is that people in government are angels and people in business are evil. They’re still people, with all the same motivations.
    • anigbrowl 9y ago
      No it isn't. It's the more prosaic observation that governments are more accountable by procedural mechanisms than privately owned firms. How well those mechanisms work is subject to wide variance; nobody believes that North Korea actually operates in a democratic fashion,. but there are many countries that self-evidently do. The concept of a constitutional republic (as opposed to all of its real world implementations) is one of maximizing the citizenry's ability to participate in the decisions that affect them. Most corporations not only function but are structured as autocracies, in which junior employees have no rights over their conditions of employment other than departure.
      • kadenshep 9y ago
        The most level headed statement instead of immediately going with some Libertarian thought terminating cliche and it's being downvoted.
        • anigbrowl 9y ago
          I'd be lonely without my downvoting groupies :-)
• smsm42 9y ago
  So you're saying to fix the problem of you voluntarily surrendering your free will to distractions brought to you by profit-seeking entities, we need to take free will out of the equation by introducing a system where resources would be centrally allocated and there would be no free will involved in what is offered for you and what you could consume, thus no distractions - you always read the content that the People's Democratic Central Party Committee decided you should read, and nothing but that is produced, because what't the point in producing it if nobody would read it anyway? I guess this is one way to solve it - if you have no free will or free time outside of People's Democratic Central Party Committee directives, you certainly couldn't spend it on Facebook and Buzzfeed. North Korea probably doesn't have any issues with distractions. I heard they solved the obesity problem too, by similar means.
  • tarsinge 9y ago
    The issue is that free will cannot be exercised under certain circumstances because for-profit have found a hack to shutdown it. Sure completely surrendering it is disproportionate, but for me it would be more akin to banning certain toxic substances in food, like too much sugar cause addiction and health problems so consumers lose their ability to make an informed choice. Here we would simply ban certain practices in media.
    • smsm42 9y ago
      > The issue is that free will cannot be exercised under certain circumstances because for-profit have found a hack to shutdown it. No they did not. You don't go to Twitter/Facebook because your free will has been "shut down". You do it because you like it. If you don't want to do it, it is very easy to stop. You won't have excruciating pain and debilitating disease if you don't read what she did next, you heart won't stop and your brain won't shut down if you don't learn one weird trick to burn body fat and make all people of your preferred gender to fall in love with you forever. Literally nothing would happen. You decide whether to do it or not. If you decide to do it, it's ok - it is your time, your life, if you want to spend a little bit of it reading about one weird trick or looking at funny cats, who am I to say no? Go for it. But please stop blaming somebody else for your decision to do it. You have free will. Embrace it.
• snerbles 9y ago
  This has to be one of the most heavily-couched calls for Marxism I've seen all week. "Democratic deployment" will still suffer from well-applied demagoguery, the people themselves are still prone to manipulation - even when their choices are abstracted away in a command economy.
  • wffurr 9y ago
    Did I deliberately avoid the M-word? Maybe. A solid counter to demagoguery is economic justice and education that encourages critical thinking. People are much less prone to be swayed by that sort of thing when their health, shelter, and food are not at risk.
    • smsm42 9y ago
      Should I read this as "solid counter to socialist propaganda is actually building socialism"? If so, I wholeheartedly agree. As somebody who actually lived under socialism (until it collapsed), I am inoculated against it forever. However, I think this is way too cruel punishment for a weak souls swayed by a false promise of socialist demagoguery about "justice" and "education" and inevitably finding themselves in abject poverty, monumental totalitarian tyranny and thorough thought-control likes of which had never been seen by humanity before. I'd recommend learning from other's mistakes instead, unfortunately 20th century has enough material for that.
      • wincy 9y ago
        Hey, I just wanted to thank you for articulating some of the thoughts I've had more eloquently than I can or have time to do. It's good to see HN not just sounding like an echo chamber and seeing someone speak up against socialism/communist sentiments commonly expressed here.
        • wffurr 9y ago
          Is it really all that common? HN often feels like a techno-utopian libertarian echo chamber to me. Maybe if we both feel this way, it's actually a balanced group? Or maybe it just comes in waves depending on the topic.
• kunimu 9y ago
  This is precisely correct. I think the replies to you are missing a very central point (speaking as if the accusation of advocating Marxian Communism was a serious charge, too). Perhaps the important authors about the relationship between media and capitalism are the Frankfurt School, in particular Herbert Marcuse's works. I'm reading his book One-Dimensional Man at the moment. He's advocating exactly what you are: democratic deployment of technology. How this relates to media is very interesting, and the idea that these problems exist merely quantitatively different in a possible Socialist society is a fundamental lack of imagination for qualitative change. The other people replying to you forget a key component of history - that rationality is not fixed. Technology has the capability to change what humans consider rational, rationality is a process, a movement in which different societies have different views. The current rationality of late capitalism is what Marcuse terms technological rationality. That is, the rationality of production. This kind of rationality is the production for the sake of production, for the sake of profit. After all, what is more rational than developing machinery, streamlining it, making it more efficient, increasing the role of mechanization in society? Hardly anyone would disagree that these are wonderful advancements - however with them, they have brought rationality of production which pervades society everywhere. This rationality is actually irrational, but few see this. Advertising, planned obsolescence, extreme marketing, the working of the market into the education systems are all simply parts of the production process. Just more costs. Artwork is affected by technological rationality. The old pieces of art often had an alienating component, that is to say, they displayed a clear break from the state of things, and a hope for a different kind of future, the outcast, the mastermind thief, the unemployed person, etc. all fulfilled a role that was outside of the system of rationality, acting against it; even when these roles were not glorified, they existed as an opposition to the system. Marcuse notes that in modern artwork, this notion has largely disappeared; the villains and outcasts are no longer outcasts, they are within the system but in the bottom rungs, and their opposition cannot be seen as clever, but it is only misguided. Their opposition to the bourgeois system from within is always shown as a false opposition, a threat to our notions of freedom conferred by technological rationality. When you hear Bach, Freud, Marx etc. in the supermarket, he is stripped of his alienating or any kind of critical dimension. An element of his truth has been taken away by the new consideration in the light of technological rationality, reduced and sublimated into the totality. Socialism, what you are advocating, carries with it a very different set of rationality in which man is liberated from the freedom of being a free economic subject, free from the bounded freedom of the welfare state. The welfare state, which many proponents of "soft capitasm" advocate is another form of repression of the individual, but in different forms. It is administered living, the restriction and control of the free time made available by technological advancement and control over the intelligence necessary to comprehend self-determination. When we advocate Socialism, we do not mean a central party committee deciding what to read, we mean the liberation of people from the restrictions of the new rationality which insists in its own mode of living through our leisure time, our work time, our sexual enjoyment and artistic pursuit.
• erasemus 9y ago
  >require major changes driven by the democratic process Marxists tell people what's best for everyone; they don't do what people want.
  • wffurr 9y ago
    Funny, I would say the same thing about advertisers.
    • erasemus 9y ago
      Yes but no one claimed advertising was 'driven by a democratic process'. Marxists keep telling people what they want, and of course lying to them, even as the bodies are piling up. At the centenary of Russian Revolution, with 50 million dead, it's hard to believe one can still see hammer and sickles around the place. Yet one can.
      • wffurr 9y ago
        That's exactly why the democratic process part is so important. Without the peaceful exercise of power via democracy, all that's left is violence, and nobody in their right mind wants that.
        • deleted 9y ago
          [deleted]
        • gaius 9y ago
          Why would you want democracy when by definition The Party speaks for all Workers?
    • smsm42 9y ago
      Except advertisers won't put you in gulag if you don't buy their product.
      • pixl97 9y ago
• reirob 9y ago
  The root of the issue is human greed