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I do academic work in this area, which was inspired by watching Reddit and HN for a decade. I do think something must be done, but the notion that it should be

I do academic work in this area, which was inspired by watching Reddit and HN for a decade. I do think something must be done, but the notion that it should be the government taking action scares me. I believe, platonically that is the right way for government to act, to take necessary actions to counter predatory behavior. What scares me is that we chanced into this. Zuck made some brilliant movies but he was the same guy at 22 that thought that younger people were smarter. Notice he wasn't young enough to say that at 32. The people in government do not understand tech. They don't understand how it works, they don't understand where it is going, and they don't understand its ethos. Government right now is dominated by ideologues and demagogues. I'm very worried that any government action is going to end up being something that only FB, Google, etc can do anything about. Why does the government need to act? Why spend so much time complaining about it on HN? We've been doing that for a decade.

colinmhayes 5y ago
The government is the only institution with a monopoly on force. How else can institutional changes be enacted without worrying about defection?
- crazy_horse 5y ago
  How many people here work in those institutions? Do they not have power to make change or work somewhere else?
  - colinmhayes 5y ago
    Not really... If the market saw an opportunity to make money by defecting from a commonly accepted norm that isn't enforced by law there are people who would be willing to implement the defection for the right price.
  - Barrin92 5y ago
    There is absolutely zero incentive for any of those people in power to do anything about it. They work in one of the best paying industries on earth, they financially stand to benefit from the very things that ought to be regulated. How do you think anyone reigned in the tobacco industry? Everyone in the industry just went, "well I hate coffers full of money, let's stop working here" ? That's what governmental authority exists for. The idea that the foxes polices themselves while they have all the keys to the henhouse is comical.
    - TeMPOraL 5y ago
      > The idea that the foxes polices themselves while they have all the keys to the henhouse is comical. Exactly. "The tragedy of the commons" is a well-known terms that means, "given the keys to the henhouse, the foxes are not able to police themselves well enough to keep themselves from starving" - and this doesn't even begin to consider the interests of hens.
- OneEyedRobot 5y ago
  Judging from the daily riots in Portland without law enforcement involvement I'd say that force has become a more egalitarian hobby.
  - void_mint 5y ago
    You can really tell who gets their info on Portland from Fox News and not Portland residents.
    - OneEyedRobot 5y ago
      No need for Fox. There's a jillion hours of raw video out there. My favorites were the people with a half dozen live feeds of the various deviltries and a bit of ongoing patter. A kind of riot sportscaster I guess. Maybe it's the future of TV. In any case, I don't care if they tear up Portland or any other urban area. There's something fascinating about a battle at a distance. Regardless, have an upvote. I love ya man.
      - void_mint 5y ago
        > No need for Fox. There's a jillion hours of raw video out there. Fox news viewers post Fox news quality videos, friend. > In any case, I don't care if they tear up Portland or any other urban area. You clearly care, in that you brought up Fox-news fascist propaganda about Portland.
jjulius 5y ago
>... and they don't understand its ethos. What is tech's ethos?
readflaggedcomm 5y ago
Because the authors, and tech industry milieu they represent, believes democratic government is the only method for resolving differences: >[Democracy] doesn't mean that there's some alternative way to accomplish that underlying task >[Democracy is] about a fair process for refereeing in an ongoing way, the contestation of citizens’ own choices and preferences. Like they said, would you prefer the Pope to censor your tech? Would you wear unregulated clothing? Of course not. "[W]e need to break people out of a kind of binary mindset where markets are good and markets have all the solutions" and people's needs must be decided democratically.
- crazy_horse 5y ago
  These profs know that democracy isn't a magic fix. The changes made to tech today will come from the democratic system, the same system that is not working great. The current situation sucks but a challenger still has the power, overreaching legislation instead puts that power into the public will which is arbitrary and easily misrepresented. I'm not opposed to a break-up or limits on some of the bigger companies, but it's beyond that which worries me, personally.
  - readflaggedcomm 5y ago
    It can be, if people are energized by their newfound agency, instead of towed around on cattle cars called Facebook and Google. Like Rob says in the interview, cooperation beats competition. Cooperative community solutions beat greedy private solutions.
    - crazy_horse 5y ago
      I guess my main disagreement is that private solutions dn't have to be greedy and community solutions are often driven by it. I think we want the same or similar things, we disagree about the process?
      - TeMPOraL 5y ago
        > private solutions dn't have to be greedy But they do, over time. This is what competition does. You may start out in a fresh market fully intent on doing a good and honest job, but then competitors arrive. First, they force you to innovate and improve your offering. Then, when improvements start yielding diminishing returns, you're forced to either become exploitative and dishonest, or be outcompeted.
mrfusion 5y ago
Have you studied creative destruction in your work? Could that apply here? https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/creativedestruction.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/creativedestruction.asp
efitz 5y ago
The problem is that we are dealing with large concentrations of power. These tech corporations have power in the form of money; additionally many technology corporations have power in the form of the ability to selectively amplify or silence people and ideas. Many of these companies have monopolies, but many of these companies, while jot monopolies, participate in very small oligopolies. How many credit card networks are there? How many microblogging sites? Effectively if you piss off one of these companies, they can exclude you from entire swathes of tech, media or the economy. In such situations many people will choose to self censor. Personally I don’t believe that is healthy; it leads to situations like the US 2016 election when all the polls were well in favor of one candidate and then the other won. Another thing about corporate power in general is that it is not the case that the corporation uses its power proportionately representing either its employees or shareholders. The corporation uses its power in accordance with its officers’ desires. In this way corporations are the ultimate anti-democratic institutions as they concentrate the economic power generated by many diverse people and centralize it to one or a few people. Hence Bezos, Zuckerberg, etc. And the combination of skill, hard work and luck that led to their leadership of these corporations doesn’t in any way relate to their values or judgment and the ways that they will use their power.
- themacguffinman 5y ago
  That's a pretty strange take of the political consequences of Big Tech power, especially the US 2016 election. Polling for that election put Trump at a low chance of winning (FiveThirtyEight had it at ~30% IIRC), not practically impossible odds. I don't understand how bucking the statistical favorite is some kind of disastrous or unhealthy outcome. I also don't have any idea what that has to do with Big Tech. Big Tech did and continues to discriminate against right-wing/alt-right views* which you say leads to self-censorship, and that somehow led to an electoral outcome where the right-wing/alt-right candidate won; So Big Tech's corporate power is so immense & influential that it led to...the opposite outcome? I'm sure there's an argument there somewhere about the dangers of excessive corporate power but I can't make sense of your connection between Big Tech corporate power and your example of the 2016 election of the most anti-Big-Tech US president ever. * I'm assuming you're referring to right-wing/alt-right discrimination because I don't recall many significant examples in which Big Tech excluded people/partners from "entire swathes of tech, media or the economy" for left-wing views, but feel free to correct me!
eplanit 5y ago
"I'm very worried that any government action is going to end up being something that only FB, Google, etc can do anything about." Worse is the likely objective/outcome: big tech and gov't. joining forces.
philipov 5y ago
As I see it, the problem is essentially an antitrust issue, but our notion of antitrust hasn't evolved since the early 1900s to cover the realities of today's economy. Whether a company has complete market domination is a red herring used to dismiss other types of market failure. Cartel behavior does not involve monopolies. Vertical integration of supply chains does not require a monopoly to be a problem. Markets are defined in a way that makes it look like on paper the leader doesn't have a dominant position simply because they don't have 100% market share, but it hides that market share doesn't tell the whole story. Facebook should have never been allowed to buy their most promising competitors in Instagram and WhatsApp, for example. Intentionally confusing the market for phones with App stores is an example of a problem that 20th century antitrust never had to deal with. Just because two products look the same doesn't mean they compete with each other if there are other reasons, such as identity politics or vendor lock-in, which cause people to not treat them as replacements for each other. All these things are issues which government should legitimately be regulating, and at one point did regulate. But there is no will left to do that anymore, and the poor quality of our politicians is partly to blame for it.
- nobody9999 5y ago
  >Intentionally confusing the market for phones with App stores is an example of a problem that 20th century antitrust never had to deal with. I'd say that the issues with app stores are a pretty direct parallel to Company Towns[0], whose issues have been known and addressed for more than a century. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town
TeMPOraL 5y ago
> The people in government do not understand tech. They don't understand how it works, they don't understand where it is going, and they don't understand its ethos. That may have been true 20 years ago. The people in government understand current tech and its ethos very well, because it's the same ethos as in every other industry: profit over all. What surprises me is to see people still thinking our industry has any trace of the original "hacker ethos" left in it. It doesn't. Big Tech companies are just run-of-the-mill megacorporations, with all pathologies that come with megacorps run by suits, differing only by the flavor of the products they sell. Startup world is just another Wall Street, with a sprinkling of tech sugar on top of the dollars being gambled. Governments understand this well. Whether it's Google or GM or Monsanto that's pulling business shenanigans, it's all the same business shenanigans. Hacker ethos? That ended when programming started to pay well.
- crazy_horse 5y ago
  What you are describing is SV. SV doesn't have to be the tech industry and it isn't.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    No, it's just the golden beacon everyone else tries to mimic. No surprise there either, SV-style shenanigans deliver solid money.

colinmhayes 5y ago

The government is the only institution with a monopoly on force. How else can institutional changes be enacted without worrying about defection?

crazy_horse 5y ago
How many people here work in those institutions? Do they not have power to make change or work somewhere else?
- colinmhayes 5y ago
  Not really... If the market saw an opportunity to make money by defecting from a commonly accepted norm that isn't enforced by law there are people who would be willing to implement the defection for the right price.
- Barrin92 5y ago
  There is absolutely zero incentive for any of those people in power to do anything about it. They work in one of the best paying industries on earth, they financially stand to benefit from the very things that ought to be regulated. How do you think anyone reigned in the tobacco industry? Everyone in the industry just went, "well I hate coffers full of money, let's stop working here" ? That's what governmental authority exists for. The idea that the foxes polices themselves while they have all the keys to the henhouse is comical.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    > The idea that the foxes polices themselves while they have all the keys to the henhouse is comical. Exactly. "The tragedy of the commons" is a well-known terms that means, "given the keys to the henhouse, the foxes are not able to police themselves well enough to keep themselves from starving" - and this doesn't even begin to consider the interests of hens.
OneEyedRobot 5y ago
Judging from the daily riots in Portland without law enforcement involvement I'd say that force has become a more egalitarian hobby.
- void_mint 5y ago
  You can really tell who gets their info on Portland from Fox News and not Portland residents.
  - OneEyedRobot 5y ago
    No need for Fox. There's a jillion hours of raw video out there. My favorites were the people with a half dozen live feeds of the various deviltries and a bit of ongoing patter. A kind of riot sportscaster I guess. Maybe it's the future of TV. In any case, I don't care if they tear up Portland or any other urban area. There's something fascinating about a battle at a distance. Regardless, have an upvote. I love ya man.
    - void_mint 5y ago
      > No need for Fox. There's a jillion hours of raw video out there. Fox news viewers post Fox news quality videos, friend. > In any case, I don't care if they tear up Portland or any other urban area. You clearly care, in that you brought up Fox-news fascist propaganda about Portland.

jjulius 5y ago

>... and they don't understand its ethos. What is tech's ethos?

readflaggedcomm 5y ago

Because the authors, and tech industry milieu they represent, believes democratic government is the only method for resolving differences: >[Democracy] doesn't mean that there's some alternative way to accomplish that underlying task >[Democracy is] about a fair process for refereeing in an ongoing way, the contestation of citizens’ own choices and preferences. Like they said, would you prefer the Pope to censor your tech? Would you wear unregulated clothing? Of course not. "[W]e need to break people out of a kind of binary mindset where markets are good and markets have all the solutions" and people's needs must be decided democratically.

crazy_horse 5y ago
These profs know that democracy isn't a magic fix. The changes made to tech today will come from the democratic system, the same system that is not working great. The current situation sucks but a challenger still has the power, overreaching legislation instead puts that power into the public will which is arbitrary and easily misrepresented. I'm not opposed to a break-up or limits on some of the bigger companies, but it's beyond that which worries me, personally.
- readflaggedcomm 5y ago
  It can be, if people are energized by their newfound agency, instead of towed around on cattle cars called Facebook and Google. Like Rob says in the interview, cooperation beats competition. Cooperative community solutions beat greedy private solutions.
  - crazy_horse 5y ago
    I guess my main disagreement is that private solutions dn't have to be greedy and community solutions are often driven by it. I think we want the same or similar things, we disagree about the process?
    - TeMPOraL 5y ago
      > private solutions dn't have to be greedy But they do, over time. This is what competition does. You may start out in a fresh market fully intent on doing a good and honest job, but then competitors arrive. First, they force you to innovate and improve your offering. Then, when improvements start yielding diminishing returns, you're forced to either become exploitative and dishonest, or be outcompeted.

mrfusion 5y ago

Have you studied creative destruction in your work? Could that apply here? https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/creativedestruction.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/creativedestruction.asp

efitz 5y ago

The problem is that we are dealing with large concentrations of power. These tech corporations have power in the form of money; additionally many technology corporations have power in the form of the ability to selectively amplify or silence people and ideas. Many of these companies have monopolies, but many of these companies, while jot monopolies, participate in very small oligopolies. How many credit card networks are there? How many microblogging sites? Effectively if you piss off one of these companies, they can exclude you from entire swathes of tech, media or the economy. In such situations many people will choose to self censor. Personally I don’t believe that is healthy; it leads to situations like the US 2016 election when all the polls were well in favor of one candidate and then the other won. Another thing about corporate power in general is that it is not the case that the corporation uses its power proportionately representing either its employees or shareholders. The corporation uses its power in accordance with its officers’ desires. In this way corporations are the ultimate anti-democratic institutions as they concentrate the economic power generated by many diverse people and centralize it to one or a few people. Hence Bezos, Zuckerberg, etc. And the combination of skill, hard work and luck that led to their leadership of these corporations doesn’t in any way relate to their values or judgment and the ways that they will use their power.

themacguffinman 5y ago
That's a pretty strange take of the political consequences of Big Tech power, especially the US 2016 election. Polling for that election put Trump at a low chance of winning (FiveThirtyEight had it at ~30% IIRC), not practically impossible odds. I don't understand how bucking the statistical favorite is some kind of disastrous or unhealthy outcome. I also don't have any idea what that has to do with Big Tech. Big Tech did and continues to discriminate against right-wing/alt-right views* which you say leads to self-censorship, and that somehow led to an electoral outcome where the right-wing/alt-right candidate won; So Big Tech's corporate power is so immense & influential that it led to...the opposite outcome? I'm sure there's an argument there somewhere about the dangers of excessive corporate power but I can't make sense of your connection between Big Tech corporate power and your example of the 2016 election of the most anti-Big-Tech US president ever. * I'm assuming you're referring to right-wing/alt-right discrimination because I don't recall many significant examples in which Big Tech excluded people/partners from "entire swathes of tech, media or the economy" for left-wing views, but feel free to correct me!

eplanit 5y ago

"I'm very worried that any government action is going to end up being something that only FB, Google, etc can do anything about." Worse is the likely objective/outcome: big tech and gov't. joining forces.

philipov 5y ago

As I see it, the problem is essentially an antitrust issue, but our notion of antitrust hasn't evolved since the early 1900s to cover the realities of today's economy. Whether a company has complete market domination is a red herring used to dismiss other types of market failure. Cartel behavior does not involve monopolies. Vertical integration of supply chains does not require a monopoly to be a problem. Markets are defined in a way that makes it look like on paper the leader doesn't have a dominant position simply because they don't have 100% market share, but it hides that market share doesn't tell the whole story. Facebook should have never been allowed to buy their most promising competitors in Instagram and WhatsApp, for example. Intentionally confusing the market for phones with App stores is an example of a problem that 20th century antitrust never had to deal with. Just because two products look the same doesn't mean they compete with each other if there are other reasons, such as identity politics or vendor lock-in, which cause people to not treat them as replacements for each other. All these things are issues which government should legitimately be regulating, and at one point did regulate. But there is no will left to do that anymore, and the poor quality of our politicians is partly to blame for it.

nobody9999 5y ago
>Intentionally confusing the market for phones with App stores is an example of a problem that 20th century antitrust never had to deal with. I'd say that the issues with app stores are a pretty direct parallel to Company Towns[0], whose issues have been known and addressed for more than a century. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town

TeMPOraL 5y ago

> The people in government do not understand tech. They don't understand how it works, they don't understand where it is going, and they don't understand its ethos. That may have been true 20 years ago. The people in government understand current tech and its ethos very well, because it's the same ethos as in every other industry: profit over all. What surprises me is to see people still thinking our industry has any trace of the original "hacker ethos" left in it. It doesn't. Big Tech companies are just run-of-the-mill megacorporations, with all pathologies that come with megacorps run by suits, differing only by the flavor of the products they sell. Startup world is just another Wall Street, with a sprinkling of tech sugar on top of the dollars being gambled. Governments understand this well. Whether it's Google or GM or Monsanto that's pulling business shenanigans, it's all the same business shenanigans. Hacker ethos? That ended when programming started to pay well.

crazy_horse 5y ago
What you are describing is SV. SV doesn't have to be the tech industry and it isn't.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  No, it's just the golden beacon everyone else tries to mimic. No surprise there either, SV-style shenanigans deliver solid money.