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When he says "Let's Fix the Internet, Not the Tech Giants", in my mind I translate that to: "capitalism doesn't care directly about human well being. Well, that
by slx26 5y ago
When he says "Let's Fix the Internet, Not the Tech Giants", in my mind I translate that to: "capitalism doesn't care directly about human well being. Well, that's not cool, but I believe it's better to try to provide an alternative flow / dynamic / space for competition than trying to stop the immoral practices of these powerful beasts directly. Don't fight the problem face-to-face, try to make it obsolete".
Well. One should be shocked: government and laws are exactly what should protect human well-being directly and decisively when other things fail (or in prevention), but now it turns out capitalism is too powerful so we can't do that? We have to ignore morality for a while, and start to leverage government and laws just to create a side pathway that might eventually lead to the possibility to compete against the big beasts of capitalism in their own (or slightly shifted) terrain? Hope we adapt better than they do?
I'm not even saying this is stupid. It might actually be the most pragmatic way forward. I tend to take a similar view when looking for solutions... but when we reached this point, we should realize that the problem is not the tech giants, interoperability, Java's error model, APIs, EFFs, js typecasting nor the internet. If having to resort to this kind of strategies doesn't make it clear to us that we are playing the wrong game, we are doomed at a more fundamental level: money sits at the top of the power pyramid, and we have no effective mechanism to balance human well-being against it (which doesn't make patches useless, but maybe we should start prefacing appropriately or writing angry ò.ó comments about it at some point).
- dane-pgp 5y ago> money sits at the top of the power pyramid, and we have no effective mechanism to balance human well-being against it That's a succinct analysis of the root cause of many problems today, and it helpfully points towards some patches that would address the problems directly. Firstly, the link between money and political power could be severed by having publicly funded elections and limits on political advertising (which might require a narrowly-targeted constitutional amendment[0] in the US). Secondly, the fact that money creates power is not a problem for human well-being if everyone has a similar amount of money (assuming that having power ensures well-being). Progressive taxation already exists in much of the world, but some countries go a step further with a wealth tax. I would advocate for a wealth tax which makes millionaires pay an amount in tax each year which is an equivalent percentage of their net worth as the amount paid by the median tax payer as a percentage of their net worth (to whom the wealth tax would not apply). [0] https://campaignfinancereform.org/explanation https://campaignfinancereform.org/explanation