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This part really struck me: > It feels like finance in 2009. > One one side, you had smart, ambitious people who ended up there simply because you were told t

by cjbest 7y ago

This part really struck me: > It feels like finance in 2009. > One one side, you had smart, ambitious people who ended up there simply because you were told to go. On the other, you had the classic Gordon Gekko-ish types reciting Liar’s Poker anecdotes ad nauseam. > Enter the crisis and everyone was equally tarred as the bad guys. The former have slowly made their way out (mostly over to tech), while the latter remain[...] It does feel like the tide of public opinion might be turning from "too uncritical" to "too critical". At least, as somebody who spends too much time on both Hacker News and Twitter, this seems believable to me.

_bxg1 7y ago
> "too critical" That wasn't my takeaway. My takeaway was, "Good. Pressure is finally getting through to the masses of complacent co-conspirators who still have enough of a soul to care. Maybe things will finally start changing."
TheFiend7 7y ago
I don't really agree with the idea that people are being too critical of FB, or these massive social media giants in general. People vastly underestimate the power of data IMHO and therefore the responsibility that comes with it. We'll look back in 20 years and wonder wtf we were doing just like any other decade, cause hindsight is 20/20 (after a certain number of years out ofc). I don't think our society is really prepared for the digitization of so much information and there will be growing pains.
- K0SM0S 7y ago
  I studied a bit of politics, anthropology, history in my 20s. The one things that frightens me the most is that a relatively "safe" constant of pretty much all dictatorial / totalitarian / fascist / <insert_new_dystopia> regimes of the world, going back millennia, is control of information, and thereby the population. It's one of the simplest rule of a State hostile to its citizens: the more you control information, the stronger the leash. The tighter your hold. And if cruelty is on the menu, the worse it can get with more, better, faster information. So I thought, when Facebook really took off, "people do this now because there's this fad, this dopamine of novelty, but surely soon enough it'll recede" and I was damn wrong. I also thought, "oh but governments with half-decent minds will undoubtedly choose to increase protection for citizens, enact "digital rights" to further the reach of the sanctity of one's "home territory" to internet, a "digital democracy" in terms of infrastructure rules so to speak, and again I was dead wrong — they're doing it the exact opposite direction, proving that the concepts were not lunatic and very much implementable, but as it turns out in the form of "digital authoritarianism". So yeah, I'm the usual optimistic about most things, even the worst like climate change; but in this case, I know no example in history to disprove this assumption: in the current context, if any major western country falls into dictatorship / totalitarianism / etc, it may get very dark very fast. The powers of such a modern incarnation of extreme regimes would be, well, unprecendented, and that's kind of understating orders of magnitude in scale.
variable11 7y ago
"too critical"? I'm sorry, that's laughable. Almost everyone I know still uses FB's privacy-violating, data-stealing services in willful ignorance. Until that psychopath Zuck is behind bars where he belongs for violating the Computer Crimes Act on a scale of billions, there will be no peace or sympathy for a criminal service like FB and its defenders, apologists, and employees.
jessaustin 7y ago
Were we ever "too critical" of the banks? ISTM we just gave them a bunch of money so they could afford to foreclose on everyone in an orderly manner, and then forgot about the whole thing. They're all still "too big to fail", which is more a statement about political corruption than about the economy. I wouldn't be disappointed if FB would have to actually fix their problems in order to escape criticism...

by cjbest 7y ago

_bxg1 7y ago

> "too critical" That wasn't my takeaway. My takeaway was, "Good. Pressure is finally getting through to the masses of complacent co-conspirators who still have enough of a soul to care. Maybe things will finally start changing."

TheFiend7 7y ago

I don't really agree with the idea that people are being too critical of FB, or these massive social media giants in general. People vastly underestimate the power of data IMHO and therefore the responsibility that comes with it. We'll look back in 20 years and wonder wtf we were doing just like any other decade, cause hindsight is 20/20 (after a certain number of years out ofc). I don't think our society is really prepared for the digitization of so much information and there will be growing pains.

K0SM0S 7y ago
I studied a bit of politics, anthropology, history in my 20s. The one things that frightens me the most is that a relatively "safe" constant of pretty much all dictatorial / totalitarian / fascist / <insert_new_dystopia> regimes of the world, going back millennia, is control of information, and thereby the population. It's one of the simplest rule of a State hostile to its citizens: the more you control information, the stronger the leash. The tighter your hold. And if cruelty is on the menu, the worse it can get with more, better, faster information. So I thought, when Facebook really took off, "people do this now because there's this fad, this dopamine of novelty, but surely soon enough it'll recede" and I was damn wrong. I also thought, "oh but governments with half-decent minds will undoubtedly choose to increase protection for citizens, enact "digital rights" to further the reach of the sanctity of one's "home territory" to internet, a "digital democracy" in terms of infrastructure rules so to speak, and again I was dead wrong — they're doing it the exact opposite direction, proving that the concepts were not lunatic and very much implementable, but as it turns out in the form of "digital authoritarianism". So yeah, I'm the usual optimistic about most things, even the worst like climate change; but in this case, I know no example in history to disprove this assumption: in the current context, if any major western country falls into dictatorship / totalitarianism / etc, it may get very dark very fast. The powers of such a modern incarnation of extreme regimes would be, well, unprecendented, and that's kind of understating orders of magnitude in scale.

variable11 7y ago

"too critical"? I'm sorry, that's laughable. Almost everyone I know still uses FB's privacy-violating, data-stealing services in willful ignorance. Until that psychopath Zuck is behind bars where he belongs for violating the Computer Crimes Act on a scale of billions, there will be no peace or sympathy for a criminal service like FB and its defenders, apologists, and employees.

jessaustin 7y ago

Were we ever "too critical" of the banks? ISTM we just gave them a bunch of money so they could afford to foreclose on everyone in an orderly manner, and then forgot about the whole thing. They're all still "too big to fail", which is more a statement about political corruption than about the economy. I wouldn't be disappointed if FB would have to actually fix their problems in order to escape criticism...