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I feel like this cart before the horse vision is the problem. If you are going to suck up as much data about the world and monetize it, you have an obligation t
by tclancy 8y ago
I feel like this cart before the horse vision is the problem. If you are going to suck up as much data about the world and monetize it, you have an obligation to spend some of that dough on a coven of wizards who can make the place you have created safe for people. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, et al have proven to be a disease vector over the past decade and if they want to be rich, they have a responsibility to bleach the shit out of the door handles.
- benologist 8y agoI think they are shining examples of privatizing the profits and socializing the costs. In Google's case they have accrued over $100 billion in savings, and the Chinese government moderates content more effectively and from more disparate sources. A handful of companies provide phone support to over 100 million customers and Google provides automated emails.
- wutbrodo 8y agoDo you similarly feel that the telephone shouldn't have been rolled out until we could ensure that people couldn't speak about objectionable things, paved roads should have waited on ensuring that getaway cars wouldn't work on them, and the printing press should've been gated on technology that ensured it couldn't print falsehoods? As you can imagine, there are a trillion and one other examples I could bring up: you could ask the same about pretty much every sufficiently big advance in technology and the new structures enabled by it. This is a serious question, not a rhetorical one: the responsibility line is unclear to me, but it seems to me that there's a level of Ludditic absolutism around the topic of Internet platforms that I don't see anywhere else, and it's possible that I'm missing the variable that makes it relevant here where it wasn't elsewhere.