The Luddites Warned Us About Google | Hacker News Reader

The Luddites Warned Us About Google

creativegood.com

28 pointsblueridge29 comments

Although the Unabomber also correctly identified systemic problems anti-efficiency, anti-technology, and/or terrorism are absurd, immoral, and untenable reactions to antitrust, profiteering, automation, and/or worker exploitation.

One prescription, although not a panacea, is profit-sharing, worker-owned co-ops of tech workers. Confederations of co-ops by tech trade or area could rival or supplant MAANGs but without the perverse incentives of publicly-traded companies and their defenestration of ethics or mercurial abandonment of valuable employees.

What problems do you think co-ops would meaningful address? Don't the perverse insentives still exist? Only who benefits changes.

I don't understand your question. Co-ops led by other values other than treating customers as the product to exploit. Do you not understand democratic socialism?

> Do you not understand democratic socialism?

i only understand that a system which require altruistic behaviour will not be stable.

Yeah, that was kind of my point in asking the question. Handing over companies to the employees might improve conditions for the employees but it does little to change any profit incentives they have. We need regulation and/or other external factors that force the fiduciary duty of companies (whether they be private/public/co-ops) to prioritize health, well being, privacy and the environment of both the employees and the customers.

Co-ops just make the employees the shareholders, the shareholders still want to maximize profit. It might improve working conditions but there's still no hard incentives to treat the customer any better at the expense of profit. Currently companies already have a profit incentive structure in the form of yearly bonuses or stock options and that's not lead to greater concern for consumer focused policies.

Why not user owned, or a nonprofit, instead of worker owned? It's too easy to imagine a worker owned advertising company that still wants to control everything.

Engineers typically already partially own their companies via equity grants, but we still have the whole landscape of enshittified tech

> The Luddites warned us about Google. Too much power in too few hands leads to bad outcomes for everyone: first for workers, then for customers, then for the industry itself.

The article argues this is the problem that regulators are having to grapple with and finally have found ways they can interfere in.

I just don't know how many tools and weapons they have in their arsenal to legally counter such commercial centralizations. I also don't know if there was sufficient advantage to decentralizing 10 years ago. And I don't know if we have exhausted the advantages in last ten years, such that no further benefits are to be had.

They also warned us about cars and oh boy did they hit the nail on the head with that one...

Are you being cheeky - I can't tell. Many people would argue that cities developed after the advent of the car are not as livable as cities developed before cars.

I am not being sarcastic. I honestly think that cars have ruined our cities and wrecked our culture. Luddites were honestly right about cars. Ray Bradbury was way too prophetic for comfort!

Cars or self-driving cars ?

I don't see a huge improvement when it comes to self-driving. They have all the same problems of their manual counterparts. They are loud, big, and dangerous.

On a complete tangent, your last sentence was quite jarring to read (at least for me).

I couldn’t work out what was wrong for a minute or two, but it’s the order of your adjectives.

> They are loud, big, and dangerous

To me reads easier as

> They are big, loud, and dangerous

Not nitpicking or trying to correct you, just a bit of personal commentary on the matter.

> But it isn't. There's a rule. The rule is that multiple adjectives are always ranked accordingly: opinion, size, age, shape, colour, origin, material, purpose.

https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/13/senten...

I based my comment off the Cambridge dictionary, which specifies the order as

> Opinion, size, physical quality, shape, age, colour, origin, material, type and purpose

I think loud is a physical quality, and big is the size so I think the ‘more valid’ way is the latter that I posted, isn’t it?

This is why I love Hacker News. Thousands of experts in thousands of topics. (Not sarcasm)

Haha, I’m absolutely no expert. My knowledge is broad, but far from deep. I like the saying ‘I know enough to be dangerous’, it perfectly suits me.

I agree with the general sentiment though, it’s why I come here too. That and the fact it’s a significantly healthier replacement for discussion than Reddit ever was.

I'm stunned that Apple collects $19 billion per year from Google to simply set Google search as the default on Apple devices.

Yes, the biggest privacy invader on the planet effectively purchased a monopoly on Apple devices.

It's just the default. Can't users change it? It's only "effectively a monopoly" because there's no interest among users in changing it.

Google pays Apple $20 billion a year to avoid competition and maintain a monopoly on Apple devices.

The fact that Apple users don't know any better doesn't change this.

There's two choices. Either they set a default, or they make the user choose which engine to use.

If they set a default, whoch is obviously the preference from a seamless experience perspective, how should Apple decide which engine to default to?

The obvious answer is let search providers bid.

If Google were paying Apple to keep other options off the platform, that would be a different story, but it's not a monopoly when a user continues to drive to the closest gas station despite there being an alternative right next door...

Bad analogy. A gas buyer is still making a choice.

Google pays Apple to eliminate the need for choice. And Apple users are accustomed to choices being made for them.

There's no world where it's monopolistic to be the default choice when other choices exist. They're making no effort, so far as anyone is aware, to remove other search engine choices from any devices or browsers.

And for the record, I'm no fan of Google at all. I use a different search engine on all of my devices (was a huge Neeva evangelist until they got bought and gutted by Snowflake, currently jumping between Bing and SearXNG). But the fact remains that paying to be the default option among a half dozen or more search engines for users to choose from is not "maintaining a monopoly" by any definition.

The obvious answer would be for apple to choose the best search engine for the users needs

And how are they expected to determine each user's needs?

Sounds like a cult.

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