If my sewage or plumbing stop working, I get sick and die. If my Twitter stops working, nothing...I am not on Twitter. Lots of countries (e.g. Japan) do fine with a private postal service. And plenty (e.g. Panama or America in the era of free banking) do fine outsourcing their currency.
I am not saying Twitter shouldn’t be regulated. Just that this isn’t the argument for it.
The likes of Facebook/Twitter/YouTube have blown past this limit a long time ago.
At this point it's too late for regulation. You can't effectively break them down. Nationalizing them is pretty much unfeasible since they have so many international users. So the only solution left seems to be to shut them down completely, and let the competition do their job (it won't take long, considering Internet timescales). But maybe before consider what kind of regulations these competitors will have to live under. (Maybe a built-in time limit before they are shut down in turn, and the cycle starts all over again ?)
When social media becomes the primary driver of misinformation and anti-democratic sentiment, then it has arguably “stopped working”. While users might not be sick in the flesh, their minds will surely start to rot.
The platforms aren't the problem, people are the problem. Education is piss poor, if that's not fixed/improved, we can go back to pre-industrial times and people would still vote for a moron who promises big things, never delivers and just grabs power for themselves.
Financial/civic/political education in schools? Public-sponsored articles and videos debunking conspiracies? Nah, just ban Twitter, that'll solve it.
People on either side of the fence believe they're right. Keep ignoring and belittling each other and it will lead to an even worse situation down the road.
Are blocked sewer is a people problem; it’s either poorly designed, poorly constructed, poorly maintained or a combination of causes. But in the end, the problem is caused by people.
While moving thinking up the stack may be an option, I don't think that's really what's happening. People would rather use that time for leisure (look at digital consumption). Not to mention, knowing the basics of these services is very elementary. The people capable of thinking further up the stack would not be significantly impacted by possessing a basic understanding of simple services.
The big idea from Postman on this is that with simple technologies, the culture and the society drive their development and use. Whereas with bigger technologies (Internet, statistics, Twitter, etc.) start to shape society around them.
I'm doing a poor job of explaining myself; Postman has more to say on page 23 onward of Technopoly if you're curious for a better explaination.
On a macro scale I also want to understand them so I know how badly my utility is screwing me when they propose rate hikes and other things to justify their poor management covering that poor stewardship with need for "improvements" or other explinations that will be ignorated by the masses of people that "do not want to think about any of this things"
This is known as Outsourcing your thinking, one should never do that
I also do not at all want them "regulated and managed by a democratic authority". I neither want centrally planned systems nor do I want them to be managed "democratically" which is at the end of the say 2 wolves and lamb voting on what is for dinner.