Cory Doctorow: Amazon's $31b “ad business” isn't | Hacker News Reader

Cory Doctorow: Amazon's $31b “ad business” isn't

pluralistic.net

15 pointsyk3 comments

This is a nice _description_ of why Amazon is a catastrophe, but not a _prescription_ of what we can do to mitigate its harms. In many areas of tech analysis we're stuck at a saturation point where we know what's not working, but fail to answer "what is to be done?" so that moral tech critique cannot jump the Humean gap of turning what _is_ into _oughts_ .

Beyond naive knee-jerks like "Don't buy stuff from Amazon" and "They must be broken up and regulated", what mature systems-theoretical wisdom can be brought to problems like this? It's not like we didn't see it coming. The trajectory of Amazon toward captive payola and race-to-the-bottom "crapification" was writing on the wall 10 years ago. It seems that "economics" has failed as an instrument to manage such matters. Descent into entrenched libertarian or authoritarian politics is unhelpful because it's obvious that neither free markets nor regulation are sufficient.

Something is wrong with how we're building these entities and the conditions by which we allow them to grow out of control. It's time for radical alterations at the protocol and constitutional levels in order to disfavour agglomeration.

You've captured one of my chief frustrations with the left. There's an overwhlming focus on analyzing what is wrong but so little stategizing to give people concrete actions to take that could improve matters. Too much explanation just depresses people rather than motivates them to make changes. Still, Doctorow's analysis is spot-on here and he does more strategizing than many.

As a self-identifying neoliberal I share a similar observation and frustration. I think it was Adam Gopnik who pointed out that the left is great at pointing it problems, but bad at developing solutions. If they have a solution it's often too simplistic sand tries to go directly to the goal, ignoring all side effects. My canonical example here is rent control. The right on the other hand tends to deny that any problem exists or more recently just tries to rewind the clock. I now notice this frequently and it's quite disheartening.

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