I recently was on a plane with broken inflight entertainment, so all you could watch was a single movie in lock step with everyone else. When the movie ended, there was a weird sense of camaraderie; "we are all stuck in this tube and we all just sat through that mediocre movie".
The extreme manipulation, not personalisation. The latter would be for your benefit, Youtube would study how to make their users happy, have better sleep, be better informed, not fall for scams, etc.
But instead they are studying how to make us spend most time on the most clickbait cospiracy theories.
If you know a way to make money from exclusively showing users content that makes them happier, better informed, better rested, etc., then by all means go ahead -- I sincerely wish you the best. But you won't need my good wishes, because you will soon outcompete YouTube and all the rest with your healthy-yet-still-profitable alternative.
If it turns out that people don't behave as we had hoped, we can always say that the approach that was implemented is not the true approach.
That is what democratic countries already do every 3-5 years -- and TTBOMK the system that gets chosen has so far had capitalism as an important component every single time, despite the option to vote for parties that eschew it partly or completely.
I think the counterargument that I would mount is that what people want, or think what they want, isn't necessarily what is good for them. This is obviously a very dangerous line of thought - because it can justify all sorts of oppression - but I think it's nevertheless true.
>That is what democratic countries already do every 3-5 years
Not sure what country you live in but in Canada they just give you a list of 4 or 5 names of people and you choose one, there's no asking of people what they'd like to do in the slightest. In fact, it's even worse: the folks campaign with certain sales pitches, but rarely follow up on their promises.
It is fascinating how well done story telling can make people oblivious to what physically occurs.
If the answer is no, then the fact that no one currently on the ballot represents such a party is just evidence that Canadians, today, have almost no interest in these political approaches.
>the folks campaign with certain sales pitches, but rarely follow up on their promises.
I agree this is a serious problem with existing democratic systems, but I don't know what to do about it. In theory people punish politicians who fail to deliver by voting them out, but in practice, a lot happens between elections, and people's attention wanders.
I am curious why you can "know" all the other things you allege, yet not also "know" this? Is there something different about the proposition?
I find solace in knowing that I don't have a say in it. Because regardless of what the idea was, whenever someone tried to force everyone to go along with it and base a society on it, it turned out disastrously.
The only thing we can all do it be open minded, honest, and set a good example for the next generation who will take over and hopefully improve on what we did, while making their own mistakes.
Without regulation, this is what happens - the bank would collect your organs for payment if they could. Buinesses have no ethical standards.
Profit maximing business did not invent antibiotics, did not invent sanitation, did not create public sewers, running water, soap, GPS, and clorination of water.
Soviet russian and chinese industrialization was different, but later and not relevant to the Atlantic slave trade that parent poster was talking about.
Of course. "Industrialization requires profit, except when it doesn't". Got it.
> but later and not relevant to the Atlantic slave trade that parent poster was talking about.
I didn't realize they used steam ships to transport slaves from Africa to Americas, where they made them work in factories to produce industrial goods.
If you don't industrialize, slavery never ends. It was everywhere in human societies until industrialization.
The Bible has passages on how to be a moral slave owner.
As far as conflating industrialization with capitalism, I'm sorry, I'm actually very far left politically but this is just a fact. It's underappreciated in the west that 5 year plans worked well, but they were following a template 200 years, 2 full centuries, later. 100 years after successful British capitalists banned slavery.
And calling 'industrialization' 'capitalism' and 'profit maximizing business' all the same thing and then shrugging it off after getting called out, you are just showing that you ignorant of what any of it means. And your last two sentences are non-sensical -- I literally cannot figure out what 5 year plans have to do with slavery in the west.
There's a principle of charity when reading that you may want to consider.
There happens to be a correlation with a bunch of nice things because we happen to live in the modern era, but you can't attribute everything to capitalism because, as we noted it was not the only system in place which did these things.
I would like you to find some scholarly research which can bolster your theory.
After industrialization, it goes away within 1-200 years every place that industrialized. Probably because it's not economical anymore in the presence of industrial production.
You're saying that this observation is so out of pocket that it doesn't deserve a charitable hearing?
To say that wouldn't have happened without industrialization, which wouldn't have happened without profit maximization, which wouldn't have happened without capitalism, is not logical. There is nothing inherent in capitalism which requires profit maximization at the expense of humans, it just requires exploitation of private property (note exploitation here means 'being used' not 'being used in a necessarily harmful manner). There is nothing inherent in industrialization which requires profit maximization, it just requires a cheap source of energy and labor and a market (note that this can be a planned market as in communism, or a market in which the demand is created only for war production and is fed by looting conquered territory, as the fascists did in WWII).
And there is nothing which precludes slavery existing because any of those other things exist. In fact, there were massive amounts of slaves who toiled under Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in the modern era, and we only don't have them now because they lost the war.
Sorry, your theory holds no water.
Remember what I said about charity?
Frankly I'm disappointed, you should have called me racist for saying only Europeans can invent stuff.
It's a tradeoff. Some things are better, other things are worse. There's nothing wrong, and everything right, with examining those tradeoffs and deciding if they need adjustment.
Unimaginable today.
I suppose the FDR had better writers, and was better at sticking to his scripts.
But there were a lot of people who referred to FDR as "that man in the White House" rather than use his name. And Edmund Wilson quoted somebody at a dinner party in the 1930s, where someone denouncing Hitler was answered with "That's going too far. You're talking about him as if he was Roosevelt."
It also is like a restaurant where everyone is required to be silent and not use phones...
I agree, though, it is very easy to isolate nowadays. And fewer and fewer third spaces exist if one were looking to interact.
It's probably just because my interests are obscure but my assumption has always been I live in my own bubble. Even my friends don't consume anything like the same media I do, going back to the early aughts.
About once a month I'll be watching a YouTube Short and my wife will yell out "Hey, I saw that on Tiktok"
You think, that's just a joke?
Just wait until you're married...
It’s fascinating how they’ve affected culture to the point where people don’t even see them anymore.
Personalization is profoundly powerful technology at scale. Do not underestimate their influence. What you talk about is the ever present concern of people who know you will talk, and almost everyone talks.
Cow hoof trimming (a Scottish guy Hoof GP and a US one someone the hoof guy), painting restoration (complicated name Beaumsometing), cooking (an Aussie guy Andy, and a British one who dances at the end of the preparation) and science (Veritaserum, Numberphile etc.)
I skipped the French channels about cooking (grolandiers) and science.
I now realize that I am really bad with the names of the channels :)
Could be that.
Metaphorically...Both of you were offered "the same meal at the cafeteria" so to speak. Based on what "others" who visited that particular cafeteria had eaten in the past.
This happens all the time to me when I visit friends. I realize the reason I have a suggestion on my youtube was because that was what the person who I was just visiting would want to watch.
Linkedin does this too with suggested contacts. I would imagine spotify and others do as well.
I said one day to a friend of mine how it was "getting creepy" and his response was "Isn't this what we have been asking for though?"
That has not been my experience unless you like a random selection of the latest big-budget movies mixed with weird artsy films.
> and if we are talking about watching on a phone quality doesn't matter (if anything plane screen is bigger).
Physically bigger (compared to a phone) but almost guaranteed to be lower resolution, have worse colors and contrast and the touch controls are barely working. You can also bring a tablet or laptop if you prefer a larger screen.