2,374 karma · joined January 27, 2018
The economy moved away from being founded on Marx's C-M-C to firmly being fixated on M-C-M' which in plain English, means "We now use Money to make more Money, leveraging Commodities as an intermediate step. The Money is all that matters, not the social benefit/harm" -- IMO, that helps explain why, even though many people are suffering financially, the market is at an ATH.
I'm a paying customer and I know my time is sufficiently valuable that this kind of technology pays for itself.
As an analogy, I liken it to a scribe (author's assistant).
Your comment has lots of useful hints -- thanks for taking the time to write them up!
That's the "cherry on top" of this dung-heap.
The examples you provided are more fundamental and I won't trivialize them, but making you lose your "keys to your own digital space" is a very real power they have over you.
> Digital Natives are used to receiving information really fast. They like to parallel process and multi-task. They prefer their graphics before their text rather than the opposite. They prefer random access (like hypertext). They function best when networked. They thrive on instant gratification and frequent rewards. They prefer games to “serious” work.
Even reading this back when it was published, it came across as drivel. Now, we have doomscroll-optimized short-form video which does precisely what Prensky recommended, and nobody in their right minds would suggest that it is healthy/good/beneficial for kids to consume that kind of media.
Which one would a corporation pick to maximize its profits?
(Playing devil's advocate, it is easier to support backup and restore via the cloud, vs. having end-users corrupt/lose their files, then clamor for end-user support)
A lot of the finance folks work in an M-C-M' world, where Money (M) is the alpha and the omega, so you see this kind of (IMO) perverse behavior.
I've found this mental model helpful in explaining these kinds of behavior.
People believe what they want to believe, right up until the leopard eats their faces.
Whether the intern is an inveterate grifter, and/or happens to be personally sponsored by a powerful mob boss, does not matter for the employees latching onto that message.
In that context too, I have a feeling these flaws would be tolerated/overlooked.
He observed that all societies evolve from "Being" to "Having" and ultimately devolve into "The Appearance of Having".
It explains a lot of what we see with the rise of Twitter, TikTok, influencers, etc.
Then, it'll be checkmate.
You expanded my mind today, and I thank you for that!
...this has been "figured out" -- it's brutal, and it looks like the gig economy.
I don't even have to paraphrase this: "Drive with Uber - Be Your Own Boss"
There are various ways to try and make sense of what we're living through right now, and commentary such as yours (presumably informed by decades of seeing this industry evolve) will be valuable in the coming years, as we all try to find our bearings in this post-LLM, post-truth, post-literate world.
This really appears to be the simplest explanation -- turn every desktop into a thin client, served by walled-garden apps, and with Azure integration/dependencies.
Then charge subscription fees to turn all computer owners into renters. Oh, and show ads too, while you're at it.
Please consider writing up something about this binary mashup toolkit. You have taken an unusual path and shown how far one can go... it's worthy of sharing more widely.
Good luck!
Here, have a preemptive upvote to keep you afloat for one extra second.
However, there is much wisdom in McLuhan's "we become what we behold" -- and consuming too much "social media" turns one into a performative puppet. Twitter is the distilled version of this (Jaron Lanier called it "Twitter Poisoning").
If Elon Husk huffing Twitter 24/7 while owning Twitter isn't a case of "getting high on your own supply", then I don't know what is.
However:
> All the non-USA-allies developed their own markets
I have friends and family in India, and I'm not aware of homegrown alternatives to any of the following:
* gmail
* amazon
* google search
* spotify
* yt shorts
On that last one, when India banned TikTok overnight, it was a golden opportunity for a different homegrown alternative to step in, but it looks like YT/IG captured most of that market.
Happy to be corrected, though. If you have concrete examples, that'd be good to know!
Also, I don't claim to have any answers, but I found some insights about literacy (vs pre-literate orality) in Walter Ong's work "The Written Word". Maybe it'll spark some ideas in your mind as well.
The main tl;dr from Ong's work IMHO is that Literacy is a Technology, and every technology entices us to give up certain strengths and conveniences for other strengths and conveniences. Humanity bought into the power of the written word wholesale, but words can be hijacked to manipulate people (by LLMs, by Yarvin, etc.) at scale.
I can also see a "unifying mental model" -- whatever increases the "health" is pursued.
A corporation needs to "feed" on money, so its actions reflect this (e.g. PMs worsening services intentionally, in order to be able to charge more and thereby boost revenue).
A party in power needs to "feed" on support from its "base", so its actions reflect this (you said it best: "for the sake of cruelty")
I hate to break this to you, but in the USA, this has happened multiple times: for instance, allowing Govt to shutdown due to spending limits, to push some extra pain + score political points, and then paint oneself as a savior when the shutdown is eventually lifted.
You could argue that they're not making things worse for the folks that actually matter (and you'd be right), but there is immense hardship and pain inflicted on ordinary people routinely (esp. of late), so I didn't want to leave your comment unchallenged.