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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 p

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.

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.