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Not sure that regulatory capture explains the poor quality of digital goods and how people value them. I think it's that cargo cults (what we have) are antithet
by nonrandomstring 2y ago
Not sure that regulatory capture explains the poor quality of digital
goods and how people value them. I think it's that cargo cults (what
we have) are antithetical to true technological societies (which is
what we say we want)
A fault I see in Bruce Schneier's article, and the general hypothesis
of "frame/baseline shifting" - it's not that people have been
conditioned or forgotten the value of privacy, but that we're looking
at the world through ever smaller lenses. The story in the article is
that science is guilty of that too. The decline has been around
education and perspective in general, not just attitudes to a small
issue like "privacy". We thought the internet would widen our
scope. It narrowed it.
In the UK we have a great travel and culture show by Romesh
Ranganathan. (I highly recommend it, so get on your VPN to watch BBC
or find it on the torrents). It will cheer you up [0]. He's a funny
guy. But also the cultural vista is breath-taking. Looking at life in
central Africa it's great to be reminded of the diversity of
humankind. Watch for the little things - like a whole bus queue of
people, none of whom are on mobile phones.
What the Internet promised - the great "conversation of mankind" -
never emerged. Instead we got cat memes and social control media that
forced people into ever smaller parochial silos. HN is no different.
Here it's cool to have a bleak outlook on humanity and technology.
"Oh it's too late... we're doomed... oh woe is me!" C'mon
hackers... what happened to the joy of shaping the world? :)
Bruce Schneier appeals to a macro systems theory metaphor, and
mentions Daniel Pauly [1]. But he neglects some of the more profound
lessons that Forrester, Meadows and actually Norbert Weiner gave us
about feedback and the empty dream of cybernetic governance. Nothing
as big as humanity will fit in bottle that small unless you're willing
to destroy it in the process. And what you're destroying is the very
innovative base that gave you the technology in the first place. This
is why they should teach history, geography and other cultures in
schools.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romesh_Ranganathan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romesh_Ranganathan
[1] https://oceans.ubc.ca/2023/05/19/daniel-pauly/ https://oceans.ubc.ca/2023/05/19/daniel-pauly/
- classified 2y agoNorbert Wiener https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norbert_Wiener https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norbert_Wiener Otherwise, I completely agree.
- nonrandomstring 2y agoOuch. Thanks.
- whilenot-dev 2y ago> We thought the internet would widen our scope. It narrowed it. > What the Internet promised - the great "conversation of mankind" - never emerged. Instead we got cat memes and social control media that forced people into ever smaller parochial silos. The internet economy enabled browsing on a global scale and, because no kind of agency could keep up with its development speed, pushed everything into an "on demand" culture - what evolved with it is the higher responsibility for consumers. I feel the state of economy before the internet was on a scale of "everything is possible" (in the western hemisphere at least), only to discover years later that "our greed has consequences we just couldn't see before". Our cognitive load feels higher than ever to just cover the basics of survival and not get screwed over, or screw someone else over, constantly. > This is why they should teach history, geography and other cultures in schools. I think system thinking should become a thing in schools early on too. Every defined system is a mere conceptual view with artificial boundaries - a system without boundaries isn't a system, but a universe. It's good to enable new resources to think about new systems, or rethink existing systems, but we also should discuss the boundaries required for its concept to make any sense. I feel that this understanding gets sometimes lost, and its naivety gets regretfully relabeled as "innovation".
- soco 2y agoIn a MBA-led economy anything which doesn't create immediate monetary value gets pushed aside - humanities and education in general, for instance. And before somebody jumps: we did have innovation before this just as well.
- nonrandomstring 2y ago> MBA-led There are no "leaders" with MBAs
- nonrandomstring 2y ago> we also should discuss the boundaries required for its concept to make any sense. I feel that this understanding gets sometimes lost, and its naivety gets regretfully relabeled as "innovation". Good observation. It gets blamed on globalism, liberalism, post-modernism, capitalism, and a bunch of other things, but somehow we got the wrong idea that all boundaries are bad. Boundaries must be broken! I think that came from the language of science and technology. We made "Smashing barriers!" a synonym for progress. But it is a childish, iconoclastic and directionless notion of "progress", for its own sake. Psychologically at least, a lack of boundaries is a kind of madness, it's disinhibited, intrusive, lacking self-control - and to the extent there's a political theory of mind it leads to wars and internal unrest. We raised "connectedness" to supernatural hoodoo, but connectedness for it's own sake is a catastrophe to systems. It violates the principles of modularity, decoupling and appropriate cohesion.
- TheRealDunkirk 2y ago> what happened to the joy of shaping the world? We were vastly outnumbered and overwhelmed by sociopaths who exploited the tools to make our lives better by capturing everything of value in the market, and subsequently enshittifying it. Our cynicism has been well earned and deserved.
- nonrandomstring 2y agoYou misheard the reveille for the sound of the retreat. Can't wear cynicism on your chest with pride can you? Take back what's yours.