Why Silicon Valley can’t fix itself
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
There is a threat worse than the power of Google or Facebook. It's the threat of the surveillance state. Just look at how China is implementing a ranking system for its citizens. Regulation that strengthens the incumbents will pave the way for it, since it will concentrate everybody's data into a few regulated data brokers.
They all know they can comply and influence the rules - as they're crafted - enough to ensure they can deal with them just fine, but their smaller competitors can't or will struggle.
The main thesis seems to be that framing the problem as health issue (as the so called Tech Humanists try to do) is: - hiding the political issues related to the power the tech companies have on our lives - giving them even more power - because they are the experts here and in health we defer a lot of our judgement to the doctors - is based on a mythical 'human nature as separate from our technology' idea
What to do with it: use anti monopoly laws, tax, introduce rules about the usage of private data and build public/coop infrastructure.
I am not so sure about public/coop infrastructure part - I don't think government is automatically better than a company - but maybe it should be tried. But the most difficult part will be the 'rules about usage of private data', that goes much deeper than just 'protecting privacy' and I am not sure how it can work - you cannot stop an individual from thinking about you and using all his memories in his thinking, sure a person is not a perfect analogy to organization.
By the way, the Facebook 'time well spent' project priorities our private communications over public ones - it is really about hooking us even deeper into the machine.
Coops aren't the same thing as government, they're about worker or consumer ownership and management of a business - although coops are certainly vulnerable to anti-competitive behaviour in the current state of affairs.
Having social media companies be cooperatives of their users could be a way of ensuring that people still have some realistic degree of control over how that data is used, for example.
We are going to have to get creative or settle in and prepare for an eternal reaming.
You have to pay the bribes.
June 7th, 2000:
"A federal judge today ordered Microsoft Corp. split into two companies, prescribing the biggest corporate breakup since AT&T while harshly rebuking the software giant for stifling computer-age competition. "
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20000607/aponl...
Then Microsoft and the DOJ made a deal on November 2nd 2001. Bush won the Presidency November 7th 2001. It's very likely the Clinton DOJ made a deal to ensure all of their hard work - indeed their victory - couldn't be easily reversed by the dramatically more business friendly Bush Administration if he were to win.
(*at the time, when the sector was much smaller)
This was a bit of an accident really.
Maybe one day big companies with monopolistic tendencies will be broken-up. But it will be a long and hard process.
Look at the Standard Oil monopoly of the late XIXe/early XXe century, it took decades to break it up, even with laws against it.
When the break-up will happen, I see two ways this could happen:
* either break by activity (separate AWS and Amazon, Gmail, Youtube and Search in Google, etc)
* break each service in a way to form a distributed system shared by several companies
For example, split Google Search with part of the search index and engine distributed across several companies, and each companies having their own offer in term of UI design, data privacy, additional functionalities, plugged on this shared index.
They remind me of the internet I remember from 1998-2006.
I wouldn't say it's the 'old' internet, because I wasn't alive for the supposed glory days of arpanet, but it definitely has the sleazy, probably illegal, never say who I am irl vibe I remember and miss.
I think we're being blindsided by just how bad the side effects of the advertising model are for media. In general, not just for the internet. It's done unbelievable damage to our culture, but it's slow and indirect and difficult to predict or quantify. Like asbestos, tetraethyl lead, carbon dioxide, etc. Those are the technologies you have to watch out for.
today we essentially define our culture and personal identities with advertising demographics and terminology. We've commoditized ourselves so thoroughly that any alternative is unimaginable and sounds silly to us.
What still sounds silly, and has always sounded silly, is micropayments.
But between its user base and Gold, Reddit is well situated to evolve the Internet just a bit further, and implement micropayments. Charge users an optional $5/month, and for users that do pay, take their upvotes and give money to recipients of upvotes from those users.
They could also pay subreddit moderators, and of course Reddit itself from that, plus Stripe Connect makes the backend payments platform stuff easy.
The viagra ads were a product of a time when the goal was to immediately and directly sell things. Now the era has shifted to one where the goal is to sell your information to people that want to sell you things (or otherwise use that information to further their ends). So instead of spamming you with viagra ads you're spammed with requests to divulge information at every turn you make. Register for this, register for that, give us your email address, let us access your location, let us send you an SMS (aka let us have your phone number), login with your facebook account, talk about yourself, and so much more.
Think I preferred viagra spam.
Good, human centric design is part of the solution, but sometimes technology just needs to get out of the way completely.
I'm sorry but I can't.
Of course advertising is not the problem! Design just has to be more “humanising” and the problems inherent with surveillance capitalism would disappear.
The only targets that people were worried about were PLCs in power plans and other things that go boom.
Reading it feels like having a priest going through your life trying to craft "sins" from everything you broke when life was moving fast. The only person this is helping is the priest of course- it does not solve any problem, it does not stabilize anything.
Makes me wish there was a way to warn follow up users of wasted time on HN.