4 ms·
Every time we get better at things like this, all the power tends to stay with organizations, and individual people are lucky if they get anything out of it. A
by wharvle 3y ago
Every time we get better at things like this, all the power tends to stay with organizations, and individual people are lucky if they get anything out of it.
Amazon, Wal-Mart, MacDonalds, giant banks, insurers, et c., analyze their competition, suppliers, and consumers in great detail with computer data and models. Where’s the widespread automated buyer’s agent for consumers, to balance that power so strongly that it shoves profit margins the other direction, so it’s not just megacorps pushing ever closer to some absolute limit of the last tenth of a cent they can wring out of us? Fucking nowhere, they’d never allow that kind of access to the data we’d need, the best we get is “CamelCamelCamel”, not some Siri-alike we can casually tell to go find the best price/quality intersection on the market for [product] and have that show up a couple days later.
And we’ll never get it. Just an ever-tightening noose of perfect price discrimination and risk calculation that goes only one way. Short of legislating radical levels of availability (and reliability and consistency—standards and minimums) for price and product information, anyway, and I’m pretty sure that’s on nobody’s radar.
- zmgsabst 3y agoScraping is legal; as are assistive technologies. What’s lacking is the collective willpower to develop social organizations, which could orchestrate and fund such efforts. There’s a complete lack of organization among the public. The problem is neither technical nor legislative: people just don’t care to, and are happier accepting the status quo.
- garrisonhh 3y agoPeople don't have the time, money, or energy. And they will continue to lose all three until there is no option but to figure out collective organisation
- nehal3m 3y agoIt definitely feels deliberate and yeah it is a feedback loop.
- woleium 3y agoI hold some hope that it’s just an unexpected outcome of a complex system. otoh, that would male it more difficult to remedy.
- anigbrowl 3y agoPreferential attachment is a natural phenomenon, but corporations have gotten really good at exploiting it. This is one reason I favor just breaking up businesses beyonda. certain size. The ostensible consumer benefits of scale are outweighed by the 2nd order costs of market distortions. Efficiency is nice but not worth the combination of rent-seeking and adversarial zero-sum strategies.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- wegfawefgawefg 3y agoExcept on LinkedIn apparentlt.
- otikik 3y agoSeize the means of computation
- Aerbil313 3y agoAnd here I am just watching Kaczynski’s predictions all the way back at 1970 become truer with the decade. Technology clashes with human autonomy. It’s even argued that the path of technological progress would not change even if you there were aliens, AI bots, any entity with the instinct of self-preservation, intelligence and replication. The mechanisms of the macro-system comprised of human biology + technology are explained in his book Anti-Tech Revolution in great detail. It was a hard and bitter conclusion to come as a software dev, but I can never again unsee the fact that all technology is inherently evil. For a shorter but enlightening read, see his original manifesto “Industrial Society And Its Future”: https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unabomber/manifesto.text.htm https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unab...
- fifteen1506 3y agoCan I read that without getting on a watchlist somewhere?
- woleium 3y agoClever and funny. This is why i like HN.
- anigbrowl 3y agoIT's not so hard to find, and I would really recommend it. I don't agree with all of Kacyzinski's ideas, and quite a few of his fans are unhinged, but he was a unique individual whose written work is worth engaging with. Electronic media also saves you the worry of opening a package.