3 ms·

A note to the readers - the real article starts somewhere after the middle point - the whole first part is just rehashing all the information YC readers know by

by zby 8y ago

A note to the readers - the real article starts somewhere after the middle point - the whole first part is just rehashing all the information YC readers know by heart. The main thesis seems to be that framing the problem as health issue (as the so called Tech Humanists try to do) is: - hiding the political issues related to the power the tech companies have on our lives - giving them even more power - because they are the experts here and in health we defer a lot of our judgement to the doctors - is based on a mythical 'human nature as separate from our technology' idea What to do with it: use anti monopoly laws, tax, introduce rules about the usage of private data and build public/coop infrastructure. I am not so sure about public/coop infrastructure part - I don't think government is automatically better than a company - but maybe it should be tried. But the most difficult part will be the 'rules about usage of private data', that goes much deeper than just 'protecting privacy' and I am not sure how it can work - you cannot stop an individual from thinking about you and using all his memories in his thinking, sure a person is not a perfect analogy to organization. By the way, the Facebook 'time well spent' project priorities our private communications over public ones - it is really about hooking us even deeper into the machine.

captainbland 8y ago
> I am not so sure about public/coop infrastructure part - I don't think government is automatically better than a company Coops aren't the same thing as government, they're about worker or consumer ownership and management of a business - although coops are certainly vulnerable to anti-competitive behaviour in the current state of affairs. Having social media companies be cooperatives of their users could be a way of ensuring that people still have some realistic degree of control over how that data is used, for example.

by zby 8y ago

captainbland 8y ago

> I am not so sure about public/coop infrastructure part - I don't think government is automatically better than a company Coops aren't the same thing as government, they're about worker or consumer ownership and management of a business - although coops are certainly vulnerable to anti-competitive behaviour in the current state of affairs. Having social media companies be cooperatives of their users could be a way of ensuring that people still have some realistic degree of control over how that data is used, for example.