We imported a Member of European Parliament, from a place with a sclerotic and insignificant tech industry, to tell us how to sabotage our robust and awesome tech industry. No thanks!
Will our tech industry in Silicon Valley remain awesome, however? I've been working in Silicon Valley for nearly a decade, and it seems to me that power in our industry within the past decade has consolidated to a small handful of companies. I'm hearing less these days about startups disrupting incumbents, and I'm hearing more about incumbents entrenching their gains. Even when it comes to career choices, it seems these days that more young people are opting for the Leetcode grind in hopes to join a FAANG or another high-paying Silicon Valley firm instead of starting a company. After all, it's hard to start a company in a garage when renting a home with a garage is prohibitively expensive for many people.
My concern is that Silicon Valley could end up becoming a place where it's all about entrenched incumbents, where it would be too difficult for startups and small businesses to compete, and where those who'd otherwise be willing and ready to compete against the incumbents are stymied by extremely high housing prices that discourage risk-taking, not to mention regulatory capture from the incumbents. Silicon Valley could morph into a place that stifles innovation instead of encourages it.
While I'm on this topic, it also seems to me that Silicon Valley collectively is losing the social goodwill it once had. I remember a decade ago people outside of the tech industry being very excited when they heard of one of their friends getting a job at a company like Google or Facebook. Google was still seen as one of the "good guys," and Facebook was still seen as a tool people loved that allowed them to connect with their friends and family. Yes, there was discontent in some parts of the Bay Area about gentrification fueled by an influx of tech residents combined with long-standing restrictions on housing development, but the broader society still thought highly of the tech industry and Silicon Valley in particular. Today that goodwill has been eroded. There are many people who don't think highly of the current generation of tech leaders; Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos, and Sam Altman seem to bring out different emotions than Steve Jobs and Bill Gates did during their heydays (and I know Jobs and Gates had their detractors).
The difference, though, between Silicon Valley today and Silicon Valley in the past, however, is that Silicon Valley is a deeper part of our everyday lives today than it was in the past. The tech industry is bigger than personal computers and e-commerce; the tech industry today plays a major part of our lives. Tech has become vital infrastructure, much like how energy and telecommunication companies are. Maybe in the early days of electrification and telecommunications companies like PG&E and AT&T were better regarded, but eventually as these companies played an increasingly integral part of peoples' lives, these companies exploited this fact, and thus they lost their social goodwill. I can also think about how cars in American society undergone a transformation from being seen as a liberating force to being seen by some as an oppressive force (e.g., facilitating urban sprawl, car-dependent commuting, soul-crushing traffic congestion, etc.). Perhaps the tech industry has entered this life cycle, but I could definitely be wrong.
The problem is deeper than that. Software has completely eroded property rights. I believe someone has coined the term "techno feudalism". Corporations own the software and us serfs merely lease it.
Now there are tons of devices running Linux, for which you may be able to see the source code, but are unable to modify it, for ostensibly "security" reasons.
> Software has completely eroded property rights. I believe someone has coined the term "techno feudalism". Corporations own the software and us serfs merely lease it.
I think that's reversed - that's property rights being stronger than ever. "Own things forever and just rent them out" is NOT a weak formulation of property rights from the point of view of the producers of those things.
I didn't mention the housing market? I was talking about anyone who produces goods (digital or physical).
There's not an inherent privilege of purchasing over renting in property rights. In either case you're paying for something, it's just a different slice of that something. They're different transactions that can benefit the different parties different ways in different situations. But if technological development lets the owner get the financial rewards of selling through "licensing" that's hardly a reduction in the owner's rights - and it's hard to make a "pro-strong-property-rights" argument that's based in "people should be forced to sell on the buyer's terms, not their own."
> There's not an inherent privilege of purchasing over renting in property rights. In either case you're paying for something, it's just a different slice of that something
I don't think there's anything inherently right about renting or owning.
Rather, it's one of the things we need to learn about and decide which is better for our societies.
Right now, we are far into testing the "renting" side, especially when it comes to housing and software, and it's very clear that, at least as currently implemented, this is creating an unhealthy society with massive wealth inequality.
I don't have an answer to this, but the only people I see arguing for the status quo are the very few who have benefited from it - landlords, politicians, company execs etc. Or at least people who aspire to join those classes.
If you do find yourself arguing for it, please ask yourself whether you're doing it for selfish reasons rather than looking beyond yourself.
I think the problem is not with renting but with letting owners hoard property (real estate or other) to profit from renting them out en masse, depriving others from ownership options. Also owners considering their property as something to do with as they want (exploit) rather than a duty of care. Best of both worlds for them: e.g. charge each month for software to pay for "ongoing development" and spend it on shareholders and/or features for growth but cut costs on support and maintenance... Or you know, rent out a moldy, drafty studio to a desperate intern who must move to Paris to work and doesn't have rich parents.
Maybe it proves your point that I'm technically a landlord now, but only to help out a neighbour so they could stay in the area for cheap, because they needed to downsize, approached me and we agreed on a very low price. I wasn't initially planning on renting it out because it needed some upfront work to be liveable, which might be even more selfish considering the housing shortage where i live...
>from the point of view of the producers of those things.
Fundamentally that's the question. Do we want a society from the perspective of "the producers" or the greater population?
Not trying to put words in OP's mouth, but I think the general idea is that software has allowed "the producers" to shrink in number and grow in power, turning independent farmers into serfs if you will. Should that cause us to reevaluate the previous question?
> Do we want a society from the perspective of "the producers" or the greater population?
Look at what the right wing US party always runs on - cutting taxes for "job creators", "running the government like a business", and bail outs for Wall Street.
At least half of this country fantasies about being at the beck and call of "the producers" of things. Fanboys of Elon Musk squeal if he interacts with them on Twitter.
You don't. The average person ought to do simple work and produce children, select few of which will have talent and integrity. These few have and always will make all the difference.
> I think the reality is most people are ok with not owning things.
> By removing ownership from the product offering the seller can reduce the price.
The price of ownership is greater than the price of licensing, as it comes with additional rights and privileges than licensing.
If a product or good is only offered and priced without ownership, how can you say that people "are ok with" not utilizing an option that's not provided to them? They cannot purchase ownership, by what means could they experience the difference?
The products you use as examples were wildly successful under an ownership paradigm, what says that Photoshop or N64 games would have been somehow better if they were licensed goods?
I agree "The price of ownership is greater than the price of licensing, as it comes with additional rights and privileges than licensing." That's why it was more expensive to purchase a product with ownership rights.
The reason I say people are ok with it is because the companies who didn't switch to a licensing model and kept their old prices either are no longer around or had to switch to a licensing model in order to stay competitive. If people were ok paying higher prices for the benefit of ownership then that's what we would see in the market today.
few companies actually offer products that you can just pay for. Its pretty rare and usually extremely celebrated when it happens. When it comes to things like housing and cars, very few people can buy a home and have to rent or take out gigantic loans. I wouldn't read this as "people are okay with not owning things" so much as "what choice is there?" and thats at the root of the problem. Monopolies and collusion have destroyed choice and competition which is supposedly the root of capitalism and neo-liberalism.
In your videogame example, there was no change in the concept of ownership between Nintendo 64 games and Playstation 5 games. If you have the physical media and the console, you can play the game.
Although Nintendo 64 tried to push the envelope in what consumers would pay, the price of video games on the mainstream consoles has stayed in the $50-$75 since at least 1985.
I don’t have a PS5 but my Xbox (my first one ever) is an absolute nightmare to play, even if I have the physical media. Still demands an internet connection. Still demands updates before I play. Typically I would expect to wait 2+ hours before I’m allowed to play a game I have on physical media. Often the estimated time is so long I just give up and don’t play. I let it update and then forget about it. Come back a week later and it says my system is out of date and needs an update before I play.
Most consoles and computers today don't even have a way to insert discs. You have to download the game which means you can't share or sell the game when you're done. That's why the price is lower. You license the software rather than own a copy. Also, $75 in 1985 is the equivalent of $224 today so even though the number has stayed the same the real cost is much lower now.
The CPI was already built into the discussion (the original discussion was inflation--CPI adjusted--prices, and this branch was about a comment that indicated that wages had not kept price with inflation) and the housing price thing just indicates that buying a house has gotten more expensive even adjusting for inflation, which is true but way afield of the discussion of game prices.
> This was a huge barrier of entry for a lot of people who now have the ability to afford it and can make a living using it. Today photoshop is $9.99 per month
It wasn’t though. People learned photoshop on a pirated copy and used that to make art that Adobe didn’t care about. Companies are the ones who paid the $1000/seat license for their professional designers.
> I think the reality is most people are ok with not owning things. Otherwise, they wouldn't agree to licensing software from companies.
This is such a huge hand-waving blanket statement that I apologize in advance for my response.
The CAD shop I worked at was doing fine on R14 for YEARS and specialized apps/etc with hardware dongles until everyone got onto the 'SaaS' or 'Subscription' mode. And frankly, the "choice" our shop had more than once was 'our customer signed a deal to use this so we have to buy it'. What was worse was they did that twice in one year, and the second product cost as much per seat/year as the first product cost FOR OUR WHOLE TEAM per year.
> Another example is video games. The average Nintendo 64 game used to be $75.99 in 1997 which is $150 in today's dollars. Today the average PS5 game price is $70. That's half the price.
You're comparing apples to oranges there. Heck, even back then, a -huge- benefit of the PS and Saturn was that production costs for discs were -cheap-. Something like 3$ including case and sleeve. Compare to N64 carts which as far as I can understand would cost somewhere between 15-30$ depending on size of ROM. Neither of those factor in actual 'distribution' costs (i.e. shipping to retailer) but I know which format was lighter/smaller... Also PS1 'greatest hits' were the closest we had to steam sales at the time.
> By removing ownership from the product offering the seller can reduce the price.
Says every SaaS that gives a nice intro contract that will even give a nice first contract, knowing that by renewal the buyer will be more at their mercy with too much pain involved to 'get away' from ever-increasing prices... Low-Code tools are really good at this strategy lol.
And how many games do people have to subscribe to PSN to use? How many people have to pay for internet to use their game? How many games have microtransactions or DLC? How about a season pass? How about all of the editions they have? What's the cost of a controller? Does a console come with one or two? How many times do you have to buy a game because backward compatibility doesn't exist?
I'm not a big gamer and I realize some (maybe most) of these are not required, but let's not act like the gaming industry is surviving off the base price of a game like in the 90s.
It's the producer of the software that has the property rights, not the user.
If I own a piece of land, I can charge people to visit it, but I don't give up my property rights to do so. We don't see that as an "erosion" of property rights but rather the opposite.
Not much software is really all that useful, let alone necessary, though. And only a little bit of that isn’t provided by one vendor or another as part of delivering whatever other actual service you were after (e.g. banking apps).
Property, that is, that didn’t exist prior to the wide use of software or SaaS platforms. Which begs the question, did the rights ever exist to be eroded in the first place?
It's just an unfortunate title by her editor, the article is interesting. Silicon Valley is about building new companies, not large incumbents manipulating the world.
> And of course, the other real issue, especially in the U.S., is the capability of the power grids. In the Netherlands, which is an advanced economy, as in the U.S. and the U.K., we’ve already seen reports that the grids are functioning at near-emergency levels: code red. The grids are stretched to their limits. They break down and outages are more frequent. And yet there are many data centers in the pipeline that were agreed to years ago. When they come online in two or three years, we may face a wave of disaster.
I keep a document called "Timed Predictions," so I can check back on bold predictions such as these.
I'm adding an entry for this. In a few years, I'll evaluate whether we experience "a wave of disaster" due to overtaxed energy grids in 2026-2027.
I've added claims from a wide gamut of people (some just random Internet users), but here are a few:
2021-10-02 (did not come true): "I would not be surprised if Apple completely closes off the Mac ARM64 platform for “security” in the next few years. The option to boot third-party OSes seems like a short-term gimme to keep the pitchforks and torches at bay." -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28731406
2022-04-04 (we will soon see): "Unless we see big structural changes in the Democratic party's coalition, then the modal outcome for 2024 is Donald Trump winning a filibuster-proof trifecta with a minority of the vote." -- https://twitter.com/davidshor/status/1511028728381734912
2022-11-18 (did not come true): "I do not think Twitter will die, but it will go down in the next few days due to the World Cup and its overwhelming traffic. When it does, Musk will dedicate himself to bringing it back up, and boldly claim that his mission is to “keep Twitter standing.” In the background, he will realise that nobody wants to work for him, and that there is no path that involves him running (or even keeping) this website that resembles any kind of success." -- https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-fraudulent-king/
You are seeing the first two as "concluded"? Apple is known for playing long games, especially now that they need to be careful due to threats of regulation, and studies about long COVID take a long time - we really don't have enough research yet to be sure and we're barely 2 years out of the pandemic.
I'm holding my breath on both of those but I'm curious why you think otherwise.
For the first, the prediction was "in the next few years." If we take "a few" as three, that would bring us to 2024-10-02, which was earlier this month. It could still happen someday, but didn't in the time frame of this prediction.
For the second, "sooner than anyone can imagine" is admittedly not a specific time frame, but we're 2.5 years later and I haven't heard any news about long COVID lately, certainly nothing calling it a crisis. But this also could certainly change in the future.
The reason you don't hear any news about long covid is that it affects peoples brains, hearts, immunity, microbiome, organs, and employability. The hospitals do not attribute the rise of problems in these areas to long covid, so there is no news about long covid as the ultimate source of increases in childhood diabetes, the rise of autoimmune diseases, middle age heart attacks, a higher background death rate, decline in lifespan, availability of workers, etc. These are all reported as isolated mysterious facts that nobody understands. But just prior to the rises was a huge pandemic from a disease that causes long covid with many research reports of very long lasting damage to multiple systems in the body; maybe the cause is not so mysterious? Swiss Re the insurance company is certainly paying attention.
And the pandemic is not over, more people are getting long covid right now and it's not just the old people. The main fear is that this is a slow moving crisis where 5% of all people lose _some_ capability every year, including the capability of fighting off other infections, and also including those who are reinfected. It doesn't take long for that to have widespread effects and indeed effects are showing up and there are already economic consequences. The reason researchers were saying "sooner than anyone can imagine" is that this is an exponential effect and now that the CDC is no longer collecting data (and much of the world followed suite) it is difficult to predict with precision. However, like all exponential effects it will at some point start the steep part of the upward climb.
Great idea, please consider publishing it. I've often wanted to do something similar, and in reverse (that is, now that the outcome has happened, check predictions). Not to get too far afield but online discourse really undervalues success. It's almost as if people speak not because they are correct, but because people like hearing them speak.
Have you ever considered opening this up? Of course I can see it getting too big and but having multiple contributors could be useful, especially when hunting down sources. Or is anyone interested in starting an (at least partially) open version?
It's a little different in that it only publishes bets made directly on the site, but that also helps remove some of the ambiguity that otherwise would be inherent in trying to judge predictions made elsewhere.
I’ve seen users on Reddit use “remind me” bots for this kind of thing, so maybe you could use something similar? Future-dated blog posts with RSS/Atom notifications/feed subscriptions?
>I'm adding an entry for this. In a few years, I'll evaluate whether we experience "a wave of disaster" due to overtaxed energy grids in 2026-2027.
We have been experiencing overtaxed grids for decades now. Rolling black and brown outs happen every summer on a hot, cloudy, still day. The issue isn't big-tech, the issue is that we're living in a fantasy where we can keep the grid running with renewables and no sign of terawatt hour batteries.
I think you're battering round evidence to fit your own square hole. Batteries are coming on stream, and do not need to be TwH scale to provide incremental improvement and I don't personally think the outages are sheeted home to the rise of solar and wind alone. It's complicated.
I've worked as a quant for a power company and had more data than god about what was happening in a continent wide grid. The instabilities in the grid are caused by renewables turning on and off at the drop of a hat the whole network over. That's on top of the complete lack of any stable base load at night that comes with renewables.
I then build a continent wide physics based electrical network simulation down to the individual house. There is no way to keep the networks stable in the coming decades with more and more intermittent sources coming in.
Large heavy spinning shafts are the only thing that's kept us from catastrophic failures and pretty much no one knows or cares.
We're betting civilization on pixie dust and unicorn farts.
South Australia is going to find out. Synchronous condensers have been a thing since forever, batteries are moving into that space. Sure they started in FCAS but they now bid for some of the inertia stuff too. SA is of course connected to the Australian east coast grid and are securing supply from them, but they got islanded in a big storm, the gas fallback generators didn't work and they lost the grid. Now, they have built out for wind, solar and battery. They haven't had a significant fail yet. Those gas generators who failed, and who failed to do black start are in court over their contract.
Building out and running more syncons seems like a low bar.
I appreciate you work in the field. but, so do a bunch of people in the grid forming world who think it's entirely feasible to move beyond the base load model. Maybe they are all smoking pixie dust, but I think it's not clear you're right and they're wrong, because BOTH OF YOU have fucktonnes of experience and skin in the game, past and present.
As a random asker (ie me), why is your input here better than the people doing the planning for the Australian east coast grid?
Is the HCAIP funded by newspaper or TV companies, by any chance?
There are certainly good reasons to be concerned about tech companies, who are pretty much uniformly becoming politically active (the Facebook-Google-Amazon-Apple axis being an especial concern, they seem to be relatively politically homogenous). But the new is still strictly better than the old; the combination of radio/newspaper/TV produces an unreasonable amount of misinformation (and government officials, for that matter).
The energy issue is a joke. We have had a massive shift from the 90s to today where the political system was set to prioritise environmental concerns above energy security. Even if it materialises a lack of energy has nothing at all to do with tech companies.
And political fracturing looks like it is mostly due to demographic pressure. Better communication is more likely helping than harming - if nothing else now we hear about the genocides instead of them being quietly swept under the rug. Facebook doesn't cause genocide, racialists cause genocides.
Orthogonally related to the article, I think it gets to the deeper issue at hand with regulating technology:
The internet connects everyone and allows for free-flow of information, free-flow information is eroding people's trust.
We want free speech, but people use words to deceive and coerce. You can't make rules to stop this - people will always find ways around them.
Ken Thompson wrote "Reflections on Trusting Trust" in 1984 (fitting as it may be). The conclusion being that we can't rely on computers to build trust. But we need trust to live in a society.
It's human instinct trust one another. But falsehoods spread fast online, and after being fooled so many times, people are losing their natural trust in others.
What's the way forward? I'm curious what this crowd thinks.
I don't have a specific answer to this as I'm not a trained historian. However, didn't we see this with the invention of the printing press back 500+ years ago? That also dramatically increased knowledge distribution and probably lies and mistruths. How did society handle that?
A key difference was the lack of democracy. There was plenty of misinformation, but it didn't channel quite so directly to the levers of power.
That wasn't necessarily better. We put democracy in place for a reason. But there has been a shift in the societal basis that underlies democracy, and we'll be forced to come up with another set of solutions.
It's weird how people can recognize early versions of manmade things are usually primitive and need numerous iterations to get working at acceptable levels of optimality but when it comes to democracy there's some sort of a magical force hiding it from sight in this regard.
The scarcity of printing presses and costs associated in running them by definition made distribution a calculated financial endeavor. Cultivating a positive reputation would therefore be a valuable asset in order to reliably recoup costs via sales and/or retain patrons.
This form of gatekeeping has been eliminated with the zero cost of any person being able to publish their thoughts digitally and without review. Furthermore, misinformation and disinformation now has a financial incentive by way of "driving the clicks."
In short, not everyone's voice needs to be heard by all, especially when extremism is required in order to "stand out."
I've thought about this a lot too and I think about a few things:
- The barrier to creating and distributing content was higher (it still had to capture people's attention).
- We didn't have all the tools to artificially create content, just our imaginations.
I'm no doomer by any means, and I think it's useful to look back at history for clues as to how to manage it but it's hard to find clues when the situation is so different.
I still believe education and critical thinking are the best antidote for disinformation, but higher education in the US has continued to come under attack (and perhaps rightfully so with the costs rising extremely out of proportion to inflation).
> The barrier to creating and distributing content was higher.
The printing press lowered the barrier to distributing ideas. The internet lowered the barrier further.
In each case, there is a period of social turmoil as society "catches up". The Peasants' War, Müntzer, the Münster Rebellion, Matthys, Hoffman, and on and on are all events and products of the change in availability of printed word.
We developed social technologies to counter the faults exploited by increased information availability. "Don't believe everything you read," is a meme which acts against the bias exploited by highly available text. The invention of journals, newspapers, and citations all act in the same way.
We haven't developed enough new social technologies to counter the change in information availability. Our existing techniques aren't enough to hold tide and frankly, like all change, going back is never an option, but finding new ways to exist are.
Reputation is the usual solution. You build a community and you know who to trust, like humans have always done.
The early internet was mostly that (BBS, Usenet, forums). But on the modern internet we mostly consume random google sites & TikTok accounts that are probably bots.
FAANG has actively replaced following with algorithmic feeds because they're more profitable.
Anonymous reputation can turn on those who trust the reputable entity. Easy, though facile, examples are the romantic schemes used to defraud, more intricate are spies and so on.
If I can build reputation somewhere, I'm going to use the same account, but that account may not have my real name. Reputation incentivizes identity, but not necessarily association to a real identity.
I think trust and identity are fundamentally intertwined, for sure. I think it's also why trust can be easily gamed by posing as certain identity groups. It's a dark path taken to the extreme.
I just read supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg and one of the best take aways from it was to remind people that they have multiple identities that they hold dear, and some of them may be in conflict. It gets people to think more and not regress to knee-jerk beliefs they think they're supposed to hold based on their identity on a given topic.
That remains to be seen. Studies purporting to show the harms of social media are shaky at best. It could very well turn out to be more benign like TVs or violent video games (remember the pearl clutching around those in the early 2000s?).
The data supports your thesis, but in the same way a meth addict wants more meth imho. The algorithm is hitting a reward center (TikTok has put on a masterclass in this, for example).
I would be interested to see user preferences with regards to algorithm vs chronological feed when the cohort is on GLP-1 agonist of some sort (which inhibits malfunctioning reward center behavior, including alcohol, tobacco, and opioid addictions).
It’s what users are addicted to. I did that with TikTok first time I installed it. Just swipe swipe watch swipe. Those like 15-30 seconds hits are addictive as hell. I deleted my account after an hour and haven’t touched it since, except the occasional video a friends sends a link to. Their algo is way better than Twitter or Meta algos.
Since it's no longer political to mention Iraq: every major news organization lied about the war, they knew they lied about it and millions died. The only person to be held accountable for this was the one person to tell the truth: https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/phil-donahue-iraq-war
We can't solve the issue of truth through our current institutions because those institutions are rotten to the core. The best we can do is keep them from destroying the channels from which we can hear how badly they are fucking up and allow us to organize.
The algorithm has replaced following out of necessity. The following paradigm made sense when social media was something where you mainly connected with people you were friends with IRL and where media came from a small number of channels that could be browsed by one person (even this was already overwheling by the time cable hit hundreds of channels). There is simply no way to navigate the billions of pieces of content generated daily without an algorithm. There could be the exact thing you want out there, but how would you ever discover it?
Doesn't really undermine your point, but as a fun aside: Trusting Trust style attacks on compilers were (theoretically) solved by David Wheeler with "diverse double compiling".
Yes, good point. That's pretty similar to scientific falsifiability at least!
I think for topics that are not as easily provable as reproducible builds though, trust gets murky.
There was something else I read (can't find it now) that made a similar analogy for a web of trust.
A web of trust (e.g. PGP) will have de-facto authorities since there will be a tendency for more people to sign individuals presumed to be trustworthy based on their history. It follows that the system runs into issues if their key gets compromised or if a false individual is subject to a sybil attack, producing the illusion of trust. See also: github stars, cryptocurrency, social media follower counts.
...you can make rules to stop this? The Dominion election fraud was more or less cast out of mainstream discourse with commercial damages law. If you expand this a bit (ONLY A BIT) farther, you'd expect a roughly linear scale of results.
I think of how I lost trust and it's more along the lines of: "Wow, with all of this new information, I can see how institutions/experts/officials have been lying to me all along."
In other words, I "lost trust" in institutions, experts, officials etc., when I found the information on the web that I consider to be "the truth" which overrides what established organizations previously proffered to the me.
The Web did cause me to lose trust, but only because it made the actual truth available to me and made me realize how dishonest most people are.
There may be examples of this... A mechanic who overcharges you can be "found out" now by a customer who does some online research. Previously, this work would be accepted as is, but it is now (rightfully) questioned. The dishonesty was always there, but it's more readily discovered now.
Unpopular opinion: It's exhausting to be under the illusion I can fact check the world. There's so much freedom in having the faith to say "I trust you that I need those brake pads". If I get screwed for $200 it just means I have $200 less to spend on some other junk I don't need. The scammer won't survive in the long run.
True trust is earned. "Default trust" is not the same thing. But the two are often confused.
When trust is lost, it takes 10x, sometimes 100x more effort to regain it.
Sometimes, even with 100x the effort trust does not return.
These are Life 101 basics. Pretending these laws don't exist doesn't make them disappear.
From my perspective, the root problem is that institutions that want to be trusted - and traditionally were - don't want to make the effort to regain the trust they lost. The media and the government come to mind. Instead they waste energy shamelessly demanding to be trusted, which only widens the gap. They blame the violated, which only widens the gap.
And into that void, the nefarious has rushed in. Until the institutions embrace "true trust is earned" the nefarious will thrive in the gap.
I think earning trust often requires significant personal sacrifice. Institutions are made up of people, and I think that one of the outcomes of the web era is that it seems that fewer high talented folks find the motivation to do unglamorous, lower-remuneration jobs.
No pain. No gain. That too applies in the earned / sacrifice sense.
Trust is one of now corrupted words. It's current meaning is a Frankenstein knock off of the true meaning of the word. Other examples include journalism, and leadership (which have also fallen due to lack of sacrafic).
Yes, it's Orwellian. Normalized. But still Orwellian.
A bad actor with access to peoples private data from Facebook, Google, or Apple could probably blackmail a large fraction of politicians, globally. Someone with unchecked access to peoples private communications would have nearly unimaginable levels of power. It would also be fairly easy for these companies themselves to cover their tracks enough that it would be impossible to prove it wasn't a rogue employee or outside hacker acting alone.
We already had "the Fappening" when iCloud was compromised, but I feel if someone did something similar and kept the data private for blackmail purposes, we'd probably never hear about it.
Am I missing something here about how this wouldn't actually be possible? Frankly, I'd be surprised if it isn't already happening.
This is basically spelled out in the writings of Marx and Lenin. Same stuff over and over again. Corporate monopolies accrue incredible undemocratic power. They must be owned by the people and their workers.
capitalist countries literally starved other countries outside the imperial core. gaza is in famine today to satisfy the lust for control of world markets.
churchill starved india. the list goes on.
the only genocide i can think of by a nominally socialist govt was the cambodian genocide, backed by the US and China, and the ppl in charge were really weird and not marxist. they were rigid idealists afaik. that genocide was halted by vietnamese marxists.
I think this "problem" stems directly from the fact that the geographic model of governments is extremely unsuited for governing on the internet.
In times past, Governments could e.g. regulate the quality of coke, control election misinformation or forbid burglaries on their own soil, because they had law enforcement who could imprison people doing these things against the law. What happened outside of their borders was mostly of no concern to them.
If Coca Cola wanted to sell their products in Germany, they needed people in Germany willing to sell it, and those people were directly vulnerable to imprisonment by German law enforcement, so they had to care about and follow German law. Even if the original corporation wasn't involved directly, there were always vendors, importers, store owners and such, and all of them could be targeted to some extend.
Tech companies are different, you can make a product on the internet that interacts with the data of the majority of German citizens, without ever stepping foot in Germany or even realizing that a country called Germany exists and has laws. If Germany doesn't like the fact that this product exists, there isn't much they can do.
For now, most countries still have some semblance of control, usually backed by the power of international treaties, DNS blocking and control over payment infrastructure, but I wouldn't be surprised if the prevalence of fast and affordable satellite internet on one hand and easier access to crypto on the other will make the situation even worse.
Germany is notorious for banning, restricting, or altering, a huge number of tech products from smartphones to video games, with practically perfect compliance after a valid court order is issued.
I would generally agree - but effectively, government does have control of the internet, at least the cables that run underground in their portion of the world, and even moreso the bits and bytes that travel along those wires that travel into and out of their territory.
Wireless and satellite shoots a rather big hole in that ownership model, but not completely, the concept of air space is a thing, as well as maritime. Things get muddy when you extend out into space of course, but most internet is distributed by wire + signals on the ground rather than from satellite, might not be able to argue that to much of an extent.
Then there's the arguability of whether or not government(s) own their people - I think governments today worldwide truly believe in that position wholeheartedly. I certainly don't think they do, and government(s) ought to think twice about that position if you were to ask me.
> For now, most countries still have some semblance of control, usually backed by the power of international treaties, DNS blocking and control over payment infrastructure, but I wouldn't be surprised if the prevalence of fast and affordable satellite internet on one hand and easier access to crypto on the other will make the situation even worse.
What exact scenario are you envisioning here? Germany bans X (for example), but people smuggle Starlink terminals to continue reading it and advertisers continue advertising to them illegally by paying with crypto? Sounds extremely unrealistic to me TBH.
>It’s basically about catching up through international law, regulations, and enforcement, to make sure that the ideas that we have about what a democratic mandate looks like, what accountability looks like, and what oversight looks like are actually meaningful whenever activities happen in the digital sphere.
Who is "we" here, and which "democratic mandate" is being discussed?
The author was involved with the EU parliament? Excuse me for not taking their tech sector recommendations seriously.
Why not? The EU has some of the best consumer protection laws on the planet and they seem to be the only coalition that are actively legislating against big tech.
Why be so dismissive on the idea that the “tech utopia” that Google or Meta wants to sell us is just digital serfdom? Seems appropriate seeing how damaging to society these companies truly are.
The insidious take over of security by the smart phone is what worries me the most. I can't pay my taxes, access healthcare or even sign-on to my job without using my phone any more.
If somebody said 25 years ago that access to government services would be completely privatised there would have been uproar. Not only did we consent to this, we did it willingly in exchange for convenience. Now we are screwed.
Americans used to be all gung-ho about "those who give up freedom for security will not be free or secure" but it's much worse than that. We gave up security for convenience and handed everything about ourselves to an unscrupulous bunch of billionaires who are intent on replacing government wholesale, and we will be paying them while they do it.
>And how the police can demand the video off our Ring door bells. What's next, my dash cams?
They always could. It's called a search warrant. The idea that your security camera footage was inaccessible to governments was incorrect to begin with.
Plenty of people when I lived in Texas 25 years ago who would be pretty easy to get onboard with privatizing access to government services. Complaints about the DMV, for instance, are eternal. School vouchers were and continue to be hot in many influential circles, with people wanting to get rid of the government services entirely in favor of privatized ones. Pro-privatization, small-government ideas have been WILDLY popular since at least Reagan.
Giving up liberty for security, (or just convenience or religion) in the US goes back even further. Cold War policies and inquisitions, any number of vice laws, restrictive zoning, to name a few from the 20th century.
>I can't pay my taxes, access healthcare or even sign-on to my job without using my phone any more.
Where is this? For instance the IRS still allows you to file by mail[1], and it's unclear why you'd need a phone to go to a hospital or walk in clinic. As for needing a phone to access your company networks, I don't how it's deserving of outrage anymore than needing a laptop to do a modern desk job.
That's why I asked OP for where he lived, and qualified my point about the IRS with "for instance". I'm not going to do an exhaustive search of all countries to validate the claim.
I understand your concern, but I think it's overly simplistic to frame this as a zero-sum tradeoff between convenience and security/freedom. Smartphones have undoubtedly made interacting with government services more accessible and efficient - especially for marginalized communities, rural populations, and individuals with disabilities.
That being said, I'm not convinced that access to government services has been "completely privatized" as you claim. Governments often partner with private companies to develop and provide these services, and there's usually some level of regulatory oversight in place. This collaboration has led to some really valuable innovations, like online portals for tax filing and telemedicine.
The Benjamin Franklin quote about trading freedom for security is still relevant, of course. But maybe we should also consider the flip side: by resisting technological change, we risk getting left behind. Finding a balance between convenience, security, and individual rights is the real challenge.
Rather than sounding the alarm about an "insidious takeover," perhaps we should focus on the practical steps we can take to ensure our rights are protected. Advocating for open standards, strengthening regulatory frameworks, and investing in digital literacy programs would be a good start. Let's try to have a nuanced discussion about this, rather than resorting to hyperbole.
I stand by the idea that it is insidious. It’s one thing for our governments to ensure access is secure, it’s entirely another to assume we all have smartphones and have aligned ourselves with Apple or Google. Being a digital serf is our new reality and we did it willingly. If we had to start up our Ford to access a government website it would be ridiculous but having to have your phone at hand is just as bad. Google and Apple both know exactly when and where you accessed a government service and stand as a gatekeeper to doing so. It is by definition insidious.
they are just as illustrative of some of the challenges that I’m pointing to, [such] as Elon Musk deciding who in Ukraine should and should not have access to Starlink internet connections. ... Let’s compare how the U.S. responded to the Ukraine war in the physical world versus in the cyber domain. As part of NATO, the U.S. is clear: It doesn’t want to see boots on the ground. But in the cyber domain, the U.S.’s offensive activities are ongoing. That political discrepancy can continue because of the legal gray zone in the digital realm.
Wikipedia has a good overview[0] but the basic debate was originally over funding of systems donated to replace a civilian communication network, and later over the use of the Starlink civilian communication system in attack drones, e.g. "Starlink legal documents claim it is not for use in weaponry as a military use of Starlink brings it under US export control laws like the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) or the Export Administration Regulations (EAR)" and "Shotwell explained that her company agreed with Ukraine's military using Starlink for communications but never intended to have them use it as a weapon. She added 'But then they started putting them on f---ing drones trying to blow up Russian ships. I’m happy to donate services for ambulances and hospitals and mothers [...] But it’s wrong to pay for military drone strikes.'"
This author says "we need to bring the same level of legal clarity, accountability mechanisms, and transparency measures to the digital realm that we expect around other innovations such as medicines, chemicals, foods, cars, or even processes such as the decision to engage in foreign conflict" but uses as her case-in-point example the demand by a foreign military that a civilian communication system be enabled for use on novel drone weapons in a war where the United States is explicitly not a combatant.
Certainly legal clarity could be helpful for a situation like this, but I would hope the clarity is that a private company intentionally building a product for purely civilian use cannot be forced to modify that system to enable its use as an offensive weapon in a foreign war. Her argument seems akin to saying "Tim Cook arbitrarily decided Apple won't sell iPhones secretly loaded with remotely detonated plastic explosives for use by a foreign military - we need accountability here, this is destabilizing governance!"
I watched Julian Assange’s recent talk at the Council of Europe and his testimony on the insanity that the U.S. Government put him through [1]. This makes me come to a different conclusion than the article.
> In the digital realm, companies’ control of information, unfettered agency, and power to act have almost overtaken that of governments.
Why is it assumed that governments will act better if the power to control information is in their hands? We see this time and time again that the control over information is the most manipulating force a tyrant can wield. Why should we trust government over companies? At least with a publicly traded company we can sell stock faster than we can elect new leaders.
Because companies make decisions based on who has the most money. 90% of Americans have basically no control of those decisions. And companies interfere with democratic control of the government. Getting things out of the way of democracy seems good to me.
Again, how would that be different if government had the power to control information? Its human nature to do things that benefit yourself. At least if its not centralized then you have competition which gives people a choice of where they want their information coming from.
We already know that organizations (whether public or private) eventually devolve into a bureaucracy where the goal is the growth of the organization itself.
We see this with the government - how often does the government ever remove laws? Or reduce size? Very rarely.
It seems to me that if the goal is to ensure one is not coerced, whether by business or government is not to try and create mechanisms to ensure coercion is only benevolent, but rather to ensure they never have the power to coerce people in the first place.
For US companies and its citizens, trading stock enough to send a message and make a difference is in the hand of the top X% of people. Those same people don’t have to worry about the same things we do. Their income tier makes them operate fundamentally differently. When you have a team of lawyers on call you can get a lot done quickly. For us companies depend on us deeming it not worth our time and money for a chance to right a wrong. On top of that companies are at times misusing or breaking the law for decades before they are taken to justice. And that justice is more and more just the cost of doing business.
I could go on and on, but I would rather face down one tyrant than an army of them. But the way things are going, we might be facing both soon.
Democratic governments have some form of accountability to those elected, if none other than periodic elections. If you are fortunate enough to live in a country which has free and fair elections, then vote.
Companies do not have such constraints and operate strictly in self-interest.
Does government not act within self interest? The self interest of the company is to provide the information that people want. The self interest of the government is to provide the information that keep the citizens voting for who controls the politicians. And who controls the politicians is a profitable game for big corporations.
I understand companies act within their own self interest. But the problem is when we provide government with enormous power it becomes within the self interest of companies to influence government rather than provide value to society.
> self interest of the government is to provide the information that keep the citizens voting for who controls the politicians
Now expand your model to one where the government, politicans and citizens aren't monoliths.
> who controls the politicians is a profitable game for big corporations
It's a pertinent game for everyone. That's the point of democracy. It's still a profitable game in a dictatorship. It's just that while democracy gives a peanut-gallery seat to even the most disinterested citizen, autocracies hoard those seats for the deserving.
How do you end up in a position where governments aren't monoliths? You decentralize the power. Adding more and more state control concentrates power into the monoliths.
> You decentralize the power. Adding more and more state control concentrates power into the monoliths
“State control” isn’t a monolithic lever. You can have a theoretically powerful but weak state if power is properly shattered. This is the lost art of designing democracies. (Not just throwing elections at every problem.)
This is the current situation in the United States. The problem with this is that when you have shattered/distributed state power, they work to achieve opposing objectives. On one hand we have massive subsidies provided to the fossil fuel industry while at the same time spending millions on research in renewable energy. Recently we had huge subsidies to growing tobacco while also funding programs to stop people from smoking. This is ineffective and inefficient use of money. Now, this would happen with private companies as well, but the difference is that private companies have no means to force individuals to pay for their costs the way state government does. The state can threaten you by means of force or jail to pay for both of these conflicting endeavors through taxation. Whereas you only give money to private enterprises voluntarily, where you find value in their goods or services.
They operate under the constraint of my ability to take my business elsewhere. This gives me 1000x more leverage over companies than my vote will ever have over the government. The worst customer service nightmare i have ever been through is nothing compared to the time the IRS incorrectly calculated that I owed them thousands more in taxes. My vote does not constrain them in the least.
Those countries exist? Last I checked there are few true democracies. Where there are free and fair elections the politicians seem bought out by unchecked corporate interests. If all your options are just corporate shills and power hungry spooks and goons is it even "free and fair" at that point?
> Last I checked there are few true democracies. Where there are free and fair elections the politicians seem bought out by unchecked corporate interests
If you're anywhere in the West, this doesn't describe your democracy but a cartoon of it.
Like yes, if you only show up for--in the U.S.--the Presidential general election, your vote isn't that powerful because it's not supposed to be in a country of a quarter of a billion.
"Bought out by corporate interests" is a completely accurate assessment of the American electoral system. It's honestly quite alienating reading all of these completely delusional comments. Your vote is at the very least supposed to be proportionally significant to the general population. We don't even have that. We are bombarded with corporate propaganda every fucking day. A senator from Wyoming has just as much of a vote as California. This notion that we live in a democracy or anything close to that is asinine. The system is not tethered to the will of the people in any sense of the word. It's an oligarchy.
Because unchecked corporate interests / you don't vote for the President but for electors are hot takes?
(Also, "your vote is at the very least supposed to be proportionally significant to the general population" doesn't technically make sense. I think I know what you're getting at. But even ignoring the political structure and just focussing on voting, you're assuming by statement values for parameters which lie on a spectrum.)
> notion that we live in a democracy or anything close to that is asinine. The system is not tethered to the will of the people in any sense of the word. It's an oligarchy
Pure democracy doesn't work. (More accurately: election fetishisation doesn't work. It tears itself apart in manufactured partisanship.) We live in a republic. The Congress is democratically elected. The President is meant to embody the strengths of monarchy. The Supreme Court represents the oligarchy. This is civics 101, succinctly summarised in the Federalist Papers.
> senator from Wyoming has just as much of a vote as California
I vote in Wyoming. We're not the oligarchy. We're not even a swing state. You're complaining about, broadly, the Electoral College (and our system of apportionment). That's orthogonal to that of corporate interests. If anything, the fact that each of my resresentatives has fewer people they're accountable to makes them harder to buy off.
You sound like a religious fundamentalist. Civics 101 is blindly deferring to the architects of a system whereby only rich, white property owners could vote?
Look, however you rationalize it in your head, power is highly concentrated in the US. Unless you are a member of the ruling class, being in favor of this basically amounts to Stockholm Syndrome.
> Civics 101 is blindly deferring to the architects of a system whereby only rich, white property owners could vote
No, it's understanding the tradeoffs systems of governments make in erecting the systems that they do.
Have you read the Federalist Papers? If not, I suggest starting there. It's more interesting than railing against the woke mind virus or corporations.
> however you rationalize it in your head, power is highly concentrated in the US
It's not consistently concentrated. And even then, it's not that concentrated. I've managed, as a rando, to get language put into multiple state and twice federal bills because I was the only person in my district who called in on a low-priority process. Nihilism in American politics is often just cover for civic laziness.
It's a good thing I don't advocate for nihilism. You haven't asked what I advocate, which illustrates to me you're a dull, incurious person. And if you're seriously bringing up the "woke mind virus," I think that says all I need to know about you. I haven't even brought up matters of social justice. Many of the things I think are rather "unwoke" in many respects; however, if that's your paradigm, your brain is hopelessly broken. I don't particularly care that you have gotten "language" into legislation. Do you also have some patents in your name?
You will be lambasted for it, but you're fundamentally correct. Recall that the question was "What can be done about the unchecked power of governance?" If your response to that question is "just vote," you have missed the plot entirely. It is truly pathetic how naive that statement is. It's akin to still believing in Santa Claus.
I would say the statement was "Well, at least vote". And in local elections, that does make a difference.
In general, I think far too much attention is paid to single election cycles at the federal level. And I'm not sure why. The state you live in has significantly more effect on your experience with government, outlay of benefits, taxes, education and environmental policies than who holds the presidential office, for essentially all issues that matter.
In the rare case that a federal change affects you (likely a court decision, thanks to lame duck congress), states routinely step in, as we've seen recently.
The one exception to everything is that if you want _other_ states to live like _your_ state, then yeah - you better try to get the federal government aligned with your virtues. But why any sane person would want that is beyond me.
This is just the galaxy brain version of the position I am criticizing. You are not any less naive than the person who said "just vote." You're fundamentally missing the point. Corporations manipulate state and local elections as well, and the scope of what is possible is shaped by this. If your impulse during this political moment is to rally people to vote, all you are demonstrating is that you do not fully understand the system you live in.
>> If you are fortunate enough to live in a country which has free and fair elections, then vote.
> Those countries exist?
Yes. The US is one, others exist today as well.
> Where there are free and fair elections the politicians seem bought out by unchecked corporate interests.
Start by voting for the least objectionable politicians in the general election (local, state, and federal).
If you do not like those choices, remember this and vote in the primary (or primaries where allowed) for the least objectionable politicians.
If you do not like the choices in primaries, remember this and get involved in the selection process for the least objectionable political party.
Note the recurring theme of involvement in the representation process. Those who do not want you to have this type of agency spend a lot of money to disparage it.
>Those who do not want you to have this type of agency spend a lot of money to disparage it.
You just contradicted yourself. Do we have free and fair elections, or do we have a system whereby the wealthy have disproportionate influence? It's one or the other.
>> Those who do not want you to have this type of agency spend a lot of money to disparage it.
> You just contradicted yourself.
I did not. Please re-read what I wrote dispassionately.
> Do we have free and fair elections, or do we have a system whereby the wealthy have disproportionate influence? It's one or the other.
This is a false dichotomy[0]. The US has had free and fair elections for at least 40 years. I wish I could confidently state a longer period. Some might include the 70's but few would include much of the 60's.
What the wealthy do in attempt to convince people they do not have agency, or that their involvement in representative government does not matter, is orthogonal to having it. I humbly recommend contemplating the difference.
> You're begging the question with respect to what is "free" and "fair."
Free: there are no longer Jim Crow laws[0], such as voting poll taxes[1].
Fair: each eligible voter whom casts a vote in US elections has it included in the vote tally (see below).
> In large part, people do not have that kind of agency, and telling them they do is deceptive liberal bullshit.
Every eligible voter has the ability to cast their vote in one form or another. In extenuating circumstances, some votes will not be included. I am neither a constitutional nor civil rights lawyer, so will not attempt to clarify those situations beyond acknowledging they exist.
I will not further engage in this thread as my interpretation of your replies thus far is they are not based in intellectually honest discourse.
We study history in order to understand the present moment. So your question presents a false dilemma in an attempt to cut off historical analysis and blindly continue what you're doing without question. How is society actually shaped? If you believe it's by people simply "showing up," you are delusional.
I humbly disagree, at least at the local level. Get involved and you'll be surprised at how much you can do. Local clubs, like an Optimist Club or Lions Club volunteering for your community builds relationships. Many people involved are part of the community: business owners, politicians, accomplished/connected individuals, etc. Much of what affects you in a democracy is local and can be changed if you get involved. It is not just about checking some boxes every couple years.
America is as broken as it is because explicit Republican policy for 50 years has been "Don't let the government interfere with company activities" and Americans voted for that with all their might. Millions of registered democrats voted for Reagan, with his loud and clear "I'm going to make the government do less" policy, and his history of narcing on coworkers and friends to the "Commies are bad" witch hunt.
Empirically, people who think the government has a duty to protect it's citizens from corporate raiding have not shown up to vote. The US has had 2 years of total democrat control during my entire life, plus a decade.
For the most part it's people who are politically apathetic, as if letting the choice be made by only the most rabid political fans is a better option than making your mild opinion known. Or they swear that "both sides are the same" despite Congressional votes not being secret and "both sides" being trivially not the same on many very important issues.
Elections have consequences. We got exactly what we voted for.
Nearly all of this happened before the citizens united decision.
First you can have democracy. Then separation of powers between the judiciary, the executive and the legislature along with property rights and the rule of law.
And? By its own description, that council doesn’t appear authoritarian. For reference, here’s how it describes itself…
“To seize the benefits of rapid technological progress, while managing its risks, it is essential to foster responsible technology governance and regulation, advance the digital transformation of sectors and industries, and promote tech-enabled solutions to serve people and the planet. How can policies, regulations and institutions be transformed to scale technologies responsibly?”
Can you elaborate? Quick scan of her Wikipedia entry and top Google hits doesn’t indicate an authoritarian bent. They all list her as a center-left progressive.
This is an interesting discussion, no doubt. But no one questions this is the case. Yes corporations grow in power and reach and are taking on responsibilities previously held by states.
I'm looking forward to the next step in the discussion. Should this not be the case? Where do these notions that imply that the state doing something is better than a company? I'm not a libertarian or an extremist, but I've had to reject some pretty simplistic views that businesses are evil. The word coporation comes from the word Corpus, in a sense the people congregate, each with their own function as an organ to serve as a body. So it seems as noble a concept as the state. I can point to corrupt states or corruption in golden standard states as easily as I can do the same for companies.
Is there a disparity between the goals and the results of these organizations (Companies for selfless reasons, the state for the common good)? If so, is it sufficient to judge the organizations based on their results, or should we demand organizations not only to benefit the common good, but to expressly pursue it?
Finally, not for profits enter the fray as a potential intermediate option. OpenAI's success is pretty unprecedented, although the reputation of the NFP is irreparably damaged. Even if courts decide that whatever fuckery they are doing is all good by the law, in the trial of public opinion we can all agree that OpenAI walks like a dog and barks like a dog.
There are two important differences between corporations (even non-for-profit ones) and the government.
The first is that citizens have a say in who governs them. If the government does something they don't like, they can (at least in theory) vote for someone who will change it.
The second is that in most legal systems, there are differences in what governments are allowed to do and what corporations are allowed to do. For example, a government may be required to provide services to all citizens, whereas a corporation has the right to not serve certain people (such as "people who don't own a smartphone").
These differences aren't insurmountable, but it's something to keep in mind.
Regarding point 1, I would argue that citizens have more of a say in how the corporations operate, (and what corporations for that matter) as their say occurs every time they pay or not pay or engage into a commercial contract, which is much more often than once every 4 years.
"Let’s compare how the U.S. responded to the Ukraine war in the physical world versus in the cyber domain. As part of NATO, the U.S. is clear: It doesn’t want to see boots on the ground. But in the cyber domain, the U.S.’s offensive activities are ongoing?"
A few weeks ago I saw Zero Days, which is a good documentary on Stuxnet and it's pretty wild just to what extent tools in that domain are out of the purview of the public. Offensive capabilities that amount to acts of war seemingly have no democratic oversight, and even an ex-director of the NSA thought the amount of classification of materials went too far. Very few people were willing to speak at all to the filmmakers even years after it had already blown over.
Whether its some sort of dystopian privatized policing by Palantir or tools used by three letter agencies, what the article warns of has arguably already arrived a decade ago.
I have a hard time listening to this complaint about unchecked power coming from an entity that controls $20 billion of land, owns a $40 billion endowment, and receives most of its revenue from the federal government who is legally required to pay whatever price they ask, all while paying $0 in taxes on all of it.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 236 ms ] threadMy concern is that Silicon Valley could end up becoming a place where it's all about entrenched incumbents, where it would be too difficult for startups and small businesses to compete, and where those who'd otherwise be willing and ready to compete against the incumbents are stymied by extremely high housing prices that discourage risk-taking, not to mention regulatory capture from the incumbents. Silicon Valley could morph into a place that stifles innovation instead of encourages it.
While I'm on this topic, it also seems to me that Silicon Valley collectively is losing the social goodwill it once had. I remember a decade ago people outside of the tech industry being very excited when they heard of one of their friends getting a job at a company like Google or Facebook. Google was still seen as one of the "good guys," and Facebook was still seen as a tool people loved that allowed them to connect with their friends and family. Yes, there was discontent in some parts of the Bay Area about gentrification fueled by an influx of tech residents combined with long-standing restrictions on housing development, but the broader society still thought highly of the tech industry and Silicon Valley in particular. Today that goodwill has been eroded. There are many people who don't think highly of the current generation of tech leaders; Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos, and Sam Altman seem to bring out different emotions than Steve Jobs and Bill Gates did during their heydays (and I know Jobs and Gates had their detractors).
The difference, though, between Silicon Valley today and Silicon Valley in the past, however, is that Silicon Valley is a deeper part of our everyday lives today than it was in the past. The tech industry is bigger than personal computers and e-commerce; the tech industry today plays a major part of our lives. Tech has become vital infrastructure, much like how energy and telecommunication companies are. Maybe in the early days of electrification and telecommunications companies like PG&E and AT&T were better regarded, but eventually as these companies played an increasingly integral part of peoples' lives, these companies exploited this fact, and thus they lost their social goodwill. I can also think about how cars in American society undergone a transformation from being seen as a liberating force to being seen by some as an oppressive force (e.g., facilitating urban sprawl, car-dependent commuting, soul-crushing traffic congestion, etc.). Perhaps the tech industry has entered this life cycle, but I could definitely be wrong.
It's an old joke. The joke is it's working as designed for the companies.
We were way more worried about that before GNU/Linux became a thing.
What piece of software do you need for your life, but you're forced to lease?
This is a great topic to discuss right after you accept the End-User License Agreement and Terms of Service.
I think that's reversed - that's property rights being stronger than ever. "Own things forever and just rent them out" is NOT a weak formulation of property rights from the point of view of the producers of those things.
There's not an inherent privilege of purchasing over renting in property rights. In either case you're paying for something, it's just a different slice of that something. They're different transactions that can benefit the different parties different ways in different situations. But if technological development lets the owner get the financial rewards of selling through "licensing" that's hardly a reduction in the owner's rights - and it's hard to make a "pro-strong-property-rights" argument that's based in "people should be forced to sell on the buyer's terms, not their own."
I don't think there's anything inherently right about renting or owning.
Rather, it's one of the things we need to learn about and decide which is better for our societies.
Right now, we are far into testing the "renting" side, especially when it comes to housing and software, and it's very clear that, at least as currently implemented, this is creating an unhealthy society with massive wealth inequality.
I don't have an answer to this, but the only people I see arguing for the status quo are the very few who have benefited from it - landlords, politicians, company execs etc. Or at least people who aspire to join those classes.
If you do find yourself arguing for it, please ask yourself whether you're doing it for selfish reasons rather than looking beyond yourself.
Maybe it proves your point that I'm technically a landlord now, but only to help out a neighbour so they could stay in the area for cheap, because they needed to downsize, approached me and we agreed on a very low price. I wasn't initially planning on renting it out because it needed some upfront work to be liveable, which might be even more selfish considering the housing shortage where i live...
Fundamentally that's the question. Do we want a society from the perspective of "the producers" or the greater population?
Not trying to put words in OP's mouth, but I think the general idea is that software has allowed "the producers" to shrink in number and grow in power, turning independent farmers into serfs if you will. Should that cause us to reevaluate the previous question?
Look at what the right wing US party always runs on - cutting taxes for "job creators", "running the government like a business", and bail outs for Wall Street.
At least half of this country fantasies about being at the beck and call of "the producers" of things. Fanboys of Elon Musk squeal if he interacts with them on Twitter.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html
Nowadays, it’s about $800, and I have access to any of their apps I want (I still only use the three, though).
> By removing ownership from the product offering the seller can reduce the price.
The price of ownership is greater than the price of licensing, as it comes with additional rights and privileges than licensing.
If a product or good is only offered and priced without ownership, how can you say that people "are ok with" not utilizing an option that's not provided to them? They cannot purchase ownership, by what means could they experience the difference?
The products you use as examples were wildly successful under an ownership paradigm, what says that Photoshop or N64 games would have been somehow better if they were licensed goods?
The reason I say people are ok with it is because the companies who didn't switch to a licensing model and kept their old prices either are no longer around or had to switch to a licensing model in order to stay competitive. If people were ok paying higher prices for the benefit of ownership then that's what we would see in the market today.
Although Nintendo 64 tried to push the envelope in what consumers would pay, the price of video games on the mainstream consoles has stayed in the $50-$75 since at least 1985.
Not the same experience at all compared to N64.
Of course, if they do run we send the hounds after them.
Clearly this is a case of revealed preference.
If salary of the average Joe was doubled as well your logic would be ok. Bit it did not.
P.S. It appears that I am wrong about median salary growth so my point should be discarded
Using the most recent numbers against the last quarter of 1997, it actually increased to 2.29× the 1997 amount, well over double:
Employed full time: Median usual weekly nominal earnings (second quartile): Wage and salary workers: 16 years and over
Q4 1997: $508 / Q3 2024: $1,165
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881500Q
All-Transactions House Price Index for the United States [1]
Q4 1997: 204.87 / Q2 2024: 682.18
i.e., roughly 3.33x
Median Consumer Price Index [2]
1997-12: 170.42938 / 2024-09: 353.73857
i.e., roughly 2.07
Take that as you will (I was mostly curious).
Interestingly, it seems console prices have kept pace with inflation.
NES at release: $180 ($428 adjusted for inflation)
PS5 right now: $450 (standard) / $500 (slim) / $700 (pro)
[1]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USSTHPI
[2]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEDCPIM094SFRBCLE
It wasn’t though. People learned photoshop on a pirated copy and used that to make art that Adobe didn’t care about. Companies are the ones who paid the $1000/seat license for their professional designers.
Pricing works by what people will pay for, not by how much it costs to produce.
Removing ownership increases profit.
Also, N64 games have additional utility, like resale or gift value, which affects the price comparison.
This is such a huge hand-waving blanket statement that I apologize in advance for my response.
The CAD shop I worked at was doing fine on R14 for YEARS and specialized apps/etc with hardware dongles until everyone got onto the 'SaaS' or 'Subscription' mode. And frankly, the "choice" our shop had more than once was 'our customer signed a deal to use this so we have to buy it'. What was worse was they did that twice in one year, and the second product cost as much per seat/year as the first product cost FOR OUR WHOLE TEAM per year.
> Another example is video games. The average Nintendo 64 game used to be $75.99 in 1997 which is $150 in today's dollars. Today the average PS5 game price is $70. That's half the price.
You're comparing apples to oranges there. Heck, even back then, a -huge- benefit of the PS and Saturn was that production costs for discs were -cheap-. Something like 3$ including case and sleeve. Compare to N64 carts which as far as I can understand would cost somewhere between 15-30$ depending on size of ROM. Neither of those factor in actual 'distribution' costs (i.e. shipping to retailer) but I know which format was lighter/smaller... Also PS1 'greatest hits' were the closest we had to steam sales at the time.
> By removing ownership from the product offering the seller can reduce the price.
Says every SaaS that gives a nice intro contract that will even give a nice first contract, knowing that by renewal the buyer will be more at their mercy with too much pain involved to 'get away' from ever-increasing prices... Low-Code tools are really good at this strategy lol.
And how many games do people have to subscribe to PSN to use? How many people have to pay for internet to use their game? How many games have microtransactions or DLC? How about a season pass? How about all of the editions they have? What's the cost of a controller? Does a console come with one or two? How many times do you have to buy a game because backward compatibility doesn't exist?
I'm not a big gamer and I realize some (maybe most) of these are not required, but let's not act like the gaming industry is surviving off the base price of a game like in the 90s.
If I own a piece of land, I can charge people to visit it, but I don't give up my property rights to do so. We don't see that as an "erosion" of property rights but rather the opposite.
Bruce Schneier, for one, not sure if anyone else had applied the feudal analogy before him. His remarks stand up quite well, I think:
https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2012/11/when_it_com...
I keep a document called "Timed Predictions," so I can check back on bold predictions such as these.
I'm adding an entry for this. In a few years, I'll evaluate whether we experience "a wave of disaster" due to overtaxed energy grids in 2026-2027.
2021-10-02 (did not come true): "I would not be surprised if Apple completely closes off the Mac ARM64 platform for “security” in the next few years. The option to boot third-party OSes seems like a short-term gimme to keep the pitchforks and torches at bay." -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28731406
2022-01-12 (did not come true as a "crisis"): "Long COVID / PASC [...] will easily be our next great public health crisis sooner than anyone can imagine." -- https://twitter.com/JamesPhipps/status/1481442131751456770
2022-04-04 (we will soon see): "Unless we see big structural changes in the Democratic party's coalition, then the modal outcome for 2024 is Donald Trump winning a filibuster-proof trifecta with a minority of the vote." -- https://twitter.com/davidshor/status/1511028728381734912
2022-11-18 (did not come true): "I do not think Twitter will die, but it will go down in the next few days due to the World Cup and its overwhelming traffic. When it does, Musk will dedicate himself to bringing it back up, and boldly claim that his mission is to “keep Twitter standing.” In the background, he will realise that nobody wants to work for him, and that there is no path that involves him running (or even keeping) this website that resembles any kind of success." -- https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-fraudulent-king/
2024-01-29 (by the end of 2024): Brigida v. @SecretaryPete will be settled by the start of year 2025 -- https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1752118772960514234
I'm holding my breath on both of those but I'm curious why you think otherwise.
For the second, "sooner than anyone can imagine" is admittedly not a specific time frame, but we're 2.5 years later and I haven't heard any news about long COVID lately, certainly nothing calling it a crisis. But this also could certainly change in the future.
"How Much Does Long COVID Cost Society? New Data Shed Light"
https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/how-much-does-long-covi...
"Long COVID: confronting a growing public health crisis"
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2...
"The Long Covid Moonshot"
https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/news-sanders-i...
"Long Covid is a significant health crisis in China too"
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanwpc/article/PIIS2666-6...
"Long Covid at 3 Years"
https://erictopol.substack.com/p/long-covid-at-3-years
"The future of excess mortality after COVID-19"
https://www.swissre.com/institute/research/topics-and-risk-d...
"Covid Brain"
https://erictopol.substack.com/p/covid-brain
"The Indomitable Covid Virus"
https://erictopol.substack.com/p/the-indomitable-covid-virus
The reason you don't hear any news about long covid is that it affects peoples brains, hearts, immunity, microbiome, organs, and employability. The hospitals do not attribute the rise of problems in these areas to long covid, so there is no news about long covid as the ultimate source of increases in childhood diabetes, the rise of autoimmune diseases, middle age heart attacks, a higher background death rate, decline in lifespan, availability of workers, etc. These are all reported as isolated mysterious facts that nobody understands. But just prior to the rises was a huge pandemic from a disease that causes long covid with many research reports of very long lasting damage to multiple systems in the body; maybe the cause is not so mysterious? Swiss Re the insurance company is certainly paying attention.
And the pandemic is not over, more people are getting long covid right now and it's not just the old people. The main fear is that this is a slow moving crisis where 5% of all people lose _some_ capability every year, including the capability of fighting off other infections, and also including those who are reinfected. It doesn't take long for that to have widespread effects and indeed effects are showing up and there are already economic consequences. The reason researchers were saying "sooner than anyone can imagine" is that this is an exponential effect and now that the CDC is no longer collecting data (and much of the world followed suite) it is difficult to predict with precision. However, like all exponential effects it will at some point start the steep part of the upward climb.
It's a little different in that it only publishes bets made directly on the site, but that also helps remove some of the ambiguity that otherwise would be inherent in trying to judge predictions made elsewhere.
https://www.metaculus.com/faq/#public-figure
But apparently removed it recently:
https://github.com/Metaculus/metaculus/issues/1095
We have been experiencing overtaxed grids for decades now. Rolling black and brown outs happen every summer on a hot, cloudy, still day. The issue isn't big-tech, the issue is that we're living in a fantasy where we can keep the grid running with renewables and no sign of terawatt hour batteries.
I then build a continent wide physics based electrical network simulation down to the individual house. There is no way to keep the networks stable in the coming decades with more and more intermittent sources coming in.
Large heavy spinning shafts are the only thing that's kept us from catastrophic failures and pretty much no one knows or cares.
We're betting civilization on pixie dust and unicorn farts.
Building out and running more syncons seems like a low bar.
I appreciate you work in the field. but, so do a bunch of people in the grid forming world who think it's entirely feasible to move beyond the base load model. Maybe they are all smoking pixie dust, but I think it's not clear you're right and they're wrong, because BOTH OF YOU have fucktonnes of experience and skin in the game, past and present.
As a random asker (ie me), why is your input here better than the people doing the planning for the Australian east coast grid?
https://aemo.com.au/-/media/files/initiatives/engineering-fr...
https://www.aer.gov.au/system/files/ElectraNet%20-%20System%...
Perhaps it's different in the US, but here in Toronto I've noticed the frequency and especially the severity of such events decrease over time. It's been 21 years since "the big one" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003). This year's biggest event was much less impressive (https://toronto.citynews.ca/2024/07/16/power-outages-toronto...), and that was caused by exceptional storms (https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/a-parade-of-storms-how-toro...).
There are certainly good reasons to be concerned about tech companies, who are pretty much uniformly becoming politically active (the Facebook-Google-Amazon-Apple axis being an especial concern, they seem to be relatively politically homogenous). But the new is still strictly better than the old; the combination of radio/newspaper/TV produces an unreasonable amount of misinformation (and government officials, for that matter).
The energy issue is a joke. We have had a massive shift from the 90s to today where the political system was set to prioritise environmental concerns above energy security. Even if it materialises a lack of energy has nothing at all to do with tech companies.
And political fracturing looks like it is mostly due to demographic pressure. Better communication is more likely helping than harming - if nothing else now we hear about the genocides instead of them being quietly swept under the rug. Facebook doesn't cause genocide, racialists cause genocides.
The internet connects everyone and allows for free-flow of information, free-flow information is eroding people's trust.
We want free speech, but people use words to deceive and coerce. You can't make rules to stop this - people will always find ways around them.
Ken Thompson wrote "Reflections on Trusting Trust" in 1984 (fitting as it may be). The conclusion being that we can't rely on computers to build trust. But we need trust to live in a society.
It's human instinct trust one another. But falsehoods spread fast online, and after being fooled so many times, people are losing their natural trust in others.
What's the way forward? I'm curious what this crowd thinks.
That wasn't necessarily better. We put democracy in place for a reason. But there has been a shift in the societal basis that underlies democracy, and we'll be forced to come up with another set of solutions.
[1] https://blogs.ubc.ca/etec540sept09/2009/10/31/unintended-con...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years%27_War
This form of gatekeeping has been eliminated with the zero cost of any person being able to publish their thoughts digitally and without review. Furthermore, misinformation and disinformation now has a financial incentive by way of "driving the clicks."
In short, not everyone's voice needs to be heard by all, especially when extremism is required in order to "stand out."
- The barrier to creating and distributing content was higher (it still had to capture people's attention).
- We didn't have all the tools to artificially create content, just our imaginations.
I'm no doomer by any means, and I think it's useful to look back at history for clues as to how to manage it but it's hard to find clues when the situation is so different.
I still believe education and critical thinking are the best antidote for disinformation, but higher education in the US has continued to come under attack (and perhaps rightfully so with the costs rising extremely out of proportion to inflation).
The printing press lowered the barrier to distributing ideas. The internet lowered the barrier further.
In each case, there is a period of social turmoil as society "catches up". The Peasants' War, Müntzer, the Münster Rebellion, Matthys, Hoffman, and on and on are all events and products of the change in availability of printed word.
We developed social technologies to counter the faults exploited by increased information availability. "Don't believe everything you read," is a meme which acts against the bias exploited by highly available text. The invention of journals, newspapers, and citations all act in the same way.
We haven't developed enough new social technologies to counter the change in information availability. Our existing techniques aren't enough to hold tide and frankly, like all change, going back is never an option, but finding new ways to exist are.
The early internet was mostly that (BBS, Usenet, forums). But on the modern internet we mostly consume random google sites & TikTok accounts that are probably bots.
FAANG has actively replaced following with algorithmic feeds because they're more profitable.
HN, while being large, incentivizes that brilliantly, by highlighting new accounts in green.
I just read supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg and one of the best take aways from it was to remind people that they have multiple identities that they hold dear, and some of them may be in conflict. It gets people to think more and not regress to knee-jerk beliefs they think they're supposed to hold based on their identity on a given topic.
Alternatively: it's what users want.
Social media is to the 2020s what cigarettes were to the 50s
That is an interesting thought. Thanks!
I thoroughly despise the frankly Puritan attitude that society should prevent people from harming themselves
The data supports your thesis, but in the same way a meth addict wants more meth imho. The algorithm is hitting a reward center (TikTok has put on a masterclass in this, for example).
I would be interested to see user preferences with regards to algorithm vs chronological feed when the cohort is on GLP-1 agonist of some sort (which inhibits malfunctioning reward center behavior, including alcohol, tobacco, and opioid addictions).
So why are they so opposed to adding some toggle in the options to allow chronological feed then?
Since it's no longer political to mention Iraq: every major news organization lied about the war, they knew they lied about it and millions died. The only person to be held accountable for this was the one person to tell the truth: https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/phil-donahue-iraq-war
We can't solve the issue of truth through our current institutions because those institutions are rotten to the core. The best we can do is keep them from destroying the channels from which we can hear how badly they are fucking up and allow us to organize.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/651977/americans-trust-media-re...
My point was about small communities though. For country scale organizations it's a much trickier problem indeed.
It has to be decentralised, i.e. you or an open source software agent that you control is what's doing the filtering and deciding what you see.
It has to be a moderatorless system where you end up with what you actually choose.
I think for topics that are not as easily provable as reproducible builds though, trust gets murky.
There was something else I read (can't find it now) that made a similar analogy for a web of trust.
A web of trust (e.g. PGP) will have de-facto authorities since there will be a tendency for more people to sign individuals presumed to be trustworthy based on their history. It follows that the system runs into issues if their key gets compromised or if a false individual is subject to a sybil attack, producing the illusion of trust. See also: github stars, cryptocurrency, social media follower counts.
In other words, I "lost trust" in institutions, experts, officials etc., when I found the information on the web that I consider to be "the truth" which overrides what established organizations previously proffered to the me.
The Web did cause me to lose trust, but only because it made the actual truth available to me and made me realize how dishonest most people are.
There may be examples of this... A mechanic who overcharges you can be "found out" now by a customer who does some online research. Previously, this work would be accepted as is, but it is now (rightfully) questioned. The dishonesty was always there, but it's more readily discovered now.
Hope I'm making sense...
Oh, I agree. It is tiring.
> If I get screwed for $200...
Some scams do far more damage than $200.00.
> The scammer won't survive in the long run.
Not really true. Some entire industries are built on scams and last decades or indefinitely.
When trust is lost, it takes 10x, sometimes 100x more effort to regain it.
Sometimes, even with 100x the effort trust does not return.
These are Life 101 basics. Pretending these laws don't exist doesn't make them disappear.
From my perspective, the root problem is that institutions that want to be trusted - and traditionally were - don't want to make the effort to regain the trust they lost. The media and the government come to mind. Instead they waste energy shamelessly demanding to be trusted, which only widens the gap. They blame the violated, which only widens the gap.
And into that void, the nefarious has rushed in. Until the institutions embrace "true trust is earned" the nefarious will thrive in the gap.
Trust is one of now corrupted words. It's current meaning is a Frankenstein knock off of the true meaning of the word. Other examples include journalism, and leadership (which have also fallen due to lack of sacrafic).
Yes, it's Orwellian. Normalized. But still Orwellian.
They do.
> You can't make rules to stop this - people will always find ways around them.
Would you be pissed if you got penalized for this comment?
We already had "the Fappening" when iCloud was compromised, but I feel if someone did something similar and kept the data private for blackmail purposes, we'd probably never hear about it.
Am I missing something here about how this wouldn't actually be possible? Frankly, I'd be surprised if it isn't already happening.
I take no stance on the article or parent comment, just for your reading.
I also don't think this is a good phrase to use in reference to society, politics, or the economy.
Marxist governments have caused exponentially more harm (e.g., genocides) than monopolistic companies.
Both are bad but the first one results in harm always.
churchill starved india. the list goes on.
the only genocide i can think of by a nominally socialist govt was the cambodian genocide, backed by the US and China, and the ppl in charge were really weird and not marxist. they were rigid idealists afaik. that genocide was halted by vietnamese marxists.
In times past, Governments could e.g. regulate the quality of coke, control election misinformation or forbid burglaries on their own soil, because they had law enforcement who could imprison people doing these things against the law. What happened outside of their borders was mostly of no concern to them.
If Coca Cola wanted to sell their products in Germany, they needed people in Germany willing to sell it, and those people were directly vulnerable to imprisonment by German law enforcement, so they had to care about and follow German law. Even if the original corporation wasn't involved directly, there were always vendors, importers, store owners and such, and all of them could be targeted to some extend.
Tech companies are different, you can make a product on the internet that interacts with the data of the majority of German citizens, without ever stepping foot in Germany or even realizing that a country called Germany exists and has laws. If Germany doesn't like the fact that this product exists, there isn't much they can do.
For now, most countries still have some semblance of control, usually backed by the power of international treaties, DNS blocking and control over payment infrastructure, but I wouldn't be surprised if the prevalence of fast and affordable satellite internet on one hand and easier access to crypto on the other will make the situation even worse.
Germany is notorious for banning, restricting, or altering, a huge number of tech products from smartphones to video games, with practically perfect compliance after a valid court order is issued.
Do you have some examples of non-compliance?
Wireless and satellite shoots a rather big hole in that ownership model, but not completely, the concept of air space is a thing, as well as maritime. Things get muddy when you extend out into space of course, but most internet is distributed by wire + signals on the ground rather than from satellite, might not be able to argue that to much of an extent.
Then there's the arguability of whether or not government(s) own their people - I think governments today worldwide truly believe in that position wholeheartedly. I certainly don't think they do, and government(s) ought to think twice about that position if you were to ask me.
What exact scenario are you envisioning here? Germany bans X (for example), but people smuggle Starlink terminals to continue reading it and advertisers continue advertising to them illegally by paying with crypto? Sounds extremely unrealistic to me TBH.
Who is "we" here, and which "democratic mandate" is being discussed?
The author was involved with the EU parliament? Excuse me for not taking their tech sector recommendations seriously.
Why be so dismissive on the idea that the “tech utopia” that Google or Meta wants to sell us is just digital serfdom? Seems appropriate seeing how damaging to society these companies truly are.
If somebody said 25 years ago that access to government services would be completely privatised there would have been uproar. Not only did we consent to this, we did it willingly in exchange for convenience. Now we are screwed.
Americans used to be all gung-ho about "those who give up freedom for security will not be free or secure" but it's much worse than that. We gave up security for convenience and handed everything about ourselves to an unscrupulous bunch of billionaires who are intent on replacing government wholesale, and we will be paying them while they do it.
They always could. It's called a search warrant. The idea that your security camera footage was inaccessible to governments was incorrect to begin with.
Giving up liberty for security, (or just convenience or religion) in the US goes back even further. Cold War policies and inquisitions, any number of vice laws, restrictive zoning, to name a few from the 20th century.
Where is this? For instance the IRS still allows you to file by mail[1], and it's unclear why you'd need a phone to go to a hospital or walk in clinic. As for needing a phone to access your company networks, I don't how it's deserving of outrage anymore than needing a laptop to do a modern desk job.
[1] https://www.irs.gov/filing/where-to-file-paper-tax-returns-w...
That being said, I'm not convinced that access to government services has been "completely privatized" as you claim. Governments often partner with private companies to develop and provide these services, and there's usually some level of regulatory oversight in place. This collaboration has led to some really valuable innovations, like online portals for tax filing and telemedicine.
The Benjamin Franklin quote about trading freedom for security is still relevant, of course. But maybe we should also consider the flip side: by resisting technological change, we risk getting left behind. Finding a balance between convenience, security, and individual rights is the real challenge.
Rather than sounding the alarm about an "insidious takeover," perhaps we should focus on the practical steps we can take to ensure our rights are protected. Advocating for open standards, strengthening regulatory frameworks, and investing in digital literacy programs would be a good start. Let's try to have a nuanced discussion about this, rather than resorting to hyperbole.
they are just as illustrative of some of the challenges that I’m pointing to, [such] as Elon Musk deciding who in Ukraine should and should not have access to Starlink internet connections. ... Let’s compare how the U.S. responded to the Ukraine war in the physical world versus in the cyber domain. As part of NATO, the U.S. is clear: It doesn’t want to see boots on the ground. But in the cyber domain, the U.S.’s offensive activities are ongoing. That political discrepancy can continue because of the legal gray zone in the digital realm.
Wikipedia has a good overview[0] but the basic debate was originally over funding of systems donated to replace a civilian communication network, and later over the use of the Starlink civilian communication system in attack drones, e.g. "Starlink legal documents claim it is not for use in weaponry as a military use of Starlink brings it under US export control laws like the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) or the Export Administration Regulations (EAR)" and "Shotwell explained that her company agreed with Ukraine's military using Starlink for communications but never intended to have them use it as a weapon. She added 'But then they started putting them on f---ing drones trying to blow up Russian ships. I’m happy to donate services for ambulances and hospitals and mothers [...] But it’s wrong to pay for military drone strikes.'"
This author says "we need to bring the same level of legal clarity, accountability mechanisms, and transparency measures to the digital realm that we expect around other innovations such as medicines, chemicals, foods, cars, or even processes such as the decision to engage in foreign conflict" but uses as her case-in-point example the demand by a foreign military that a civilian communication system be enabled for use on novel drone weapons in a war where the United States is explicitly not a combatant.
Certainly legal clarity could be helpful for a situation like this, but I would hope the clarity is that a private company intentionally building a product for purely civilian use cannot be forced to modify that system to enable its use as an offensive weapon in a foreign war. Her argument seems akin to saying "Tim Cook arbitrarily decided Apple won't sell iPhones secretly loaded with remotely detonated plastic explosives for use by a foreign military - we need accountability here, this is destabilizing governance!"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_in_the_Russo-Ukrainia...
> In the digital realm, companies’ control of information, unfettered agency, and power to act have almost overtaken that of governments.
Why is it assumed that governments will act better if the power to control information is in their hands? We see this time and time again that the control over information is the most manipulating force a tyrant can wield. Why should we trust government over companies? At least with a publicly traded company we can sell stock faster than we can elect new leaders.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idphGmY3QRM
Influence and power follows a power distribution. This is an age old problem.
We see this with the government - how often does the government ever remove laws? Or reduce size? Very rarely.
It seems to me that if the goal is to ensure one is not coerced, whether by business or government is not to try and create mechanisms to ensure coercion is only benevolent, but rather to ensure they never have the power to coerce people in the first place.
I could go on and on, but I would rather face down one tyrant than an army of them. But the way things are going, we might be facing both soon.
Democratic governments have some form of accountability to those elected, if none other than periodic elections. If you are fortunate enough to live in a country which has free and fair elections, then vote.
Companies do not have such constraints and operate strictly in self-interest.
I understand companies act within their own self interest. But the problem is when we provide government with enormous power it becomes within the self interest of companies to influence government rather than provide value to society.
Now expand your model to one where the government, politicans and citizens aren't monoliths.
> who controls the politicians is a profitable game for big corporations
It's a pertinent game for everyone. That's the point of democracy. It's still a profitable game in a dictatorship. It's just that while democracy gives a peanut-gallery seat to even the most disinterested citizen, autocracies hoard those seats for the deserving.
“State control” isn’t a monolithic lever. You can have a theoretically powerful but weak state if power is properly shattered. This is the lost art of designing democracies. (Not just throwing elections at every problem.)
With companies I have options to not engage at all. I don’t have that option with the government.
If you are fortunate enough to live in a country which has free and fair elections, then vote.
If you're anywhere in the West, this doesn't describe your democracy but a cartoon of it.
Like yes, if you only show up for--in the U.S.--the Presidential general election, your vote isn't that powerful because it's not supposed to be in a country of a quarter of a billion.
that's not true in the US, a republic not a direct democracy. Never has been.
Because unchecked corporate interests / you don't vote for the President but for electors are hot takes?
(Also, "your vote is at the very least supposed to be proportionally significant to the general population" doesn't technically make sense. I think I know what you're getting at. But even ignoring the political structure and just focussing on voting, you're assuming by statement values for parameters which lie on a spectrum.)
Blind deference to the status quo illustrates poor critical thinking skills.
Pure democracy doesn't work. (More accurately: election fetishisation doesn't work. It tears itself apart in manufactured partisanship.) We live in a republic. The Congress is democratically elected. The President is meant to embody the strengths of monarchy. The Supreme Court represents the oligarchy. This is civics 101, succinctly summarised in the Federalist Papers.
> senator from Wyoming has just as much of a vote as California
I vote in Wyoming. We're not the oligarchy. We're not even a swing state. You're complaining about, broadly, the Electoral College (and our system of apportionment). That's orthogonal to that of corporate interests. If anything, the fact that each of my resresentatives has fewer people they're accountable to makes them harder to buy off.
Look, however you rationalize it in your head, power is highly concentrated in the US. Unless you are a member of the ruling class, being in favor of this basically amounts to Stockholm Syndrome.
Wat.
> Civics 101 is blindly deferring to the architects of a system whereby only rich, white property owners could vote
No, it's understanding the tradeoffs systems of governments make in erecting the systems that they do.
Have you read the Federalist Papers? If not, I suggest starting there. It's more interesting than railing against the woke mind virus or corporations.
> however you rationalize it in your head, power is highly concentrated in the US
It's not consistently concentrated. And even then, it's not that concentrated. I've managed, as a rando, to get language put into multiple state and twice federal bills because I was the only person in my district who called in on a low-priority process. Nihilism in American politics is often just cover for civic laziness.
In general, I think far too much attention is paid to single election cycles at the federal level. And I'm not sure why. The state you live in has significantly more effect on your experience with government, outlay of benefits, taxes, education and environmental policies than who holds the presidential office, for essentially all issues that matter.
In the rare case that a federal change affects you (likely a court decision, thanks to lame duck congress), states routinely step in, as we've seen recently.
The one exception to everything is that if you want _other_ states to live like _your_ state, then yeah - you better try to get the federal government aligned with your virtues. But why any sane person would want that is beyond me.
> Those countries exist?
Yes. The US is one, others exist today as well.
> Where there are free and fair elections the politicians seem bought out by unchecked corporate interests.
Start by voting for the least objectionable politicians in the general election (local, state, and federal).
If you do not like those choices, remember this and vote in the primary (or primaries where allowed) for the least objectionable politicians.
If you do not like the choices in primaries, remember this and get involved in the selection process for the least objectionable political party.
Note the recurring theme of involvement in the representation process. Those who do not want you to have this type of agency spend a lot of money to disparage it.
You just contradicted yourself. Do we have free and fair elections, or do we have a system whereby the wealthy have disproportionate influence? It's one or the other.
> You just contradicted yourself.
I did not. Please re-read what I wrote dispassionately.
> Do we have free and fair elections, or do we have a system whereby the wealthy have disproportionate influence? It's one or the other.
This is a false dichotomy[0]. The US has had free and fair elections for at least 40 years. I wish I could confidently state a longer period. Some might include the 70's but few would include much of the 60's.
What the wealthy do in attempt to convince people they do not have agency, or that their involvement in representative government does not matter, is orthogonal to having it. I humbly recommend contemplating the difference.
HTH
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question
See, I can do that too.
In large part, people do not have that kind of agency, and telling them they do is deceptive liberal bullshit.
Free: there are no longer Jim Crow laws[0], such as voting poll taxes[1].
Fair: each eligible voter whom casts a vote in US elections has it included in the vote tally (see below).
> In large part, people do not have that kind of agency, and telling them they do is deceptive liberal bullshit.
Every eligible voter has the ability to cast their vote in one form or another. In extenuating circumstances, some votes will not be included. I am neither a constitutional nor civil rights lawyer, so will not attempt to clarify those situations beyond acknowledging they exist.
I will not further engage in this thread as my interpretation of your replies thus far is they are not based in intellectually honest discourse.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poll_tax
Remember how the US came to be in the first place.
Society is shaped by those who just simply show up, so show up if you want a say.
Empirically, people who think the government has a duty to protect it's citizens from corporate raiding have not shown up to vote. The US has had 2 years of total democrat control during my entire life, plus a decade.
For the most part it's people who are politically apathetic, as if letting the choice be made by only the most rabid political fans is a better option than making your mild opinion known. Or they swear that "both sides are the same" despite Congressional votes not being secret and "both sides" being trivially not the same on many very important issues.
Elections have consequences. We got exactly what we voted for.
Nearly all of this happened before the citizens united decision.
It seems to work reasonably well.
“To seize the benefits of rapid technological progress, while managing its risks, it is essential to foster responsible technology governance and regulation, advance the digital transformation of sectors and industries, and promote tech-enabled solutions to serve people and the planet. How can policies, regulations and institutions be transformed to scale technologies responsibly?”
https://www.weforum.org/communities/gfc-on-technology-policy...
The defendant certainly didn't kill his wife, he said so himself!
Take from it what you will.
This very article reeks of authoritarianism. Read her blog, not the first time she’s advocated for bureaucratic regulation of tech companies.
I'm looking forward to the next step in the discussion. Should this not be the case? Where do these notions that imply that the state doing something is better than a company? I'm not a libertarian or an extremist, but I've had to reject some pretty simplistic views that businesses are evil. The word coporation comes from the word Corpus, in a sense the people congregate, each with their own function as an organ to serve as a body. So it seems as noble a concept as the state. I can point to corrupt states or corruption in golden standard states as easily as I can do the same for companies.
Is there a disparity between the goals and the results of these organizations (Companies for selfless reasons, the state for the common good)? If so, is it sufficient to judge the organizations based on their results, or should we demand organizations not only to benefit the common good, but to expressly pursue it?
Finally, not for profits enter the fray as a potential intermediate option. OpenAI's success is pretty unprecedented, although the reputation of the NFP is irreparably damaged. Even if courts decide that whatever fuckery they are doing is all good by the law, in the trial of public opinion we can all agree that OpenAI walks like a dog and barks like a dog.
The first is that citizens have a say in who governs them. If the government does something they don't like, they can (at least in theory) vote for someone who will change it.
The second is that in most legal systems, there are differences in what governments are allowed to do and what corporations are allowed to do. For example, a government may be required to provide services to all citizens, whereas a corporation has the right to not serve certain people (such as "people who don't own a smartphone").
These differences aren't insurmountable, but it's something to keep in mind.
A few weeks ago I saw Zero Days, which is a good documentary on Stuxnet and it's pretty wild just to what extent tools in that domain are out of the purview of the public. Offensive capabilities that amount to acts of war seemingly have no democratic oversight, and even an ex-director of the NSA thought the amount of classification of materials went too far. Very few people were willing to speak at all to the filmmakers even years after it had already blown over.
Whether its some sort of dystopian privatized policing by Palantir or tools used by three letter agencies, what the article warns of has arguably already arrived a decade ago.