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Silicon Values
- SQueeeeeL 4y ago>At the beginning of the book, York points to a 1946 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Marsh v. Alabama, which held that private entities can become sufficiently large and public to require them to be subject to the same Constitutional constraints as government entities. We actually live beyond a time where this is possible. The political conditions of the US have basically deteriorated to where any meaningful regulation of corporations can't really happen because of the changing laws around how corporate contributions to political campaigns work. It actively hurts whichever political party attempts to regulate (by reducing finical contributions/increasing them to the other party or rivals in primaries who "stay in their lane".) The only group who benefits from regulation are individuals who live in the country, which really isn't enough to get laws passed.
- CartyBoston 4y agoI agree with your assessment as of today, we can accomplish some amazing things by electing different leaders over time though. I read this as a call to activism.
- whatshisface 4y agoIf contributions to both parties get reduced equally, what's the issue?
- jmeister 4y agoThis is wrong and out-of-date for multiple reasons. 1. Corporate spending in politics has had negligible impact after Citizens United: https://www.nber.org/papers/w30352 https://www.nber.org/papers/w30352 2. These days, the ostensibly pro-business party(GOP) gets more of its money from individuals and SME donors than the Democratic party. Your real problem is public opinion itself. The public in America simply trusts corporations over government institutions(except maybe the military). David Shor has great(but damning for progressives) analyses of this phenomenon.
- jacobolus 4y agoHint: when you say “Democrat party” rather than "Democratic Party" you are giving away your game too easily. This is what GOP partisans call the party as an intentional slight. The only ordinary people I ever hear use this name are those who habitually watch Fox News.
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- jefftk 4y agoContext and history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democrat_Party_(epithet) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democrat_Party_(epithet)
- jmeister 4y agoI didn’t know the history behind the pejorative usage. Thanks for pointing out. EDIT: I'm a recentish immigrant, so help me out with this inconsistency: Why Democrats and not Democratics? Why Republicans and not Republics?
- ad404b8a372f2b9 4y agoThere is no game to be given away, this is not sports and these are not teams to be cheered for or jeered against. The modern version of the Godwin's law is people bringing up dog-whistling in a conversation.
- wpietri 4y ago> meaningful regulation of corporations can't really happen Isn't that overstating the case? I agree corporate lobbyists have an outsized and often harmful impact. But just recently we have seen California moving toward ending sales of gasoline-powered cars. Or at the federal level, greenhouse gasses are now legally a pollutant that the EPA can regulate. With just one more Democratic senator, we would have seen the end of the carried-interest loophole. And organized labor, which serves as an important check on corporate power, has been on the rise, in part due to Federal support. I'll also note that places like Facebook, although not yet particularly regulated, are running scared from a lot of proposed legislation, and so are increasing transparency and reducing harm in hopes of heading it off. That too checks corporate power, and is a strong sign that they don't see themselves as untouchable. Personally, although the challenges are large, I think there's a fair bit of cause for optimism.
- tablespoon 4y ago> The political conditions of the US have basically deteriorated to where any meaningful regulation of corporations can't really happen because of the changing laws around how corporate contributions to political campaigns work. It's also probably worth drawing distinctions around the different meanings of "corporate." The sense of "large for-profit, limited liability business entity" has eclipsed all other meanings, which is a shame.
- spamizbad 4y agoI actually think the biggest hurdle won't be political obstacles but judicial ones. The courts have been reshaped to be extremely deferential to the interests of business/capital. And these court decisions cannot be narrowly interpreted enough to say "These laws apply to Twitter (a website the vast majority of Americans do NOT use), but cannot apply to Walmart (A business a majority of Americans do utilize)"
- fintechjock 4y ago> The political conditions of the US have basically deteriorated to where any meaningful regulation of corporations can't really happen because of the changing laws around how corporate contributions to political campaigns work. I’ve run a US Senate campaign. We raised tens of millions of dollars, and I can confidently say that corporate donations made no impact in any policy decisions - on the campaign or the official side. That extends to individual donations as well. The caps are ~$10,000 per couple. Considering the cost of a federal campaign, no person or corporation can buy a campaign when costs are in the tens of millions and contribution caps are in the thousands.
- bovermyer 4y agoI wonder if the takeaway here is that we should be less global and more local in all of our interactions with each other. If one of the problems here is that the one-size-fits-all approach is dangerous and counterproductive in social networks, then it seems an experiment in local-only networks is worth investigating.
- RichardCNormos 4y ago> an experiment in local-only networks is worth investigating. That's what church is. The experiment has been successful for at least 2,000 years.
- Eupraxias 4y agoIt's a good model, and more active church communities would likely be a net positive for society. But the model does come with some nasty side-effects, not the least of which is a required subscription to the invisible-friend belief service.
- 082349872349872 4y agoI understand some Unitarians only ask of their congregants that they believe in at most one god. Edit: upon reflection, the side-effects are probably contained in the etymology of the english adjective 'parochial'
- CharlesW 4y agoAs a former Catholic, subscription authentication is not strict. It's also apparently not difficult to get admin privileges — one of the priests teaching at my tiny high school was gay, and the pastors of both churches in my small midwestern town were eventually discovered to have been uncomfortably handy with children. In the faith, the joke is that all Catholics are "à la carte Catholics" to some degree or another. Many will even dismiss papal ex-cathedra statements that they don't like, even though papal infallibility is Catholic dogma.
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- Bakary 4y agoI often have periods of anglosphere fatigue where hearing about the same values, debates, and cultural norms every day starts to take its toll. That's why learning languages is so psychologically helpful.
- Cyberdog 4y agoAre you saying all Anglophones have the same values and norms? That's an odd take. I mean, foreign language learning is great and I'd definitely encourage people to do it, but if your true goal is just to break out of whatever echo chamber of ideas you find yourself in, there's easier ways to go about it.
- Bakary 4y agoYes and no. I'm familiar enough with the anglosphere that I could spend hours talking about the cultural nuances between some of its component regions. At the same time, there are broad overall patterns that are hard to escape, to the point where the easier echo chamber escape you describe doesn't quite cut it. One analogy would be the 20th century. There are many ideologies and cultural movements that clashed against each other during that time, but it's still possible to develop a sense of fatigue about those events and the corresponding ideas, even if these ideas are at odds with each other in some major ways. In both cases, it's probably easier to conceptualize if you aren't originally anglophone or didn't live most of your life during the 1900's.
- burlesona 4y agoThe author asks us to consider if social media is so large it should be a state regulated entity, then concludes with an implicit argument for decentralization, or perhaps more specifically anti-trust. So we have two mental models: (1) ubiquitous social media like YouTube is so large and important that it has become a public service, or (2) ubiquitous social media like YouTube is so large and dominant that it has become a monopoly. The weird part about the "public service" argument is that it's hard to say I would ever want tax dollars funding "video distribution," while I don't have those qualms around distributing water and electricity. Content feels different to me. But maybe future generations will look back on that and laugh. The weird part about the monopoly argument is that the barriers to entry for video hosting and distribution are low, and there are many different social media platforms, so the only thing YouTube has a monopoly on is... being YouTube. But perhaps that's enough? Ultimately I'm more sympathetic to the anti-trust argument, that we should take action to break up mega platforms (although I'm not sure what that action should be). What has more appeal to me personally is establishing a Constitutional Right to Privacy, then apply that right to ban surveillance capitalism. (US-centric framing, sorry; I would advocate all democracies adopt such a right.) Such a right would mostly break up social media, with the side effect being an unknown degree of harm to online platforms in general since it's pretty hard to operate the server-client model without tracking your clients. But we could work around that, perhaps with local-first software, or by common-sense provisions like the idea that a store can keep a record of your purchases, it just can't share that record with others. There's no obvious easy solution here, but this is a big society-shaking problem so I think there's no doubt we will take steps to solve it, the only question is which path will we choose, and how will it work out in the end?
- CharlesW 4y ago> The weird part about the monopoly argument is that the barriers to entry for video hosting and distribution are low… They're low for Google, but prohibitively high for any potential competitors. To me, this supports the argument that YouTube is a monopoly. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/04/cheaper-bandwidth-or-bust-how-google-saved-youtube/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/04/cheaper-bandwidth-or... "Remember YouTube's $2 million-a-month bandwidth bill before the Google acquisition? While it wasn't an overnight transition, apply Google's data center expertise, and this cost drops to about $666,000 a month."
- kareemsabri 4y ago> But platforms like Rumble which trumpet their free speech bonafides are missing the point: moderation is good, normal, and reinforces free speech principles. It is right for platform owners to decide the range of permissible posts. This is a very Canadian take.
- JacobThreeThree 4y agoDo people think that Rumble doesn't have a moderation policy and moderation team? https://rumble.com/s/terms#policies https://rumble.com/s/terms#policies
- decebalus1 4y agoI find it funny when people who spend most of their waking hours under a de facto totalitarian leadership (the workspace) expect that companies extend the same rights to their userbase as the US constitution.
- kareemsabri 4y agoI don't. I wouldn't consider most workplaces I've been in totalitarian - though maybe you've lived in some pretty nice totalitarian countries I'm not aware of. But I also don't see why customers shouldn't demand what they care about from companies.
- thundergolfer 4y agoCheck out Philosopher Elizabeth Anderson and her work on workplace democracy for more on how modern corporations are like dictatorships and at least certainly anti-democratic. Her New Yorker profile is very good, for an intro.
- kareemsabri 4y agoI don't think they're all that democratic. But there's a world of difference between democratic, which itself has degrees, and being totalitarian.
- AlexandrB 4y ago> The problem is that I should not be able to find so many similarities in the use of technology as a form of soft power, and certainly not for spying, between a democratic nation and an authoritarian one. This sums up my feelings nicely. Western governments are quietly outsourcing surveillance to private companies. "Social credit" as a formal system may be limited to China, but between government, insurers, and employers using data from data brokers to make decisions about people in the west, we're not far from building our own ad-hoc version.
- peteradio 4y agoA difference is that in a market driven economy it may turn out to be a losing strategy (fingers crossed).
- Cyberdog 4y agoSadly, government behavior is rarely reigned in by the market.
- paulryanrogers 4y agoAs it should be? Would we rather the market controls the government? Or the market have a monopoly on violence?
- Cyberdog 4y agoI would prefer if the government were subject to the same laws of nature as reality, yes.
- paulryanrogers 4y agoMaybe I was unclear. By market I imagine corporations which constitute the market. Those amoral entities concerned with profit above all else. I am in favor of governments ruled by representatives elected by the people. Regulating markets to ensure healthy competition, without collusion or corruption. Not sure where the laws of nature fit into the picture. Unless you subscribe to the view that might makes right.
- yazzku 4y agoIt certainly does feel that The Rest of the World currently must choose between one empire's surveillance machine or another's. You point out that many of TikTok's employees come from Chinese state media, but many higher-ups in Silicon Valley similarly come from CIA or defense. The big platforms are an unofficial extension of government to exert power and control. > The question of how to apply more local customs and behaviours to a global platform is, I believe, the defining challenge of the next decade in tech. Government involvement aside, banning targeted advertising could be a start. Twitter and Facebook and others are centralized shit shows primarily because that maximizes their advertising revenue.
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- simonebrunozzi 4y agoEven better: Pixar/Disney movies are so American. I lived in the US for ~9 years, and before and since I have been in Europe. I can totally sense this, and it's almost annoying. I wish the Pixar/Disney teams would move to another place for 1-2 years, then produce a few animated movies with that new perspective.