Cal Newport: It's Time to Dismantle the Technopoly
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
The network effects for social media are so strong as to push most people to the winning platform. Even without being a pre-installed default, Facebook and Twitter win. Google has to pay $47 billion a year to be the pre-installed default, indicating that their network effect is weaker.
The monopoly stuff is something we’re just barely starting to take any issue with here in 2023. But it remains an insider/tech topic.
> Techno-selectionists believe that we should continue to encourage and reward people who experiment with what comes next. But they also know that some experiments end up causing more bad than good.
While they may go further than most of us might like to in terms of rejection of certain technologies, they provide a model for the idea that the choice of whether and how to use particular technologies should be a societal decision.
Edit: reworded.
How is this, and most of the rest of what you're saying, different from the capitalist consumer lifestyle that's programmed into you if you're not Amish? To quote you, "You don't have a choice in that. When you grow up, all of your peers are programmed in the same way."
There only difference seems to be your claim that things don't change much for the Amish. But they do selectively adopt new technologies, just in ways that are consistent with their community values. Which is a discipline somewhat lacking in our tech-driven society.
It’s very different. When you are born into an insular, homogenous, high-control community like the Amish, or the Haredis (Orthodox Jews), or any of the countless cult communities (e.g. Children of God, LDS), you are expected to conform to the group. Usually these groups live apart from others and don’t allow outsiders in or members out. If you are raised in such a group, your mind has basically only been shown the ways of the group. And those ways have been presented as, “This is the way.” It’s just the way. There’s the group and there’s the way. If you don’t go along with the group and walk in the ways of the way, you are shunned. There’s no room for any kind of serious challenge of the way because the way has long since been sacralized. It is religion.
Modern Western culture is extremely open and heterogenous. Yes, a lot of programming gets pumped into young minds through media and the school system. But it’s not like religious indoctrination where a closed system of belief is installed in the young mind. You might think that sounds trite, but a person who is indoctrinated in a high-control community is never really shown how to ask a question that the religion doesn’t have an answer for. If they do ask such a question, they get reprimanded. They learn to just ingest and integrate the questions and answers that the group allows. The questions line up with the answers, everything is internally consistent. In contrast to that, when a young person in Western society comes of age (assuming they don’t live in a high-control community), the doors open to nearly limitless possible ways of thinking and being if the person has the curiosity to ask questions. A person can go in pretty much any direction they want with their philosophy, value system, habits, customs. They can become an anti-capitalist socialist counter-culture minimalist anarchist and ‘find their people’ just fine. All they have to do is follow their curiosity. In Western society, there are a countless doorways to different ways of thinking and being. Forums, universities, philosophers and intellectuals to follow. You can just as easily stumble INTO a high-control group that you weren’t born into.
There’s no comparison between that and a community like the Amish. They literally live apart and unto themselves. There are no doorways within the community to other ways of thinking. The only doorway is the exit doorway. If a person can’t follow the way of the group, there’s no place for them within the group because of how homogenous it is, and how much generational inertia that homogeneity has.
It’s really all about curiosity, critical thinking, and asking questions. What happens to you if you are curious, think critically, and ask a lot of questions in a modern, Western society? All of the doors open. What happens if you do the same in a high-control community? You get shunned, suppressed, and the only door that might open is the exit door.
Edit: expanded.
What an arrogant little troll you are to demand everyone else set aside such extravagant amounts of resources for your fetish.
[0]: https://thenib.com/im-a-luddite/
[1]: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-the-luddites-rea...
Sounds great! Let's unfuck the situation with Google/Apple having a chokehold on phones and app stores while we're at it.
As such, discussion of the nature of the problem and broad-strokes ideas about how it might be addressed - e.g. "techno-selectionism" - can be an important part of the process of improving the situation.
As for your proposed solution, breakups of companies like Meta, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and probably quite a few more, is certainly one potentially promising possibility.