Democracy and the open internet die in daylight
heatherburns.tech
heatherburns.tech
The solution is the same as it has always been, stop spending time and money on things that are frustrating. If enough people do it in aggregate, then things will change; but I'll be damned if people aren't slow to catch on.
Gas station at 6a, nothing like blaring ads across 20 pumps. What a time to be alive!
edit: speedway has gone touchscreen, so I wonder if there are ghost buttons then?
That's the line which, when crossed, I immediately boycott and use another gas station indefinitely, but I get the feeling that it's only a matter of time before they all follow suit.
But surely, “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds” that our late-stage capitalism has so benevolently bequeathed us.
No more "savey-save fcky-fck" cards/clubs as Bill Burr used to joke. No more apps required just to get a fair price. Get the easily transferable PFAS/PFOA contaminants off of my receipts and food wrappers. The sky is the limit for what we could demand.
Companies/shareholders could choose to comply or not.
This feels like a pathology of board/C-suite culture, something that they feel like they "have to" do, rather than actual angry letters from Joe Shareholder in Des Moines demanding more user data farming.
Not that I'd put it past them, but I assume the entire point of the Monopoly campaign is advertising, playing on the nostalgia for the original, and that the app is just there because that's what you do now, you just have an app.
That still works. Instant prizes will have a tiny QR code on them and you can still take them to the counter and let the person behind scan it. At least here in the UK.
Yeah, they preach about truth, but the ink ran dry,
Bought the headlines, thought clout could buy the sky.
Bezos in the lobby, pullin’ strings, that’s the show,
Turned the Post into a post nobody wants to know.
Five hundred K deep, now it’s tumbleweed clicks,
Writers jump ship while the suits play tricks.
Never trust the press when it’s built on a throne,
Every page now reads like a PR zone.
Ad Homeminem, I don’t bow, I expose,
I talk numbers, they talk prose.
Media’s a mirror, cracked and vain,
You can’t buy truth with billionaire pain.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Post
[2]https://www.niemanlab.org/2024/02/the-new-york-times-made-mo...
[3]https://fourweekmba.com/the-new-york-times-print-subscribers...
Meanwhile Laurene Powell (Steve Jobs' widow) owns The Atlantic, and their subscriptions are up and they are now profitable:
* https://wan-ifra.org/2025/05/how-the-atlantic-keeps-subscrib...
* https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/11/media/the-atlantic-magazine-p...
* https://www.pugpig.com/2025/03/14/the-content-and-revenue-le...
One can have a well-run 'vanity project' or a badly-run one.
Atlantic is/was a monthly magazine so they're not trying to do 'scoops' as much as a traditional daily or weekly magazine. Of course in the current age they do have to post regularly somewhat for traffic: but they've generally been about taking a step and perhaps looking a the bigger picture.
For example, on the politics side they have David Frum, former speech writer for George W. Bush (#43):
* https://www.theatlantic.com/author/david-frum/
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Frum
And Tom Nichols, who taught international affairs and national-security at the U.S. Naval War College:
The problem I think is implied to be the choice to meddle with editorial not per se the choice for wealthy individuals to own such a publication.
I'd be interested with people who buy sports teams and interfere in running the team - does that go similarly poorly? Does it turn out that billionaires aren't great at choosing the team composition and strategy for NFL games ? Surprised Pikachu Face 'cos sure seems like Bezos doesn't understand how to write a great newspaper...
He's not trying to write a great newspaper, he's trying to write a newspaper that curries favor or at least doesn't raise the ire of the current administration.
And I think is a problem with news organizations that are part of larger conglomerates: it may be possible to use leverage on other parts of the business to affect how the news operations are done.
If (say) Bill Gates owned WaPo, he doesn't necessarily care much about how Microsoft is doing anymore. Whereas Bezos probably does still care about Amazon, as well as his space stuff.
“The publication has now shed 250,000 subscribers, or 10% of the 2.5 million customers it had before the decision was made public on Friday, according to the NPR reporter David Folkenflik”
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/oct/29/washington-pos...
News cannot survive, because it has no real revenue stream.
the NYT figured out video games as a solution.
That said NYT crossword has existed for much longer, puzzle games are a longstanding feature of many newspapers.
Yes, the crossword has existed for longer, but it was never the core source of funding.
It’s interesting, and I doubt it can scale - every newspaper has its own puzzle section?
But if we interpreted the headline as if the article was actually about the idea: I do think there is an interesting idea (which I first read in Byung-Chul Han‘a The Transparency Society) which is that trust and transparency are functionally opposites. We tend to treat transparency as an automatically good thing in democratic systems, but I think you can make the argument that the call for transparency only comes after trust has already been lost.
So it’s not really a solution to a more democratic system that results in more trust between constituents and representatives, but rather just a way to deal with the loss of trust in an ostensibly practical way.
What service is that?
In a properly functioning democracy, I think you’d want leaders to want to be a part of the political process. The more hostile and demanding that becomes, the less likely you’ll get those people in positions of power.
> Transparency is the order of the day. It is a term, a slogan, that dominates public discourse about corruption and freedom of information. Considered crucial to democracy, it touches our political and economic lives as well as our private lives. ...
The core argument for why transparency is crucial for democracy is can be framed as a question. How can people be sufficiently informed to govern themselves without information? This leads to follow-up questions like: (1) How much will it "cost" to get X more units of transparency? (2) How much will this help? (3) Who will "pay" for it (in terms of political capital and issue prioritization)?
> ... Anyone can obtain information about anything. Everything—and everyone—has become transparent: unveiled or exposed by the apparatuses that exert a kind of collective control over the post-capitalist world.
I take Han's meaning, but there are major limits to this. Practically, various byzantine corporate ownership structures can make it very resource-intensive -- sometimes nearly impossible given a time deadline -- to make sense of who controls what.
Information has the potential to move way faster than our ability to vet it.
> A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on. [2]
Back to Han, second paragraph from [1]:
> Yet, transparency has a dark side that, ironically, has everything to do with a lack of mystery, shadow, and nuance. Behind the apparent accessibility of knowledge lies the disappearance of privacy, homogenization, and the collapse of trust.
Speaking in terms of statistical association, sure. Transparency may co-occur with the negatives listed above. But -- YIKES -- the quote above muddles the issue! We should not confuse causality: transparency does not cause a lack of trust once you include the other relevant factors. [3] Transparency promotes trust in the long run, even as it highlights scandals and corruption in the short-run.
Don't shoot the messenger. Don't blame transparency. The deeper problems tend to involve human nature (e.g. greed, power-seeking, tribalism), misaligned incentives, ineffective institutions, and eroded norms. [4]
Too much of anything can be a problem, but in aggregate, I doubt we have too much transparency in government and corporate affairs.
Of course transparency is not free; we want to spend our political capital strategically on the better kinds of transparency. Nuance matters. For example, effective negotiation requires that leaders can speak candidly and off the record when working out deals. However, once a proposal is hammered out, there should be a sufficiently-long public comment period so the public and interested parties have time to make sense of whatever has been proposed and get involved.
[1]: https://www.sup.org/books/theory-and-philosophy/transparency...
[2]: Who originally said this? Twain? Churchill? Not according to the analysis at https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/ which suggests the core idea can be traced to Jonathan Swift in 1710.
[3]: I'm a huge proponent of promoting clear and direct statements of causality, rather than burying one's assumptions. See Judea Pearl's "The Book of Why" as well as his more technical work on causality.
[4]: One can divide this up in different ways, but I think this four-way split is reasonably useful.
Below, I'll quote some sections from the book directly. But first, I will be transparent in saying I think the book is _deeply_ flawed. I expect a lot more from a philosopher. I'll explain my reasons below.
The quotes below are from "The Society of Control" chapter. They are contiguous sentences taken from one paragraph, but below I have split them apart for commentary.
> Trust is only possible in a state between knowing and not-knowing.
Ok, but I don't think this framing is very useful or clarifying. One framing I find very useful for trust goes like this: Party X _expects_ Party Y to take some _action A_. It is a triple: (X, Y, A).
> Trust means establishing a positive relationship with the Other, even in ignorance.
This doesn't cut to the core of it. I don't think it is useful to frame trust only as a positive two-way relationship; one needs the third element: trust to do something.
> [Trust] makes actions possible despite one’s lack of knowledge.
No. Trust is not needed to make actions possible. Actions are possible in a state of incomplete knowledge. (This is painful to read; this is supposed to be thoughtful philosophy -- it is supposed to clear things up, not muddle things.)
> If I know everything in advance, there is no need for trust.
This sentence does not distinguish present knowledge from future knowledge.
For example, if I know about a potential business partner's other financial interests (present knowledge), this is very helpful for predicting the future (what the person might do). It makes it easier to trust, in my sense of the word (above) -- it makes it sensible for me to expect that the person will act in ways that I'm ok with, in the scope of a potential business relationship. Why? Because I better understand their holdings, which is a part of their interests.
> Transparency is a state in which all not-knowing is eliminated.
I don't care for this binary framing. Practically speaking, transparency is a matter of degree.
> Where transparency prevails, no room for trust exists.
Restated: if a party has complete knowledge of the world, present and future, there is no need for trust. Stated that way, I agree, but is close enough to a tautology to be uninteresting.
Personally, by this point I'm "off the train". Han's style of writing (and presumably thinking) is useless to me.
> Instead of affirming that “transparency creates trust,” one should instead say, “transparency dismantles trust.”
I will grant the author uses their terminology in a consistent way. I just find it maddening because it doesn't connect with reality. [1] But by this point, the cognitive dissonance between what everyday people mean by trust is so great that this sentence comes across as absurd.
> The demand for transparency grows loud precisely when trust no longer prevails.
There is a grain of truth here. But the word precisely is wrong to the extent it means "if and only if". Sure, one purpose for transparency is to "right the ship" so to speak. But once the ship is sailing in the right direction, smart people recognize that transparency was a contributing factor, so they rightfully think "let's maintain our levels of transparency so we can keep reaping the rewards."
> In a society based on trust, no intrusive demand for transparency would surface. The society of transparency is a society of mistrust and suspicion; it relies on control because of vanishing confidence.
This touches on how the author defines control from the last chapter "The Society of Control". Suffice it to say for now that I find the thinking behind it rather lacking.
> Strident calls for transparency point to the simple fact that the moral foundation of society has grown faulty, that moral values such as honesty and uprightness are losing their meaning more and more.
At this point, I want to be blunt, as I've lost most of my patience with the author. A philosopher that writes "the simple fact" is engaging with rhetoric instead of careful thinking. Shameful. Mention of morality and culture tend to be far from simple; they are complex in that they involve the interactions of millions of people.
> As the new social imperative, transparency is taking the place of a moral instance that would break new ground.”
This sentence posits that transparency somehow crowds-out morality. This is unconstrained by reality. We can see in the real world that transparency works symbiotically with morality.
By this point in my commentary, I'm pretty much uninterested in this book by Byung-Chul Han. He's an interesting person, but in this case, I'm not getting much value. I seek clear writing, truth-seeking behavior, and insight.
I recognize my cantankerousness. I decided to leave in my personal reactions not because I expect them to be persuasive but rather because they are transparent: you can read my logic and you can see how strongly it affects my emotions. As Daniel Kahneman explained, these are connected and not necessarily for the worse.
Finally, there are philosophers that I highly value. The warmth and joy I get from them more than makes up for the frustration I get from philosophers like Han. I accept this as a kind of tradeoff.
[1]: I have to admit, this is a common pain point I find when reading certain philosophers -- they reappropriate language in highly specific ways that lead to preposterous sounding claims. To some degree, I get it -- I want philosophers to define their terms. But in my view, this is little comfort. When a writer redefines words in a way that strikes people as outlandish, the writer must recognize that human cognition is a real factor. When words get mangled to the point of incredulity, it is high time the author think to themself "maybe I should find a clearer word or phrase here -- or maybe I should make one up."
We certainly need a more P2P, version of this type of platform and a way to fund and scale it such that it can’t be messed with by billionaire hacks.
The odds of this being wildly successful are pretty slim, I’d say…
True. I don’t think it was ever successful, because it requires a strong ideological point of view from the people who are supposed to support this idea. With so much distraction in the digital world today, this seems close to impossible.
wrong
I can’t think of many (Massie maybe?) rich (no black and white definition) that are using their wealth to better their fellow citizens to their own detriment. Most of them see it as another tax to prevent keep their heads attached.
Taking pie from other rich people is only lucrative because the wealth gap is so massive and consistently increasing. My point is rich people should be utilizing their wealth to enrich their fellow Americans (or whatever country they live in), but all the existing ones do not have this as a primary goal. They throw some pittances - just enough to keep people from revolting.
The majority of us are growing wealth so we don’t die on the streets. The rich have already cleared this goal post, and instead of making it their primary goal to give back they continue to take. Those in power could use their power to prevent this but don’t. That is their shared interest. It’s why every politician in America becomes more wealthy after entering office. It’s why corruption is rampant. It’s why we have no borders and let corporations abuse workers. The system is setup (this is the shared interest) to empower a few at the top.
(And also, they have some shared interests, like "staying rich", although I see you call that a "shared goal"; a distinction without a difference, it seems to me.)
You can dissent in an echo chamber but it doesn’t do any good.
Patreon, Substack, etc are no different. We’ve seen people be silenced on X. We’ve also seen payment processors disallow payments to organizations and whatnot.
This is all a problem.
We already have that. Selfhosting is possible, and today even simpler than ever. And there is a multitude of systems and platforms which one can use to collect money as long as it's not doing something too critical, like porn or terrorism. Influencers have those field already covered well, and will continue building them to avoid the hefty shares on their usual platforms.
… which means it’s a problem.
There are lots of options for running your own Mastodon/ ActivityPub implementation, etc—it’s not easy, though. This is purely a technical problem.
Of course, I am not really talking about Chirp clones here, but this is a pretty good analogue for comparison.
So yes, another will rise up. But even better would be a distributed network that actually _works_, immune to the threat of centralization.
A P2P [1] social media swarm where identities are signed pseudoanonymous hashes optionally tied to identity proofs. Reputation can be gained in the peer and interest graphs.
Advertisers and attention seekers can still exist in such a system without being obtrusive - they can flag their messages by signing them with proof that they burned funds contributing to a charity (or deposited funds to my personal inbox). Eg., "this message from xyz recruiter deposited $1 in your account - read?", or "this MrBeast video provably donated $1M to the EFF - watch?"
Journalists can make money on the graph by soliciting donors or publishing content to certain nodes early for a fee.
[1] not federated, apart from proxy publishing or relay nodes
Nostr is starting to look something like P2P social, but it's still got a long way to go and isn't mainstream friendly enough. This needs kid-friendly coating. It should just work out of the box and have Meta-caliber product leadership.
And they tell us that revenue growth is organic. When Google was new, you didn't need a single ad.
There is only so much malfeasance I can swallow, and Perplexity tick a few too many boxes.
Not that that makes this any less bad, but it seems the more fair comparison.
That they did not is very telling about how the future is going to play out. This is a cash grab before the bubble pops.
1. You pay for it in cash
2. It's "free" but you pay for it with your data which is harvested and used to target ads at you
3. The weird Brave crypto model which basically does what 2 does, but you get some token for it
4. The Firefox sell your search traffic to Google model
Number 1 gets completely blown out by 2 when they compete in the market to the point it doesn't exist anymore, so that's not really viable. 3 seems scammy and nobody really wants it anyway. 4 is what I use, but let's face it, it's just 2 light with better ad blocking. It's also probably on its last legs since the courts have ruled that Google can't buy default search (which ironically will probably enhance its monopoly position).
"Under the court's ruling, Google will still be permitted to pay for search placement --- those multi-billion-dollar arrangements with Apple and Mozilla can continue."
- https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/09/google-wont-have-to-...
Long term a regime change is needed because you will lose to immoral competitors, but it’s the only fight worth fighting.
I also realize Sam Altman is a sociopath who would never do this.
Also Gleen Greenwald will shill absolute any old nonsense. I used to watch his occasionally and he was doing ad read for these awful ads about vegetable drinks, like Alex Jones is infamous for. It was nauseating.
The bad news is we’re accomplishing that via high levels of inflation, so pretty soon $5m will be the new $1m.
National democracy is built on top of local democracy, in the sense of local self-rule -- if local democracy is dying then national democracy will tend to die, but if local democracy is thriving, national democracy is largely guaranteed.
About local democracy:
1. Local city government is now less accountable because of the death of local newspapers. The public must have some idea what politicians are doing, but without local newspapers there is no one to report what is happening at the local level.
2. This is related to people (since the 1960s) losing interest in local government. When I was a child my parents both served in the local government, I remember being 7 years old and getting taken to meetings where the room was packed. But when I was 42 I drove my mom to a town meeting and I was shocked to see that the room was empty, literally, there was not a single citizen who had come out for the meeting that evening. The only people in the room were the politicians (all of whom were volunteers, as it was an unpaid position -- they were civically minded citizens).
3. Local democracy worked best when families stayed in one town for generations, and so had a long-term commitment to the health of the town. But the modern life-style, even for the middle class who are the most likely to serve in government, involves buying a starter home in one town, then a bigger home for a family (in another town), then a retirement home, possibly in another state. Most families now assume they will only be in a given town for 10 or 20 years, so their focus tends to be on minimal taxes, rather than long-term investments in the town.
4. For local government, possible solutions include abolishing local democracy and making the positions appointed (most roles are already appointed, of course) from the state level, or making the towns much larger (a large percentage of a given state) or limiting voting to those who pass some test, or who demonstrate citizenship by volunteering some time, or by having frequent elections to a staggered city council (as frequent voting tends to reward the few citizens who are highly active).
Anyone who thinks these moves are anti-democratic should remember that local government elections tend to only get 15% to 20% participation rates, so most of the public has already voluntarily disenfranchised itself.
Any democracy will automatically be the democracy of those who show up. There is no democracy for the truly apathetic. But local and regional self-rule can remain strong so long as citizens who are active in civic affairs can continue to exercise rule at the local level, without being blocked those who are non-active.
There remains a controversy whether "democracy" means "the right to vote" or "a population engaged in self-government." That is, does "democracy" refer to "self expression via voting" or does it refer to actual government arising from the local population? Those who feel that "democracy" means "self expression" tend to think of themselves as consumers rather than citizens, they see themselves as buying government services (with taxes) rather than the producers of government. But local self-rule does not survive for long in areas where people see themselves mostly as consumers of government services. Local self-rule survives thanks to the civically minded citizens who are willing to volunteer their time to creating governance.
This concept is far more popular now than it might ever have been in the 1990s. Look at Discord.
Discord makes it somewhat easy to keep folks/entities out that you don’t want around, hence so many hobbies and such moving into the space off traditional forums and social media. But it also silos off knowledge which means other folks can’t find it. It’s a real catch 22
A browser that can only go to https://discord.com is a proprietary browser.
Discord makes a proprietary browser available. You can run it from your desktop or from your web browser. All content in Discord can only be viewed by going through Discord's proprietary browser. Your regular web browser can't access it at all.
> We're sorry, but access from your location is not allowed. If you are a user with administrative privilege please enter your email below to receive instructions on how to unblock yourself.
How ironic.
*paywalled