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This is a good example of why you want to interrogate the urge to be contrarian and ask whether it’s leading you into a cognitive pitfall. While it’s true that
by acdha 1y ago
This is a good example of why you want to interrogate the urge to be contrarian and ask whether it’s leading you into a cognitive pitfall. While it’s true that there is an element of consumer choose, that has to be seen in the light of the respective power gradients and knowledge - otherwise you’re like the tobacco companies arguing that people just love the taste or oil companies arguing that Americans don’t care about climate change and just love driving everywhere, ignoring the enormous amounts of money spent promoting that culture and removing competing options. The average millennial sure used Uber and AirBnB a lot - and probably believed that prices were lower due to efficiency rather than VCs subsidies trying to run competitors out of the market. Social sites like Facebook spent billions of dollars trying to make their products more addictive – I know neuroscientists who were recruited for that specific goal – only to struggle with finding enough new content to keep people seeing ads, I have to assign most of the blame to the people who intentionally built that system rather than the people who fell into it not realizing that their trust was misplaced.
- theahura 1y agoEh, I care less about blame and more about what is to be done about the situation. I don't think we can expect the platforms to fix issues with consumer behavior, both because they aren't incentivized to and because they immediately lose market share to less scrupulous actors. The government needs to act to break coordination problems, much like they did to reduce smoking
- acdha 1y agoThat’s why I reject the diffusion of responsibility called for in that post. “We” didn’t do this, a few executives at certain big companies did, and the way to fix it is by removing their ability to do so unilaterally without consequences.