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Here in the US we think that freedom from government oversight is the only kind of freedom. We make the mistake thinking this means that the free market is actu

by c54 5y ago

Here in the US we think that freedom from government oversight is the only kind of freedom. We make the mistake thinking this means that the free market is actually the antidote to government, and as long as we have the free market we will be free. In reality, companies operating within a market is perfectly capable of imposing intrusive and arbitrary power on citizens, and collective action / government intervention is needed in order to protect our freedoms. As others have pointed out, we don't need to 'ask', we need to legislate. Congress will have a hard time passing legislation against this not only because of the filibuster (which encourages minority rule), but because of this fundamental confusion. Why would a Senator or Congressperson who believes only in the first type of free market freedom and is blind to the second type of freedom make moves against a corporation? Anyways I just started reading this great book called Freedom From the Market, points are 100% lifted from there: https://thenewpress.com/books/freedom-from-market https://thenewpress.com/books/freedom-from-market

bmitc 5y ago
Thank you for saying this, and saying it well. It’s really scary that all these “freedom” drum beaters and free market worshippers don’t consider this at all. What’s worse is that government at least have a tacit reason to keep the people’s best interest in mind, although that does seem to be eroding, but corporations have zero incentive to care about anything other than the gain of capital and more power. Also, thanks for the book reference.
- c54 5y ago
  It is scary, especially since there are very invested powers interested in keeping it that way. "Corporations good, government bad" they'll say to their people, all the way to the bank
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> As others have pointed out, we don't need to 'ask', we need to legislate. Legislate what, specifically? I always see calls for more legislation around social media, but I rarely see any actionable suggestions. Frankly, I’m kind of shocked at the degree that tech communities are rushing for legislation on this topic. When I was growing up I remember the big issue being violence in video games. Politicians went on crusades to demonize video games and demand that we pass legislation to protect the kids from any exposure to violent video games, lest the video games turn them into school shooters. With video games, the online tech communities rallied against any legislation and wrote volumes about how kids were smart enough to manage themselves and not let violent video games influence their thinking. With social media, tech communities are doing the opposite: Writing volumes about how kids are incapable of managing themselves and will succumb to social media destroying their mental health. The major difference between the two is that tech people (on average) like video games but they don’t like social media. So video games get a pass, but social media must be attacked with everything we’ve got. The secondary subtext buried in most of these articles is that young girls, specifically, are most vulnerable to social media issues, whereas violent video games were largely an issue for young boys. Apparently we’re okay letting young boys handle difficult content but we don’t give the same credit to young girls. The more I watch all of this play out, the more hypocritical it all feels. I also suspect that if anti-social-media politicians see success that we’ll see a revival of the anti-violent-game politicians. After all, we need to regulate what the kids consume, right?
- officialchicken 5y ago
  > Legislate what, specifically? Treat it like digital tobacco or similar - a product with known mental health side effects engineered specifically to modify your behavior in the name of "engagement". Limit access to children, require warnings with every email and notification. etc. etc. etc. It's not hard, as long as you keep focus on the problem. This isn't about guns.
- edbaskerville 5y ago
  End the business model entirely! Make all microtargeted advertising illegal! (I can dream, can’t I?)
  - cybernautique 5y ago
    I think it's a worthy dream and I'd be interested in hearing from anyone that says otherwise. Why should we allow microtargeted advertising?
    - camhart 5y ago
      If I'm going to have to view ads, I'd prefer to see relevant ads instead of irrelevant. The issue is with the data collection and privacy issues around it. Not with making ads more relevant by appropriately targeting.
      - JKCalhoun 5y ago
        In a perverse way, I'd rather see irrelevant ads. That way I am not inclined to purchase. I prefer not to have salespeople come to my door, I prefer to seek them out when I am inclined to.
        cybernautique 5y ago
        This is a very apt way to put it! I'm likely to adopt it into my own descriptions, thank you! Advertisers should be relegated to their own greasy pit, to speak only at my pleasure and where I know to find them. Any other attempt to engage with me, anytime and anyplace else except where I explicitly permit them, is nothing less than an unwelcome intrusion. Begone, rent-seekers! Trouble us with your A/B tests no more.
anon9001 5y ago
You're making such a pure argument that I can't resist making the contrarian argument. I believe that legislation got us into the Facebook problem in the first place. If you disagree, please take the time to correct me instead of downvoting my opinion out of existence. I'm open to a change of mind. Here's how I see it: All of these social media companies have one thing in common: they exist to sell ads. We don't really know what Facebook would have looked like as a subscription service, because it wouldn't have ever become dominant. For ads to work best, they have to be targeted at users. This incentivizes data collection that helps with ad targeting, which is pretty much everything. But for ads to work at all, the user has to actually see the ad. This incentivizes engagement, because you need attention on your ad for the ad to have value. If you need engagement, you have to find a way to reach users. This is quite good if your business is selling ads, as you already have all of the data. And so the cycle of collecting and using data for acquisition goes on forever. Since the very beginning of the ad business, companies like DoubleClick (later acquired by Google) have stretched the limits of web technology to make all of this work. Pixel bugs, cookies, app SDKs, all kinds of tricks, anything they can do to get more data about the user, because that's the gas that makes the whole engine run. Users, however, are prevented by government regulation from stretching the limits of technology to fight back against these companies. Have you ever wondered why there isn't a large market for paid alternative Twitter clients that cut out ads and data collection? There used to be, back when Twitter had a very permissive view of their data. Then Twitter changed the rules and now it's a grey area if using their private API with an app-extracted key is a crime or not. It's certainly not something you can build a company on. So the situation here is that social media companies rely on you not being able to "hack" because there are legal protections on how you can interface with their public-facing internet servers and what you can do with the data that those servers send in reply. Because of legislation like the DMCA, paid for by media companies, users never even got the chance to fight on the same technical battleground where they were already being exploited by ad companies. As I see it, these companies are using public infrastructure when it suits them. If a computer client is allowing third-party cookies, well, that's just downright reasonable to use for ad tracking. But if you alter a query string, you might be a criminal. That's where regulation has got us. If Facebook is to be regulated, you can be sure that they'll write the regulation. My litmus test for if there's a free market situation here: Are you free to make an alternative ad-free Facebook client that uses private APIs extracted from the real Facebook app? Because if the answer to that is no, as it has been since these companies have existed, then no amount of regulation is going to improve the situation. User rights and privacy is a fight we could win technically without some very specific computer and copyright laws. We need to get back to the idea of the internet being public infrastructure. If there was some change to the law that suddenly let people build better Facebook clients without fear of being sued into oblivion or even arrested, then I think we could finally get these companies under control.
cqz 5y ago
I haven't read this book, but this concept sounds very much like the notions of positive and negative liberty/freedom as described by Isiah Berlin [1]. In short, negative liberty is freedom from external interference, while positive liberty is having the resources and power to actually accomplish things. [1] http://cactus.dixie.edu/green/B_Readings/I_Berlin%20Two%20Concpets%20of%20Liberty.pdf http://cactus.dixie.edu/green/B_Readings/I_Berlin%20Two%20Co...
- c54 5y ago
  Yeah! Berlin and his ideas are explicitly referenced in the opening portions
  - sradu 5y ago
    You are misinterpreting Isaiah Berlin. "Such theoretical shifts set the stage, for Berlin, for the ideologies of the totalitarian movements of the twentieth century, both Communist and Fascist–Nazi, which claimed to liberate people by subjecting – and often sacrificing – them to larger groups or principles. To do this was the greatest of political evils; and to do it in the name of freedom, a political principle that Berlin, as a genuine liberal, especially cherished, struck him as a ‘strange […] reversal’ or ‘monstrous impersonation’ (2002b, 198, 180). Against this, Berlin championed, as ‘truer and more humane’, negative liberty and an empirical view of the self." https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/berlin/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/berlin/ The idea of positive liberty is that you are free to become the best man you can be, but there is someone or a group who defines what 'best' is. And that inevitably ends in dictatorships or similar types of abuse.
throw123123123 5y ago
The only reason the government doesnt run an instagram for kids is because it doesnt know how to. Instead, it runs lotteries and liquor shops, which they know do damage as well, but you dont get government to shut down government in those cases.
- vmception 5y ago
  The federal government ignores them as these are not tasks of the federal government and therefore are at the complete discretion of the state governments 10th amendment Now sure, the federal government has subjugated all of the states and is in a position to enforce arbitrary compliance to arbitrary whims, but it does also derive power from the collection of states and so it mostly ignores the discretion provided by the 10th amendment, to prevent that power from dissolving
errantmind 5y ago
Mostly agreed. I know it is tired to say this but we don't have a free market with the existence of intellectual property. They are also a Natural Monopoly, mostly due to network effect, but also because of their tendency to acquire the competition. Add to that that we don't put executives in jail for corporate wrongdoing, alongside treating corporations as people in terms of speech and political donations.. you end up with the present situation.
gjs278 5y ago
what the hell are you talking about? it shouldn’t be illegal for a website to exist. some kids killed themselves on myspace and xanga too but there’s no reason to ban those types of sites. stop trying to ruin the internet
AmericanChopper 5y ago
The “free market” in this context is just a consumers ability to make choices for themselves. The “freedom from” argument is just a contrivance that suggests you’ll be more free the less choices you’re allowed to make for yourself. It’s just rebranding a clearly anti-freedom idea as a pro-freedom one as a form of rationalization, and hoping nobody thinks about it long enough to notice. You’re already free from Facebook if you want to be. Nobody will make you use it. Your also free to parent your children in anyway you want to. But freedom isn’t forcing everybody else to make the same decisions you do.
ajeet_dhaliwal 5y ago
I don’t think this argument works well against “Instagram for kids”. Yes some big tech companies have services that they supply that are close to feeling like essential utilities, but certainly not this, no one needs to use Instagram for kids, and there should indeed be freedom to choose what to do here for parents, kids and people without government intervention.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
dathinab 5y ago
I mean the main problem there is _NO_ free marked (in the sense of a proper self regulating marked consumers can reasonable influence by their buying decisions). A proper free marked requires that: - People have a choice (no monopolies or oligopoly on any level), - People can see problems and decide to therefore not to buy from a given company => i.e. transparency. We are very far way from this, with how the world and technology moved on the only way to archive it is to require easy accessible transparency, especially of ownership of companies, land and especially in the finanzial/stock market. Even if this means that people privatly investing there in more then small sums losing privacy (because if you move larger amounts of mony you ARE basically a company!) - If a company messes up, the competition should be able to pick up where the original company left of. I.e. Patents and locked down electronic devices are fundamentally non free marked. - probably more stuff I missed. Many of the points above are often not associated with a free marked (at least in the US) potentially the opposite, but they are IMHO essential for a free marked to work like originally intended. Or in other words, the "free marked" the US has IMHO can not work, in the sense that it can't have the positive effects a free marked is supposed to have because the dynamics in thir marked often outright conflicts the dynamics a free marked is supposed to have leading to a continuous degrading marked (from a human/citicen/society POV).
maccolgan 5y ago
Taking away power from arbitrary companies arbitrarily isn't very free either... People dislike government oversight because government is fundamentally imposed on all people, and funded by your own money, can't say the same about Facebook...

by c54 5y ago

bmitc 5y ago

Thank you for saying this, and saying it well. It’s really scary that all these “freedom” drum beaters and free market worshippers don’t consider this at all. What’s worse is that government at least have a tacit reason to keep the people’s best interest in mind, although that does seem to be eroding, but corporations have zero incentive to care about anything other than the gain of capital and more power. Also, thanks for the book reference.

c54 5y ago
It is scary, especially since there are very invested powers interested in keeping it that way. "Corporations good, government bad" they'll say to their people, all the way to the bank

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

> As others have pointed out, we don't need to 'ask', we need to legislate. Legislate what, specifically? I always see calls for more legislation around social media, but I rarely see any actionable suggestions. Frankly, I’m kind of shocked at the degree that tech communities are rushing for legislation on this topic. When I was growing up I remember the big issue being violence in video games. Politicians went on crusades to demonize video games and demand that we pass legislation to protect the kids from any exposure to violent video games, lest the video games turn them into school shooters. With video games, the online tech communities rallied against any legislation and wrote volumes about how kids were smart enough to manage themselves and not let violent video games influence their thinking. With social media, tech communities are doing the opposite: Writing volumes about how kids are incapable of managing themselves and will succumb to social media destroying their mental health. The major difference between the two is that tech people (on average) like video games but they don’t like social media. So video games get a pass, but social media must be attacked with everything we’ve got. The secondary subtext buried in most of these articles is that young girls, specifically, are most vulnerable to social media issues, whereas violent video games were largely an issue for young boys. Apparently we’re okay letting young boys handle difficult content but we don’t give the same credit to young girls. The more I watch all of this play out, the more hypocritical it all feels. I also suspect that if anti-social-media politicians see success that we’ll see a revival of the anti-violent-game politicians. After all, we need to regulate what the kids consume, right?

officialchicken 5y ago
> Legislate what, specifically? Treat it like digital tobacco or similar - a product with known mental health side effects engineered specifically to modify your behavior in the name of "engagement". Limit access to children, require warnings with every email and notification. etc. etc. etc. It's not hard, as long as you keep focus on the problem. This isn't about guns.
edbaskerville 5y ago
End the business model entirely! Make all microtargeted advertising illegal! (I can dream, can’t I?)
- cybernautique 5y ago
  I think it's a worthy dream and I'd be interested in hearing from anyone that says otherwise. Why should we allow microtargeted advertising?
  - camhart 5y ago
    If I'm going to have to view ads, I'd prefer to see relevant ads instead of irrelevant. The issue is with the data collection and privacy issues around it. Not with making ads more relevant by appropriately targeting.
    - JKCalhoun 5y ago
      In a perverse way, I'd rather see irrelevant ads. That way I am not inclined to purchase. I prefer not to have salespeople come to my door, I prefer to seek them out when I am inclined to.
      - cybernautique 5y ago
        This is a very apt way to put it! I'm likely to adopt it into my own descriptions, thank you! Advertisers should be relegated to their own greasy pit, to speak only at my pleasure and where I know to find them. Any other attempt to engage with me, anytime and anyplace else except where I explicitly permit them, is nothing less than an unwelcome intrusion. Begone, rent-seekers! Trouble us with your A/B tests no more.

anon9001 5y ago

You're making such a pure argument that I can't resist making the contrarian argument. I believe that legislation got us into the Facebook problem in the first place. If you disagree, please take the time to correct me instead of downvoting my opinion out of existence. I'm open to a change of mind. Here's how I see it: All of these social media companies have one thing in common: they exist to sell ads. We don't really know what Facebook would have looked like as a subscription service, because it wouldn't have ever become dominant. For ads to work best, they have to be targeted at users. This incentivizes data collection that helps with ad targeting, which is pretty much everything. But for ads to work at all, the user has to actually see the ad. This incentivizes engagement, because you need attention on your ad for the ad to have value. If you need engagement, you have to find a way to reach users. This is quite good if your business is selling ads, as you already have all of the data. And so the cycle of collecting and using data for acquisition goes on forever. Since the very beginning of the ad business, companies like DoubleClick (later acquired by Google) have stretched the limits of web technology to make all of this work. Pixel bugs, cookies, app SDKs, all kinds of tricks, anything they can do to get more data about the user, because that's the gas that makes the whole engine run. Users, however, are prevented by government regulation from stretching the limits of technology to fight back against these companies. Have you ever wondered why there isn't a large market for paid alternative Twitter clients that cut out ads and data collection? There used to be, back when Twitter had a very permissive view of their data. Then Twitter changed the rules and now it's a grey area if using their private API with an app-extracted key is a crime or not. It's certainly not something you can build a company on. So the situation here is that social media companies rely on you not being able to "hack" because there are legal protections on how you can interface with their public-facing internet servers and what you can do with the data that those servers send in reply. Because of legislation like the DMCA, paid for by media companies, users never even got the chance to fight on the same technical battleground where they were already being exploited by ad companies. As I see it, these companies are using public infrastructure when it suits them. If a computer client is allowing third-party cookies, well, that's just downright reasonable to use for ad tracking. But if you alter a query string, you might be a criminal. That's where regulation has got us. If Facebook is to be regulated, you can be sure that they'll write the regulation. My litmus test for if there's a free market situation here: Are you free to make an alternative ad-free Facebook client that uses private APIs extracted from the real Facebook app? Because if the answer to that is no, as it has been since these companies have existed, then no amount of regulation is going to improve the situation. User rights and privacy is a fight we could win technically without some very specific computer and copyright laws. We need to get back to the idea of the internet being public infrastructure. If there was some change to the law that suddenly let people build better Facebook clients without fear of being sued into oblivion or even arrested, then I think we could finally get these companies under control.

cqz 5y ago

I haven't read this book, but this concept sounds very much like the notions of positive and negative liberty/freedom as described by Isiah Berlin [1]. In short, negative liberty is freedom from external interference, while positive liberty is having the resources and power to actually accomplish things. [1] http://cactus.dixie.edu/green/B_Readings/I_Berlin%20Two%20Concpets%20of%20Liberty.pdf http://cactus.dixie.edu/green/B_Readings/I_Berlin%20Two%20Co...

c54 5y ago
Yeah! Berlin and his ideas are explicitly referenced in the opening portions
- sradu 5y ago
  You are misinterpreting Isaiah Berlin. "Such theoretical shifts set the stage, for Berlin, for the ideologies of the totalitarian movements of the twentieth century, both Communist and Fascist–Nazi, which claimed to liberate people by subjecting – and often sacrificing – them to larger groups or principles. To do this was the greatest of political evils; and to do it in the name of freedom, a political principle that Berlin, as a genuine liberal, especially cherished, struck him as a ‘strange […] reversal’ or ‘monstrous impersonation’ (2002b, 198, 180). Against this, Berlin championed, as ‘truer and more humane’, negative liberty and an empirical view of the self." https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/berlin/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/berlin/ The idea of positive liberty is that you are free to become the best man you can be, but there is someone or a group who defines what 'best' is. And that inevitably ends in dictatorships or similar types of abuse.

throw123123123 5y ago

The only reason the government doesnt run an instagram for kids is because it doesnt know how to. Instead, it runs lotteries and liquor shops, which they know do damage as well, but you dont get government to shut down government in those cases.

vmception 5y ago
The federal government ignores them as these are not tasks of the federal government and therefore are at the complete discretion of the state governments 10th amendment Now sure, the federal government has subjugated all of the states and is in a position to enforce arbitrary compliance to arbitrary whims, but it does also derive power from the collection of states and so it mostly ignores the discretion provided by the 10th amendment, to prevent that power from dissolving

errantmind 5y ago

Mostly agreed. I know it is tired to say this but we don't have a free market with the existence of intellectual property. They are also a Natural Monopoly, mostly due to network effect, but also because of their tendency to acquire the competition. Add to that that we don't put executives in jail for corporate wrongdoing, alongside treating corporations as people in terms of speech and political donations.. you end up with the present situation.

gjs278 5y ago

what the hell are you talking about? it shouldn’t be illegal for a website to exist. some kids killed themselves on myspace and xanga too but there’s no reason to ban those types of sites. stop trying to ruin the internet

AmericanChopper 5y ago

The “free market” in this context is just a consumers ability to make choices for themselves. The “freedom from” argument is just a contrivance that suggests you’ll be more free the less choices you’re allowed to make for yourself. It’s just rebranding a clearly anti-freedom idea as a pro-freedom one as a form of rationalization, and hoping nobody thinks about it long enough to notice. You’re already free from Facebook if you want to be. Nobody will make you use it. Your also free to parent your children in anyway you want to. But freedom isn’t forcing everybody else to make the same decisions you do.

ajeet_dhaliwal 5y ago

I don’t think this argument works well against “Instagram for kids”. Yes some big tech companies have services that they supply that are close to feeling like essential utilities, but certainly not this, no one needs to use Instagram for kids, and there should indeed be freedom to choose what to do here for parents, kids and people without government intervention.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

dathinab 5y ago

I mean the main problem there is _NO_ free marked (in the sense of a proper self regulating marked consumers can reasonable influence by their buying decisions). A proper free marked requires that: - People have a choice (no monopolies or oligopoly on any level), - People can see problems and decide to therefore not to buy from a given company => i.e. transparency. We are very far way from this, with how the world and technology moved on the only way to archive it is to require easy accessible transparency, especially of ownership of companies, land and especially in the finanzial/stock market. Even if this means that people privatly investing there in more then small sums losing privacy (because if you move larger amounts of mony you ARE basically a company!) - If a company messes up, the competition should be able to pick up where the original company left of. I.e. Patents and locked down electronic devices are fundamentally non free marked. - probably more stuff I missed. Many of the points above are often not associated with a free marked (at least in the US) potentially the opposite, but they are IMHO essential for a free marked to work like originally intended. Or in other words, the "free marked" the US has IMHO can not work, in the sense that it can't have the positive effects a free marked is supposed to have because the dynamics in thir marked often outright conflicts the dynamics a free marked is supposed to have leading to a continuous degrading marked (from a human/citicen/society POV).

maccolgan 5y ago

Taking away power from arbitrary companies arbitrarily isn't very free either... People dislike government oversight because government is fundamentally imposed on all people, and funded by your own money, can't say the same about Facebook...