3 ms·
You can think of every business as harnessing some sort of "natural resource" and generating value from it by transforming to something more usable and/or selli
by munificent 4y ago
You can think of every business as harnessing some sort of "natural resource" and generating value from it by transforming to something more usable and/or selling it. At its core, almost every business is:
1. Acquire resource.
2. Transform or make it into something more usable.
3. Sell it to customers.
All businesses are directly incentivized to have as wide and efficient of a pipe for sucking up the raw materials they build products out of. Fishing boats want to use the biggest nets regardless of bycatch. Mines want to level the whole mountain regardless of what lives on it. Farmers want crop growing on every square inch of the field regardless of biodiversity. You get the idea.
This is not out of any deliberate malice, it's just an emergent property of how the system works. If you have a bunch of companies making widgets out of blobstuff, the company that can get the most blobstuff the cheapest wins.
And, as purchasers of widgets, we benefit from the system and tacitly support it by participating.
For ad-driven tech companies, the natural resource they acquire is human attention. They are structurally incentivized to acquire as much as they can, as cheaply as they can, for as long as they can.
One of the "obstacles" to harvesting human attention which can be then sold to advertisers is that those pesky humans would prefer to place their attention elsewhere. Given that, tech companies are always going to be pushing the boundaries of consent. It's not a strictly zero-sum game, because sometimes humans actually do want to consume ads. But as the amount of attention being sucked up by companies increases and as people get reasonably more and more covetous of their own attention, that game gets less non-zero over time.
- jacquesm 4y ago> This is not out of any deliberate malice Having seen quite a few instances of deliberate malice I beg to differ. It is out of deliberate malice, though there may be a couple of cases where it is an emergent thing. The vast majority of these companies are aware of it, won't change their ways and have a hundred different ways to rationalize their illegal behavior.
- munificent 4y agoYou and I may have different definitions of "malice". I define malice as deliberately harming someone without attaining an equal or greater benefit in return. Malice is setting someone's car on fire. Stealing someone's car is selfish and immoral, but not malicious in my definition.
- jacquesm 4y agoI just use the dictionary definition, it makes things easier: "Malice definition, desire to inflict injury, harm, or suffering on another, either because of a hostile impulse or out of deep-seated meanness" The examples I've seen check all the boxes. They don't even see end users of these services as people, just as a potential source of revenues.
- munificent 4y agoThat definition aligns with my own. Note that the definition says that the "desire"—the intent—is the injury or harm itself. It's not malice if you steal someone's car because the point isn't to make them feel bad, the point is to acquire a car. I don't consider depersonalization to imply malice either. Depersonalization can make it easier to maliciously harm someone, but seeing a user as a potential source of revenue isn't malice. The intent isn't to harm them at all, the intent is to generate revenue. The harm is incidental.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]