We can have democracy or a surveillance society, but we cannot have both
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
> [...]
> Society renews itself as common sense evolves. This requires trustworthy, transparent, respectful institutions of social discourse, especially when we disagree. Instead we are saddled with the opposite, nearly 20 years into a world dominated by a political-economic institution that operates as a chaos machine for hire, in which norm violation is key to revenue.
> Social media's no-longer-young men defend their chaos machines with a twisted rendition of First Amendment rights. Social media is not a public square but a private one governed by machine operations and their economic imperatives, incapable of, and uninterested in, distinguishing truth from lies or renewal from destruction.
If democracy has a feature worth keeping at all, it is a shared functional definition of rights that we honor whether the other person or people seem “normal” or not.
Our votes are not agreement. They are consensus.
She sums up two decades of modern history in one sentence.
Also, her take on why antitrust approaches won't work is brand-new to me and it raises a critical point. Antitrust efforts against Standard Oil did not prevent the downstream effects of the business model, i.e., ecological disaster. They may be a necessary, albeit, temporary fix to the issue of competition in the marketplace, not the real harm inherent in surveillance for profit.
>Another thought experiment: Imagine that the America of 1911 understood the science of climate change. The court’s breakup decision would have addressed Standard Oil’s anticompetitive practices while ignoring the far more consequential case — that the extraction, refining, sale and use of fossil fuels would destroy the planet.
Even worse, it was seminal liberal makework. The owners of Standard Oil were saw their holdings double in value as it was broken up, and were now the owners of the resultant entities. It was money and effort burned for no purpose other than to support the careers of the kind of "progressives" that don't have a class-based critique or worker orientation. It was a pseudo-technocratic solution that didn't even really have a clear theory about how it would solve the problems that the size and market control of Standard Oil had raised.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ida_Tarbell
When it comes to surveillance, I'm not sure that anything short of a Butlerian Jihad can stop this train. Limiting government surveillance powers just allows them to farm out surveillance to favored companies. Breaking up those favored companies just makes trying to stop the aggregation a game of whack-a-mole that no one would have the authority or interest to play.
We need to create enforceable rights based on values that are new. But the people who profit from surveillance will be powerful enough, if they aren't already, to destroy or silence any voice that endangers their business model.
Any explanation appreciated.
Beyond a certain breadth, an overload of specificity becomes too vague to engage with. Claims that cover such wide ground are impossible to refute or dissect.
The people who do it think they're well-informed and providing a service, but it's poor form. It forces readers into a poison choice: abandon nuance to pile on in blanket agreement, or bash their heads against each other bickering in 50 threads about 50 tiny points for eternity.
No good comes from that.
I'd review its bullets, deeply, because a comment of that depth, in forums such as these, is usually either misdirection because of a personal or paid agenda,
or it was somebody that was passionate about knowledge, & had decided this was the best way to spread less than obvious conclusions they'd spent time compiling, in hopes to spur someone else into learning more.
Skipping those, even if in bad form, because of the former, was a disservice to myself and my goals. So I learned to discern.
For those who do not remember 11th grade English:
If something is ironic it's unexpected, often in an amusing way. If you're the world chess champion, it would be pretty ironic if you lost a match to someone who just learned to play yesterday. Ironic is the adjective for the noun irony. In contemporary speech, when we call something ironic, we often mean sarcastic. [From www.vocabulary.com]I’m sure you can find other ironic examples of NYT disregarding the privacy of vulnerable people for their own interests.