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Comment by mtgx | Hacker News Reader

And that agreement means absolutely nothing unless the FTC is also willing to enforce it - hard - against Facebook now.

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Which they won't. Very few people of significance from the 2008 financial collapse are in jail. The justice system in America doesn't apply to the 1%.

There was a movement that tried to make people aware of that by camping out for weeks. They were marginalized, by the news and media agencies owned by that same 1%.

As the previous post stated, this type of stuff was know in 2011 and 2014. There is a good chance the only reason this is making such strong headwind now is because it's in someone's interest to have the media run with these stories.

Many of the largest players in the 2008 financial collapse -- e.g. banks -- are not regulated by the FTC:

https://www.ftc.gov/about-ftc/what-we-do/enforcement-authori...

IMO, Occupy marginalized themselves by refusing to ever stand for anything. It's very easy to say what you're against. It's harder to say, in detail, what you would do differently.

Did you attend a rally? Did you sit in at a general assembly? Have you discussed the movements goals with one of its members? The media, quite falsely, reported (cherry-picking interviewees, a similar tactic used for all movements nowadays) the movement lacked any concrete goals - it is patently untrue. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_movement#Goals

That's what the people marginalizing them said. To everyone else, it was pretty clear they wanted to see bankers in jail and regulatory restrictions that would prevent the problem from happening again in the same way.

> They were marginalized, by the news and media agencies owned by that same 1%.

That's not really true. There are many other organizations that have been around much longer, with substantially more members, that have accomplished much more than Occupy did and yet receive almost no media coverage. When you hear about a ballot initiative, an insurgent candidate, etc., there is a whole network of activists behind the scenes working to get things done that are largely ignored.

Contrast this with Occupy; just about everyone in the U.S. knows about Occupy because of the media coverage they received. Occupy got a substantial amount of coverage, particularly when you consider the amount of people involved (smaller than a whole lot of activist networks) and the political impact they had (not much). It's true that the poor state of the media in the U.S. is a big problem, but solving that problem would make the media less focused on political theater and more focused on the people effecting actual change.

Which, unfortunately, probably won't happen. Worse still, large scale intervention and stringent enforcement on the part of governing bodies and sovereign states is likely the only thing that could potentially curb the insane amount of power tech giants have accumulated over the past decade. Our culture is so saturated by the services and technologies they provide that solutions on the cultural or individual level are nigh impossible. No one will stop using these services because of bad press, this has been proven time and time again. People simply don't care enough or are so controlled by habit that a divorce from the network is perceived as more disagreeable than basically forking over anything to them, no matter what sort of implications or consequences relinquishing sensitive data ultimately has.

It's a sort of paradox: take the road of the libertine and accept that those that provide services to you freely take much more than they provide, or take the road of the conservative and accept a future wherein governments can effectively determine the technological landscape, and decide what services, what extent of data collection, and what levels of sharing are permissible. Neither is a particularly appealing option. In any case, the dream of the internet being some kind of individualist haven is long gone.

This is more of a stretch, but I think there is some degree of correlation between the forms of user-facing technology provided by massive data mining companies and users' apparent nonchalance or apathy toward data distribution issues. A great number of socio-technologic tools promote experiences that are fragmentary and break down focused engagement (asynchronity, multi-channel communication, attention deficits, etc. are hallmarks of our age). Batter your brain with instantaneous, reactionary content 24/7 and you soon lose the capacity for deep or prolonged contemplation. If you've robbed the consumer of the intellectual capabilities to engage critically with your product (or sometimes, in the case of giant networks like facebook you even ensure he likely needs to buy in to the product itself to reach an audience) you've gone a long way of ensuring you maintain hegemony.

Many of our modern technologies, like drugs, are habit forming and addictive. Once you're hooked, good luck getting out of it without a struggle. Most people don't want to struggle, so stories like this come out and effectively result in nothing.

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