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Comment by isoprophlex | Hacker News Reader

Good to have more people expose the greedy, dictatorial, detrimental shitshow that is single individuals having an outsized control over important technology. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Noone should be as big as Zuck, Musk, Altman, Bezos...

I had one moment of eyebrow-raising while reading the article. On the risk of blaming someone who was mind controlled into caring too much about ultimately unimportant, spiritually toxic shit:

> Wynn-Williams’ critiques aren’t limited to Zuckerberg. She describes the working culture under Sandberg as so intense that Wynn-Williams felt pressured to send her talking points while in labor, her feet in stirrups.

My thinking is... can you put this 100% on Sandberg? I mean, I get that the culture is bad, but there's two in this game. Maybe... turn off your phone for a day when you're giving birth?!

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> My thinking is... can you put this 100% on Sandberg? I mean, I get that the culture is bad, but there's two in this game. Maybe... turn off your phone for a day when you're giving birth?!

Sure, but you can look at this in one of two ways. One is the way you seem to be angling for, where we have an employee who is so disturbingly eager to please that she continues to do work at absurd times when no one should ever expect to be working. The other way is of an employee who has seen how her boss treats employees, and believes that her position, career, and livelihood would be in jeopardy if she wasn't working even in situations where no one should be expected to be working.

I think the second take is more likely. And even if we think it's bizarre that someone could get to the point where they believe that kind of devotion to their job is necessary, it's still alarming and raises red flags that a company culture could cause someone to get to the point that they'd feel that way.

> The other way is of an employee who has seen how her boss treats employees, and believes that her position, career, and livelihood would be in jeopardy if she wasn't working even in situations where no one should be expected to be working.

Honestly, they need to grow a pair

This kind of pressure (might) have worked for me if I was just out of university and such. But with experience you get to learn your boundaries

You're a top-level executive and you're afraid of being let go by such a silly thing? They can't wait 2 or 3 days for "top level bullet points"? Seems like they depend on you more than you depend on them

Big companies tend to develop cult dynamics. This is not an exaggeration, but a consequence of how humans tend to operate in large amounts. And I'd wager that in the case of Silicon Valley tech companies, this is also something that they embrace and nurture. I don't think this is a controversial take at all, and rather obvious.

She was probably not "afraid of being let go" (fired), but had convinced herself that it was of the utmost importance to have this level of committment. The book probably reads similar to those books of someone who leaves their church or cult.

They tend to have cult dynamics because the people who subscribe to the cult dynamics are the ones who get promoted. If you’re happy to just make a living as a software engineer instead of trying to propel your way up the ladder of the world’s richest companies then you can live very happily and comfortably.

Yes, but this is not the people they'll hire for this kind of job. They're looking for the batshit crazy that will do this kind of stuff. This is the reason for the psychological profile they do in lieu of interview, when hiring managers.

Not sure why you’re getting downvoted. These cowards are ruining workplaces everywhere by having no backbone and subjecting their subordinates to the whims of psychopathic leaders.

Edit: it’s OK Meta employees. The best time to quit was years ago, the second best time is today.

At least they were not sleeping under their desks to stroke Musks's egomania.

I am inclined to agree with you but I do have a bit of nuance to add. Pretty sure this is not going to be a popular opinion but I think the second POV you present is apt but dependant on hierarchy level as well as each individual's drive to succeed.

From my understanding that incident happened while she was in a directorial position, not some IC level. At that level one has to constantly actively balance private life and work, no one will do it for you. I am all for supporting employees on all levels (and sure her superior could and should have done some things differently) but if your aspirations and perseverance get you to the point where you are flirting with the C suite, you should also be aware the you own your decisions now.

On the other hand, if you are that far in, that you are "flirting with the C suite", it is almost impossible not to have knowledge about you having joined a data gobbling sect/mafia, that will eat you up alive, if you upset them. So while she should have been aware that she makes her own decisions, she might also have been aware of what happens, if she does.

> while she should have been aware that she makes her own decisions, she might also have been aware of what happens, if she does.

I don't understand. In my world view, owning your decisions includes understanding the paths those decisions might lead to and finding your ~piece~peace with that.

EDIT: s/piece/peace/

> EDIT: s/piece/peace/

This is a minor typo whose real intent was still understandable, you fixed it right away, and no one had replied yet. Adding the fake strike through and edit note makes your post a bit harder and more inconvenient to read with no advantage. You can just edit it in place, there would be no harm to it.

You're completely right. It is an annoyance in this site to see people listing very small edits as if something important was happening.

>flirting with the C suite

It sounds like one of the issues was that the C-Suite flirted with her

>Wynn-Williams also writes that Kaplan, as her boss, made inappropriate comments to her, including repeatedly asking where she was bleeding from after childbirth. She writes that, shortly after he called her sultry in front of other co-workers, Kaplan ground into her on a dance floor. She triggered an investigation into Kaplan and writes that she was “almost immediately” retaliated against with a cut in duties before eventually being fired. Wynn-Williams describes the investigation as a “farce.”

The fact that Kaplan was later appointed as a Trump liason only bolsters her claims (as if there were any reason to disbelieve them in the first place).

It sounds like there were witnesses to the major events mentioned, which makes things simpler than 1:1... but in general people don't tend to make these kinds of things up, in my experience.

If Sandberg was a man it would not have happened.

Woman-on-Woman violence in the workplace has to stop, instead of trying to constantly take each other down they need to be better allies to other women.

Especially true for those that aspire to be role models for successful women and write books about how to "Lean In".

I am sorry, but this attitude is sexist. My allies are those I can relate to, those which I can cooperate with. I don't pick my allies based on gender, and nor should you. And you shouldn't coerce anyone into forming alliances based on gender. It is the person that matters, not their gender or race or whatever other random attribute.

Its sexism all the way down - Sandberg would not have done that to a male subordinate (who's wife was giving birth) and a male boss would not have done that to Wynn-Williams.

Women should not discriminate against women in the workplace because they are women.

Plenty of men get asked to do work that takes them away from their families, including at special events.

Controversial, but shouldn't be: men are on average better at standing up for themselves and saying "no".

I'm not sure whether men are truly better on average, or women are just on average more conditioned by our societies not to do so or even if, to do so in a manner that isn't effective.

Unlearning ~2 decades of upbringing, education, expectations, some of that from religion, etc when entering the workforce could be pretty hard and significantly affect any statistics around this.

Why does it matter where the statistic has come from? It doesn't make it any less true.

It isn't violence. Stop this stupid hyperbole. Violence is a real term. Don't water it down.

“Violence” means “to damage or adversely affect” and includes psychological harm. This is recognised by dictionaries.

I agree don’t trivialize violence. Sending an email or txt to asking for some talking points is not violent.

I don’t think anyone reasonably thinks that’s what the poster was saying. Presumably the violence is in creating the type of work environment where you are so oppressed or manipulated that you feel immense pressure to reply in that situation.

If you’re checking your work email and replying to it during labour, I somehow doubt you feel like you were being “asked” and respected as a human being.

But I don’t know the full story from all parties, and I get the feeling you don’t either. I wasn’t judging this particular case in my previous reply, merely pointing out that violence can take many forms and we shouldn’t narrow our thinking of what it means to do harm.

Yes, the Newspeak dictionaries.

Are the Oxford and Collins dictionaries newspeak now? That’s a conspiracy theory I hadn’t heard before.

I agree for something like a McDonalds employee or even entry level software engineer but this is a senior managerial role at Facebook. Nobody needs to do this job. Unless your spending is out of control you do not need this income. So if it comes with unreasonable demands, I don’t really care. There are problems worth caring about and this ain’t one of them.

What the leadership does will be mirrored down to the grunt. I have never lead a multi billion dollars corporation but from my view if your team can discard someone easily, they can also bear not having that person around for two weeks. Or a year.

Honestly I feel that father and mothers getting back from a years parental leave usually comes back with better focus.

In an alternative version of reality, she would be so distracted, that she failed to give birth and the child died as a consequence of her being completely absorbed in a toxic work culture. That alternative version of reality would be completely believable, and probably many would not be more surprised than now reading this news. This tells us all we need to know about FB.

I don't think giving birth works that way.

If you have a job at Facebook today, you can get an impressive job somewhere else tomorrow. Nobody should be that connected.

It seems pretty extreme to say that her livelihood was in jeopardy given that her salary was probably an order of magnitude more than an average worker. She likely put up with that and other toxic behavior because she was highly ambitious and wanted to keep making immense amounts of money.

This doesn't excuse Sandberg at all, I'm sure she would be a horrifically bad person to work for. But when I read that section I immediately thought of highly ambitious people I've worked with who I could see on either side of that encounter. Such people often are highly materially successful, although most of them don't seem very happy about it.

> My thinking is... can you put this 100% on Sandberg? I mean, I get that the culture is bad, but there's two in this game. Maybe... turn off your phone for a day when you're giving birth?!

Kind of reminds me of this Simpsons joke: "Marge, it takes two to lie. One to lie, and one to listen."

It's Facebook though - I can not think of a lower stakes workplace.

Should the photo grid be 3 wide or 5 wide... Thank god ChatGPT can now pump out the mindless talking points for them.

It's Facebook - a website that is a large part of life to over 3 billion users. A website that can influence elections in major countries, that sometimes shows fake ads and is responsible for (roughly) millions of frauds caused by them, that incited genocides in African countries.

I don't think the stakes are that low.

> website that can influence elections in major countries,

I think this sort of power transferred to twitter, with most of the users who haven't left facebook being boomers who keep reposting AI slop over and over and over.

The rare times I look at my facebook account, all I see is the older members of my family spamming AI garbage like shrimp jesus, "look at this nice dog sculpture I made out of wood" (that I didn't actually make), videos of random nonsense like dogs taking care of toddlers and behaving like humans etc.

FB has become AI slop no man's land.

I don't even understand how facebook continues to operate at this point.

> this sort of power transferred to twitter

Twitter is not the place where the masses are being influenced. Especially outside the US, as in most other countries Twitter barely found adoption outside of tech and journalist circles.

The majority of voting people (= old people) are still on Facebook. And besides Facebook, Meta also own Instagram. Meta is definitely the single company with the most encompassing political influence tool, should it choose to use it.

I think people still use FB because it given them something to feel better. In Twitter/X you see all kinds of bad things happening, but in FB they sign up for groups that send only the things they like to see (most of that being fake, anyway).

In Portugal and I believe most of the world outside the US, Instagram and FB are king. Tiktok is also popular with the younger generations.

> I don't even understand how facebook continues to operate at this point.

They operate internationally. FB is still big in some of the South Pacific/Asia nations like the Philippines and India (iirc).

None of the people you mentioned's companies sell products your life depends on. If you don't like them, don't use or buy their products. I'm of the opinion that AWS, facebook and tesla cars are genuine trash. I don't know why people use that stuff.

Because your opinion is wrong. Problems with social media notwithstanding, just because you don't like the person who's running/ruining/most associated with the brand, doesn't make the product itself bad.

Most people don't give two fraks about who Bezos or Musk or Zuckerberg are, and they definitely don't think of them when using products and services from the companies you mentioned.

> Because your opinion is wrong.

I was having a strong argument/discussion yesterday with a friend who is a communist. A real "I want hammer and sickle" kinda guy. He owns two homes, works for big-pharma, his wife works for big-logistic, scuba-diving vacations across the planet, very 'communist' way of life.

His opinions (just as the parent-commenter) are not 'wrong'. His/her/our/their (not pronouns, just groups of people) are different to ours. They got a different vision of this world (which of course it costs them nothing - until Communism settles and they are beheaded for having two homes, SP500 investments, and going scuba-diving across the planet!!)

> Most people don't give two fraks

"What are you talking about dude?? I got all these Gmail, and OneDrive, and Webex stuff for free!! It's like modern day communism!!" /s

This post is such a cocktail of confusion with a dash of McCarthyism that I have to say thank you for existing, and keeping the torch of this muddled thinking all the way from the post-war period.

Thank you for never learning what communism means, for staying embattled and internalising the narrative, for your anecdotes about your rich friend who doesn't realize that communists are lurking out there, waiting to kill him and everyone with wealth, once they get in power.

I'd ask you to never change, but I know that you won't, you'll paint your future thoughts through the same stencil that I've heard and seen so many times. When you express this it feels like I get a taste of the real America, a trailer park with the metheads, the uncle that just got back from jail, educating his young nephew about how the world works.

"You see son, there are rich people and they are good. And there are bad folks called communists that are jealous and want to kill the good rich folks. Be sure to carry your gun with you and if you see any of them communists, shoot them up. Because we will be rich one day. God bless America."

>a friend who is a communist.

>His opinions (just as the parent-commenter) are not 'wrong'.

Yes they are. Communism is obviously wrong. Are you joking?

> just because you don't like the person...

Do we need that person to keep having the product though?

> Most people don't give two fraks...

They sure don't. These products and services are more like a... public good, used by and available to everyone.

But if it's a common good then should it be managed like a dictatorship?

The people using them don't have an equivalent alternative, and the companies have moats on a scale never seen before. Is that an issue?

Zuck is selling his customers wholesale, and squandering the resulting cash on asinine, unthinkably dumb projects like Metaverse. Maybe he should have just stayed with the initial product?

Maybe these public platforms would better serve the people using them without the person running/ruining/most associated with the brand?

Maybe?

I'm first to argue that, past certain size, social media platforms become de-facto town squares / utilities, and should be treated as such. But, until they are...

> Zuck is selling his customers wholesale, and squandering the resulting cash on asinine, unthinkably dumb projects like Metaverse. Maybe he should have just stayed with the initial product?

... until they are, it's kind of the core axiom behind capitalism and market economy and social order in most places around the world, that this is his money, and if he wants to be "squandering the resulting cash on" (according to you) "asinine, unthinkably dumb projects like Metaverse", it's his prerogative.

Sure, currently Zuck can do anything he wants with the money he gets from the users in his cage.

We should really open the cage though. Can you imagine being able to call people only on your mobile network, or being able to send e-mail only to people using the same e-mail provider?

Yet we accept only being able to connect with, share photos and posts, message, subscribe to people on the same social platform as you.

If we can define a technical specification for exchanging social data, and enforce that the platforms above certain size implement it, Zuck won't even have the cash to dump on Metaverse. Every platform can then have their own algorithmic feed so you can chose your own echo chamber.

The moat is only good the Zucks of the world. It absolutely sucks for everyone else.

> just because you don't like the person who's running/ruining/most associated with the brand, doesn't make the product itself bad.

And just because that product does something you need doesn't mean it's not trash. GP didn't say "all cloud, all social media, all cars". Heck, literal trash is not all trash, people throw away a lot of good stuff.

Many people thought Tesla cars are diamond studded trash since Musk was still an idol. And it was pretty objective, great motor/battery surrounded by bargain bin components.

I didn't say the products are trash because of who is at the helm of the companies. They are just bad compared to alternatives. Period.

That's a very naive take, not using their products doesn't stop them from negatively impacting society. Look at what Musk is doing over the whole world (and the other two aren't much better, just not as obvious about it). It's not about being fair or jealous or whatever, a single individual having so much wealth and thus power is simply not healthy for society.

You cannot avoid FB. They literally stalk you everywhere and sell your info to advertisers. You are their product whether you like it or not.

It’s easy to delete your account though. They may still track you, but you’re not feeding the attention machine.

It won't 'protect' you. They still track you and have a shadow account for you, and sell the data. FB is a cancer that won't go away until we/you do.

You can protect yourself by blocking all 'social media buttons' (as LI or Pinterest do the same), and for FB block every domain they use and their range of IPs. But there are so many trackers that will (eventually) get the 'job' done, so you either do 'more' (replace hosts file, add firewall on your Android and block ad broker, doubleclick, adjust, mopub, google analytics, etc. etc (loooooong list).

Surveillance capitalism is not going anywhere. Where money can be made, money will be made.

> It won't 'protect' you. They still track you and have a shadow account for you, and sell the data. FB is a cancer that won't go away until we/you do.

Firstly, this is just not true. Like basically all users who couldn't be mapped to a FB person were given userid=0, which I guess is a shadow account, but it's pretty crap as a method of tracking people. Source: worked at FB for half a decade.

I do all that, and don't use any Facebook products. It's not so hard, and has the benefit (to some) of never being invited to a WhatsApp group.

The problem is these companies buy competitors or bribe hardware/platforms in order to get market monopoly. So often it's impossible to find alternative products.

Boycotts might work occasionally but they are often not enough.

Have you tried figuring it out? It's not magic or miracle, there are reasons why they're profitable and if it's not obvious you might get surprised and learn something if you try to study it.

One reason is that they are extremely manipulative and strategically exploit people with power over other people's money, notably taxes and what labour generates.

They are super profitable because of the naivety of their customers and for that you can't blame the companies themselves.

Do you think fraud ought to be legal?

These kinds of amoral corporate hierarchies will by their nature promote people who give themselves over entirely to the business. It's not that everyone who works there turns into that kind of corporate drone, it just weeds out the people who value more of a work/life balance. If someone is willing to send talking point while they're in labour, a company with the corporate culture of Facebook isn't going to stop them, they're going to be rewarded.

> My thinking is... can you put this 100% on Sandberg? I mean, I get that the culture is bad, but there's two in this game. Maybe... turn off your phone for a day when you're giving birth?!

Do you want your job still?

sure you can take "holiday", but if you don't please your capricious master, you'll not have a job to come back to.

I can well believe that Sandberg is someone who lacks empathy of her immediate underlings, the mission comes first after all.

Blaming victims for the abuse they suffer is a common theme in modern society.

The fact she felt she could not turn her phone off without there being consequences is the core point here.

At a certain point ones unwillingness to accept consequences is capitulation pure and simple and it is what allows people to continue to behave shittily. Takes 2 to tango.

Don't foget the less visible guys (yes, it's a gender issue ;) like Thiel, Andreeeesssssen etc

It's not just about one individual pushing for more... it's the entire system that values work over personal well-being and creates an environment where people feel they can't step away, even during life-changing events.

> Noone should be as big as Zuck, Musk, Altman, Bezos...

There should be a level of market cap where you company has to split, period. Megacorps create oligarchs, ruin competition and cheat antitrust.

Or have a tax bracket after which you pay 100%.

There is a whole industry in the US to celebrate that some people are getting richer. And it is literally funded by some of the richest people in that list.

The more I learn about Sandberg the more I think she's actually psychotic

> Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Might it be an option that correlation and causation are reversed here?

Given the amount of criticsm a typical leader of a large company, or even a country, gets these days, it is no wonder that people with narcissistic traits have an advantage. Somewhat more empathetic people would've given up already, either when they received a large enough reward, or whenever they got serious criticsm on bad practices.

Free tip for a better society: stop worshipping success.

>Noone should be as big as Zuck, Musk, Altman, Bezos...

What should be the maximum of how big someone should be?

Humans are not perfect, whether "big" or "small".

Certainly the "maximum big level" is something that reasonable people could disagree about, but I don't think a society is healthy when people can get as big as Zuckerberg, Musk, Altman, and Bezos have gotten.

Individuals should not have that much power. It's not healthy.

It is definitely not healthy.

But I don't think you can limit people's wealth and not call it communism.

I think the real problem is abuse of power, not accumulation of it.

Power cannot be eliminated. It will either end up in the hand of politicians (who are genuinely more evil than tech bros) or remain in hands of wealth creators.

What we should do is focus of punishingpeople who abuse thier power.

> But I don't think you can limit people's wealth and not call it communism.

Of course you can. Those billionaires don't pay much taxes, but normal people do. And we don't call that communism.

> It will either end up in the hand of politicians (who are genuinely more evil than tech bros)

This is a very weird take. In a functioning democracy (which the US are not at the moment), politicians are elected to represent the people. If they are evil, we change them. Tech bros are not elected, period.

> What we should do is focus of punishingpeople who abuse thier power.

That's where you completely miss the problem: the problem is that when people get too powerful, we cannot punish them anymore.

Similar with companies: you have to prevent companies to become as big as the FAANGs before they do. Otherwise they become too powerful and do whatever they want.

> But I don't think you can limit people's wealth and not call it communism.

In communism, an individual can not own any means of production - effectively 0% of the society's total capital. I don't think it follows that any non-communist system must permit any single individual to gain up to 100% of the society's wealth.

I don't know what the limit could look like or how to make it work, but societies commonly called capitalist already implement various brakes on free trade, from regulation to capital and immigration controls, subsidies, tariffs...

> But I don't think you can limit people's wealth and not call it communism.

What is wrong with calling it communism? It's just a name.. You so much internalized "communism bad" that you look at a good idea and think it is bad because it reminds you something else that was implemented badly.

And by the way, you can also call it democratic socialism (democratic is really redundant).

> But I don't think you can limit people's wealth and not call it communism.

Is that your actual objection? It sounds more like a smear by association.

Famously, the USA under Eisenhower had a top marginal tax rate of 90% on income over $200K - "merely" a few million dollars in modern-day money.

Was the Eisenhower administration Communist? If it wasn't, would it have become Communist if they had gone a bit further and added a marginal rate of 99% for income over oh, let's say $20M (a few hundred million dollars nowadays)?

I think if you traveled back in time and proposed such a bill, the reaction from folks like Senator McCarthy would not have been "that's Communism" but more likely "that's a ridiculous and useless bill, how could anyone ever accumulate that much personal wealth? It would be absurd".

Andrew Carnegie was worth something like 300 billion USD (today, inflation adjusted). So that level of wealth was not unknown by the time of the Eisenhower administration.

Good point!

On that note, trust-busting is also worth discussing as a counter to the modern concentration of wealth.

One question is why communism is a problem. It is a problem because it is a totalitarian regime. I.e., a non-democratic government. I am not sure limiting peoples wealth is the actual problem with communism.

Sure, the real problem is the abuse of power. This is the nature of power, though. Give a person or an organization too much power and it will find a way to abuse it. In democratic government, the power of the government is limited by having three independent branches where, at the least, the laws are being made by representatives of the people. In democratic government there are some evil politicians but not too many. In the US the situation went completely off the rails and one of the parties completely deteriorated. I cannot help thinking that statements like 'politicians, who are genuinely more evil' are part of the problem. I.e., this became a self-fulfilling prophecy. The party where people tend to believe this turns out the consist of crooks, is maybe not that surprising.

'What we should do is focus of punishing people who abuse their power.'. Well, this presumes that there are institutions capable of doing this. For instance, a democratic government.

Somewhat similar to Paul Graham's essay _Inequality and Risk_[1]:

> I realize startups are not the main target of those who want to eliminate economic inequality. What they really dislike is the sort of wealth that becomes self-perpetuating through an alliance with power. ... But if you try to attack this type of wealth through economic policy, it's hard to hit without destroying startups as collateral damage.

> The problem here is not wealth, but corruption. So why not go after corruption?

[1] https://paulgraham.com/inequality.html

This is a convenient cover because it allows people to convert a measurable and fairly concrete thing into a more vague and flexible thing. Suddenly, all somebody needs to do is make a claim that what they are doing isn't corruption and they are off the hook. They'll be hypothetical billionaires that are the problem, but never any actual action.

There are several faults with this reasoning. Capital attracts capital, and with too low of marginal taxes, it pools at the top, increasing wealth inequality, hurting the non-elite's ability to compete, and squeezes the middle class. To say marginal taxes is communism is just wrong.

Capital attracting capital is as natural as power corrupting people. Instead of hoping people play nice and punishing the few who get caught and hoping against nature, the better alternative is to set up systems that encourage healthy, competitive markets through sensible rules, regulations, and redistribution.

Edit: re the socialism/communism scarecrow, back when woman started wearing pants in the US, they called it socialist. That same logic is oft applied today.

Power can be diffused. Wealth accumulation is power concentration. When it's legal to buy politicians then what is corruption? How can you go after corruption when those with power define what is corruption?

Concentrated power is corrupt, there's no power without the will to wield it. If you have more power than 99 percent of humans, they become insects for you.

>But I don't think you can limit people's wealth and not call it communism

I'll have "Everything I don't like is communism" for 500, Alex.

Ever heard of this little-known thing called taxes?

Particularly, progressive taxation and wealth taxes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_tax

>What we should do is focus of punishingpeople who abuse thier power.

Wealth isn't power.

Obscene accumulation of wealth is abuse of power in and of itself.

You can limit people's wealth and it's not communism. If it was communism then they wouldn't have any wealth at all. A limit would just be democratic capitalism with a limit. There's no rule in capitalism that says you can't be taxed, or that the taxes couldn't be designed to approach a wealth limit. It's an economic system, not an entire governmental and social handbook.

Then the people who punish those in power will gain too much power.

The reality is our system is not compatible with the internet. Our system is made for a network with much lower density and clustering coefficient. When you crank these up with the internet, it creates power law distributions everywhere.

Complaining a few people have all the wealth when we have created a society with this massive power law distribution of wealth is just pointlessly stupid. Of course they do.

There is nothing really to figure out. The system isn't going to work long term. I think most people are just in denial of this because they think there is a solution. No, what we are doing right now, communicating like this, is the problem itself.

Of course, if we stopped using the internet society would collapse too.

There is no solution.

While I agree that 'our system' is failing in part due to its preference for a sparser network than the one we have today, I disagree strongly on your conclusion.

You (and I) have no idea whether there is a solution. We've only explored the tiniest fraction of the societal solution space. The idea that we've exhaustively searched it by trying both "communism" AND "capitalism" is idiocy.

Choose to believe that we can build a better world. It might not be true, but it's certainly false if none of us believe it.

Presumably this is intended to lead into an argument that because we disagree on exactly where the limit should be we shouldn’t have a limit at all. We could make the same case against drunk driving, speed limits, age of consent laws, maximum sentencing…

Yeah, I don't know why we would need a limit, I'm sure if a temper tantrum devolves into one of them building their own robo army. The others will follow suit and it will all just balance itself out.

The imperfections of 'big' people have much more ramifications than the imperfections of 'small' people. Humans work best together in much more egalitarian groups where the imperfections of individuals are compensated by the strengths of other individuals.

> Humans are not perfect, whether "big" or "small".

Still, I've never seen a poor human becoming an oligarch.

The problem is not that those billionaires are not perfect, rather that they have too much power.

> What should be the maximum of how big someone should be?

In democracy, the maximum should be 1. One vote per person. That's it.

In practice, we can delegate stuff, but I don't see reason why should people (as adults) accept any sort of authoritarianism in their lives.

Ah, but this wasn't the question. You've confused formal political input with the broader idea of power.

In this hypothetical perfectly fair democracy, the ones with power would be the ones best able to sway the populace. Popularity, rhetoric, and control over media would skew the true distribution of power away from the perfectly flat one you might be hoping for.

Instead of aiming for perfection, we should oppose the systems that result in power becoming more concentrated over time. Our goal is an equilibrium where power is spread broadly and the most powerful are the most deserving (e.g, a scientist's voice has power because their expertise is respected).

One person, one vote is a good place to start. But it isn't the whole solution.

You probably don't have an issue with limiting government power. Why is limiting an individual reaching power of governments so difficult to fathom?

The problem is power accumulation, "small" people have a harder time limiting my freedoms by abusing their power.

I don't want a king, whether they got to be king by swords or money.

I don't know what the maximum wealth should be, but I do know that it is lower than one billion dollars. So let's start there.

Billionaires are bad for society.

> Good to have more people expose the greedy, dictatorial, detrimental shitshow that is single individuals having an outsized control over important technology. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Noone should be as big as Zuck, Musk, Altman, Bezos...

People amassing more money than entire countries just should not happen. "Eat the rich"!

Tuvalu has a GDP of $70 million. Is that the line?

It is a very small country.

You're trying pretty hard to miss the point here.

Honestly that seems high enough, yeah.

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