962 karma · joined August 5, 2019
Sometimes directly or indirectly (public repos/forums) working with each other. Even amateur groups produce stuff much more quickly these days. You can see it play out in college dorms when an enthusiastic group gets together.
You could probably sell a Terabyte hard disk with the best shows and movies ever made and probably keep people entertained for quite a while.
Not really. I tried once and got walked out of the building after sitting through an endless bunch of meetings where different rungs of the hierarchy making the "...but everyone does it" argument.
A better approach, I found latter in life is to be buddies with the right people. They want to stick your info all over, go talk to your Marketing/HR/PR buddy.
In large orgs "conservative" managers who escalate and block issues usually don't get fired, they just get pushed to some other part of the org. And when/if the issue blows up, they get pulled back in to clean up the mess. Cause few others will have credibility. Same dynamic applies in reverse. The bunch that were in charge, during a blow up will be sent into the background. But will be pulled back when more "aggressive" management tactics are required.
If you don't understand what role they play, or even worse, misunderstand what role they play please read some Social Psychology specifically Conformism and how it is triggered.
The problem is most people who designed the platforms are only now learning about these things and are trying to undo the effects pretending they don't need to make changes to the original design.
That's how culture changes.
Direct attacks on status quo culture will always fail cause Defenses are already in place to squash them.
Both are just mindlessly trying to hit metrics(like/views/clicks/upvotes etc). And everyone is very satisfied hitting them.
But nobody has yet proved in any country, in any part of the world all this mindless metric hitting activity (amplified robotically by the news media) is actually producing a sustainable outcome.
Doesn't matter what problem domain you pick where are the outcomes that justify all this activity? One guy gets the likes today, another gets the likes tomorrow.
It's a trap. You see the same dynamics play out in Poland, Brexit, Modi's India, Duterte etc.
That only goes away once the Like/View/Click based ecosystem is dismantled.
Go and ask Dalio why wages/worker productivity has stagnated while sector(factory/org) productivity has increased.
Listening to him is like listening to some member of British Royalty while Empire winds down having no clue why the colonies want independence. They too will say the British Empire's increased productivity will increase of the wealth gap. That's just another way of saying nobody wants to work to prop up the British Empire. People have found better things to do in life.
The only thing under threat is their model of reality. And there is no point paying attention to them about what comes next, because they can only see the empire based on obedience and domination as the best model.
When ever someone talks about Productivity they are measuring how many people in the population are obedient and fit into domination based hierarchies. Those that don't throughout history are unproductive.
Now the problem is "Productivity" is stagnating since the 80's[1]. Why? Because most people learnt they don't like being obedient or dominated and there are better and newly available routes to meet ones needs and values. We don't need to prop up a Mark Zuckerberg or Ray Dalio or the Queen of England to live a decent life anymore. You can even do it without exploiting someone else.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workforce_productivity#/media/...
So they cherry pick whatever stories they want from history to justify their mistakes.
The metrics don't reflect that reality. Most old people (who have dealt with the healthcare system while caring for their parents in old age) know quite well "about the staggering 52% in the last 2 months, and 40% in the last month". Why is anyone paying that cost? For what?
I have a Cardiologist buddy who likes to say performing surgery and treating old people is like keeping a Windows 95 system alive and kicking just because its possible. And most of his patients know it and want easy ways to checkout, but either the Doc is obligated by family/incentivized by the hospital to perform some kind of elaborate treatment. Obviously yhis will change for the simple reason a majority of the Docs and the Patients want the change to happen. On top of that there is the ongoing shift of focus from treatment to prevention.
My larger point is there are always countervailing forces to any trend that is building up. A good case study is the Population Bomb predictions in the 70s - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb
It's good to know why it didnt play out.
They just want more people using their cloud/spending more time on the web (i.e. seeing google ads, using search etc), doing things users can easily can be doing offline on their device.
These motivations obviously have nothing to do with the utility of a network/web to normal users. It just so happens that Google has temporarily succeeded in having their way. And that their interests align with Facebook, Netflix, Big Telco etc
It really makes no sense (from a users perspective) when you see the gigabytes of cheap storage and fast compute available on devices these days. How long they can keep it up depends on how long they keep Chrome teams funded at their present levels, and what kind of backlash builds up against all the dark patterns/addiction/polarization/privacy issues on the web.
From Google's perspective its easy to ramp down Chrome and ramp up Android if required. So I would keep an eye on both those teams. Is Google treating them as equals (in terms of hiring/publicity/investment etc)? If it changes tomorrow for any number of predictable and unpredictable reasons you will know which way the wind is blowing.
And when people are bored and can't come up with things to do by themselves, they just end up doing what others tell them to do. And then they complain about how annoying that is because its not what they want to do.
The key is to be "conscious", at all stages of your life, about the things that spark your interests. Most people don't know what their interests are because they have been walking through life, without noting down and then thinking about the different things that spark their interests.
Once you know your interests, you automatically start looking for book/tools/teachers/teammates to help you dig deeper. And then things snowball. That leads to new routes and new interests. But if you stop walking all that never happens.
Good ol'Louis knew things were messed up and he tried to rectify things. But it was too late.
To me it fells like certain people (a percentage of any population) are just wired to exploit human weakness.
Sometimes they are unconsciously doing it and when made conscious don't know how to exit that path. And society needs to make it simpler for exits to happen.
Those that are consciously doing it...well we are just stuck with them like we will always have bugs in code.
Invoking fear and doubt in people's heads doesn't produce imagination, curiosity or empathy. And those are the tools that produce new solutions. What fear and doubt produces is defensiveness and mindless reactions.
They need to stop braying about turning into China and admit that this a new ball game. That needs new rules.