minimuffins

These discussions often miss the point and get bogged down in trying to prove or disprove individual instances of bias or censorship.

The problem for me is prior to all of that.

If the New York Times (say) lacks financial independence, then it will always be structurally indebted to whoever foots the bill. It's just a matter of fact built into the nature of the relationship between the two entities.

Facebook executives may not have established the relationship simply to "buy off" the Times. I imagine most of them have a real commitment to "fixing the news" in their hearts. But it doesn't matter.

If news agencies depend on organizations outside of themselves for the basic necessities of their existence and reproduction, then they aren't independent. They are dependent on those organizations, by definition. What they can report on now has conditions and limits. I want to emphasize that this is a restriction on what it is *possible* to report on. It might not ever produce a distinction that you could easily measure. This is a different, and worse, problem than Facebook purchasing some flattering reporting. Facebook now (obscurely, tacitly) sets the structural conditions (without having to explicitly state any rules or appear to be a bad guy in any way).

It's not hard to think of an example of reporting which could become impossible under these conditions. Imagine if the Times, due to some public outcry, or for whatever reason, took a major rhetorical turn toward combating digital surveillance, just like they did in the last year with racism and issues of cultural morality. A sudden "moral clarity" emerged around topics that the paper used to try to be neutral about.

Whether you like those developments or not, I imagine most people will agree that the employees of the New York Times, not executives at Facebook, or anybody else, should decide the course of the Times' reporting. An existential financial dependence will of course condition all reporting on the maintenance of that dependence.

I don't know, I have seen a lot of pro LSD and psilocybin mushroom micro-dosing posts and comments. I think this place still has a generally libertarian ethos and most people think of drugs questions as best sorted out by a rational market. (My own take is different from that, fwiw).

> Prevailing opinion of HN comments seems to be getting a lil stupid for fun is Bad.

That part might be true. I think there's a tendency to be a little robotic/scientistic/productivist about...just about every topic.

Yeah but you'll notice having the facts and convincing everybody of the facts against the grain of industrial propaganda is not a trivial task.

No, do you?

If there's an implicit argument in that question I'm not able to discern it.

> It doesn’t make me feel any specific way.

I think it should!

It's disconcerting to see the expansion of platform censorship even if the censored party is aware of it, "doesn't care," and was in on the deal. That "it's just business" doesn't make it a neutral development. Spotify gets to decide what ideologies are acceptable for Spotify listeners. This is just one point on the graph. The overall picture is more and more of this stuff, with little or no resistance.

You like that? You feel nothing either way? There is a moral and political valence to this stuff.

I am totally baffled as to why that makes you feel better.

Are you being ironic? Of course there's something to see: the latest glacial shift in the accretion of content control by tech platforms.

I think we agree but are just using slightly different defintions for liberal and centrist. I would like to see reporting that is both more rigorous and thoroughly researched, and more critical and intolerant of centrist dogma/pablum.

The Intercept seems to be pivoting toward a safer, non-adversarial orientation lately. I don't know who they're trying to please with that move. Omidyar? Democrat pols? Their own more centrist staff? The world doesn't need another outlet for liberal conventional wisdom. Cowardly outfit.

Nah, you're just letting the definition of terrorism float all over the place, like everybody else. Terrorism is whatever you don't like. Terrorism is bad guys. This is Bush playbook stuff.

Yes. Legally probably no one did anything wrong. My claim is not that any party behaved inappropriately according to law or the ordinary norms of doing business. Amazon is "within its rights." No argument.

But if you look at this situation and don't see problems that are expanding beyond the ability of laissez faire contracts to account for (I'll be specific: it's the concentrated accumulation of communicative and cultural capital to a tiny number of minimally publicly accountable, opaque, private, exceedingly deep-pocketed firms), you're burying your head in the sand.

> Supporting somebody who rejects democracy is linked with terrorism

No. "Rejecting democracy," a position held by myriad political currents, each of which probably means something different by the term, is basically a run-of-the-mill ideological position. (It's not one that I hold personally, in case anyone is thinking about downvoting for "extremism.")

You know what's linked with terrorism?

Terrorist acts. That is: sporadic acts of intense, spectacular violence and devastation designed to rock and destabilize some existing political order. Usually but not always from "below" (sometimes it's literally from above, like from a B-52).

I'm concerned pretty deeply, but very, very far from being terrorized by the pathetic spectacle at the Capitol. One reason for that is I don't take the extremely hyperbolic US press as literally as so many seem to.

> It turns out that when multiple global corporations collude to halt the communications of people who think they are being persecuted by a colluding body of global corporations, it makes their movement stronger. Who would have thought?

A great point. I have yet to hear any response at all to this problem from the pro-censorship camp, much less a convincing one.

Every attempt to solve the problem creates more problems.

> conflating reasonable discourse...

This is precisely my point! Who gets to decide what's reasonable discourse?

I personally don't think the whole rank and file of establishment press jumping over each other to get in line behind the US state and starting two truly godawful wars is reasonable.

If I was in charge of distributing news to people in the early 2000s, I'd have simply disallowed all of it and made sure people only heard opinions about how the USA is the world's leading terror state. How would you like it if I did that? Luckily, you'll never have to find out because I don't have the power Amazon et al now have.

> Just don't cry when big American business wants nothing to do you with.

This is a deflection. I hate these idiots. Most reasonable people do. They're dangerous (not as dangerous as the US military, but I still wouldn't cross them). My objection is to the structural/cultural development of a tiny handful of companies amassing for themselves a huge cultural and epistemological power. They're increasingly able to shape reality in ways 20th century culture industry couldn't even dream of.

Cheer it on at your own risk!

> no legal basis

I agree. Those are the facts, for sure.

> money cares more about itself than anyone’s feelings.

No argument.

> terrorizing a legislature is harmful to these corporations’ profitable predictability

Strongly agree. This explains AWS's economic motivation. It's not that they just care so much about democracy and rule of law, though a liberal (read: Democrat loyal) employee culture there is probably also a source of pressure pushing them toward the move. In this case the stars align: liberal employees want it, and they can have it because it aligns perfectly with AWS's economic incentives.

I think where we part ways is in thinking this is good for society. My problem with it is not that it violates any laws, but that it amounts to an incredible concentration of power in the realm of cultural production.

> I'm trying to come up with an explanation why TI would do that.

When I hear these kind of stories I always wonder this too. Like, who was allowed to turn this into a company policy and why on earth did they think it worth their time? Usually something that would seem to harm the public image and goodwill of the firm.

This speculation in this comment seems pretty convincing imo:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25683856

(mainly the part about legal getting into the driver seat in a semi-fossilized sort of company like TI).

> If you have weak company leadership, legal will start to drive policy more than it should.

That's a really interesting dynamic I have never experienced or heard of. Explains a lot! Do you know other examples?

(ed. clarify which part I wanted examples for)

> Well you could become an actor, and film makers could use your body to make movies they sell for profits.

Then I would be a laborer. The film company would be using my labor as well as the director's, in conjunction with all the capital they own (cameras, sets...) to generate a profit.

> they could really move your body around and position it in poses to take photographs.

Labor.

> I think your distinction of "capital" and "labor" is fake and completely useless

Ok.

It's not "mine" though, these are centuries old analytical concepts.

> unclear why you insist on it.

I insist on it because it's a sensible and already established way to talk about this stuff.

You guys are the ones making the weird nominal excursion by asserting that labor and capital are identical because you read in a Tim Ferris startup manual that "every man is his own capitalist!" or something.

You don't have to be a radical to just use these terms in their original way. I promise you that pro-capitalist theorists also talk about labor and capital as distinct.

Yeah, it's a tradeoff they have to make. A lot of "knowledge worker" unions decide to do this, hoping it's worth it for the institutional support they'll get. Some grad student unions were formed under United Auto Workers in recent years, oddly enough. I'm not an organizer, and I don't really have an informed opinion about whether it's worth it.

One hopes that these old unions could be revived with a bunch of new membership. What I described above is how they are now, not how they have to be.

Worth noting also that even unions with totally screwed up leadership often have passionate and talented organizers with a lot of experience and institutional know-how at the lower levels, just like tech companies.

Great news! I can't wait to hire workers to start using my body to produce valuable commodities which I can then sell for a profit!

> It's just easier and cheaper to become a small capitalist by renting some of the means of production...from big capitalists

Just to clarify: I really don't mean to sound like a nihilistic radical by pointing this stuff out. Capitalism has given us a lot of good and a lot of bad. That it's way easier to start a software company today and make a good life for yourself really is great. It just doesn't mean that anything fundamental has changed about the system.

> in terms that are artefacts of the 19th century

This is such a strange neophilic reflex that people have. So the words are from the 1840s. Frankly a bunch of the concepts are even older than that. And yet other concepts that are still pretty useful--geometry, say--are even older. We don't need to re-invent language every decade, and thank God for that. No inherent virtue in novelty.

---

It's easier to start a software company now. No one will dispute this. But there is more to the world economy than SaaS entrepreneurship. Covid has provided us with a great unwanted, illustrative example here: capitalist production still works basically the same way in 2021 as it did in 1848. Some of our supply chains are extremely fragile now though, in part due to their computerization and "rationalization" over the last decades.

Suddenly we need thousands of masks and ventilators and they're nowhere to be found. What the hell happened!? Perhaps we just didn't have enough PPE SaaSes yet?

Now we have a few different vaccines (which is great!) but we're having trouble producing and distributing them fast enough in high enough quantities. There is a NYT article out today on this very problem that did well on HN.

How could our economy which is, on paper at least, vastly more productive than it was 50 or 100 years ago, fail us so badly? I mean look how many SaaS entrepreneurs we have! Look how low the barriers to entry are!

The point I'm trying to make here is that the basic relations of capitalist economy still hold despite all the changes between the 19th century and now, including any new developments in centralization of tech infrastructure (you can call cloud computing "democratizing" if you want, but it's really centralization). It's just easier and cheaper to become a small capitalist by renting some of the means of production (it's still MoP, still has the same economic function, even though the centuries have changed) from big capitalists. So what. If you're not a SaaS entrepreneur (and I keep saying this: not everyone can be) and you want a say in the workplace, you still need a union.

But again, the demand for SaaSes and SaaS entrepreneurs is, well, shockingly high, at least to me, as it turns out, but it's not infinity. If everyone could just become a SaaS entrepreneur and we didn't ever need any normal industries with normal employees anymore, you might have a point. But in the real world people still have jobs and still need unions to bargain with employers that would always rather pay them less and give them less say.

I agree with you that SaaS entrepreneurs are not the dispossessed masses. If I have seemed to make that argument at any point, I regret the error.

Industry wide unions are the goal, but you don't just flip a switch and change to a society with industry wide unions.

We don't have industry wide unions in the United States because, although unions were on the rise in the first part of last century, they eventually got beaten down into their pathetic state after the Fordist compromise broke down.

> act as barriers to progress

They give workers a say in what counts as "progress." "Progress," to my mind, does not necessarily equal improvements in my quality of life. e.g. I used to not be constantly surveilled. Then some progress happened, and now I am. Am I better off?

What if we got to decide what technology to build instead of Google and the Pentagon?

Guild has a connotation of workmanship and craft expertise, industriousness, etc. I do like that.

But there is also an existing phenomenon of various things calling themselves guilds (there are various "freelancers'" guilds, e.g.), but they do not function as an economic bargaining institution at all. They're just professional organizations where people exchange contact info for networking purposes.

I think there's no getting around the task at hand: rehabilitating the concept of a union of workers with shared interests and goals (even shared fraternity, if I'm gonna be super sentimental). It's capital, it's labor, it's unions. New century, same basic stuff.

My take on this is the old unions aren't decrepit just because they're unions and they've existed for 100 years. I don't think it's built in to the nature of unions to eventually become decrepit (no more than any other institution anyway).

Their problem is not that they're old, it's that they're not powerful enough anymore to be the kind of adversarial force they once were. They're shrinking instead of growing. Their strategy, if they even have any, is built around defensive self-preservation and survival. It's a siege mentality.

There's a reason for it, and a history to it. In the first half of the 20th century, upstart unions were on the rise, growing all the time, taking over everything, expanding into new sectors, gaining power. There really was a time when it was reasonable to think eventually just about every job in the country would be union, and that's just how things are. Perfectly normal. (And generally speaking, those young unions were more spontaneous and democratic than their progeny today. They were more "bottom up", less bureaucratic. Also much fightier.)

But capital isn't stupid or defenseless and they fought back. The result, for a while, was the Fordist paradigm that ruled the postwar years. The idea was union leaders and management leaders could work together and reach compromises that were acceptable to both sides, and overall productivity and quality of life would be optimized through this kind of give-and-take. We're all Americans, right? We all have the same goals (even if I own the factory and you work in it).

Well, that's all gone now. From the 70s on, the formerly powerful unions got totally pulverized. One major weakness they had is their own leadership had, in the compromise period, gotten pretty cozy with management and formed a kind of "labor aristocracy" whose interests were more aligned with management than the rank and file. This is basically the state the old unions are in today.

In other words, the developments were contingent on dynamics of 20th century history, not the only thing that could have happened. The problem with 20th century unions is not that they have some innate structural flaw, but that they lost the fight.

I don't think we need to re-invent the concept. The boss owns everything you need to do your job, and you have to have a job. You lack power and control over your working conditions. As an individual you can't do anything about it. Banded together with the rest of the workforce, you can. This is a concept everyone can relate to already and I don't see any utility in renaming it for the new generation or something.

I used to drive a 30 year old beat up car. One day somebody crashed into it and smashed it up. I tried fixing up everything I possibly could, but eventually I realized the engine was completely shot, the block had been cracked, and the thing just wasn't coming back. I didn't rebrand and go get a hoverboat or something. I just got another car that wasn't wrecked.

I mean, I agree with most of the content here, but it's written in that confident left-wing manifesto style that is probably more convincing to the already convinced than to the undecided.

If I kind of saw myself as at-one with the basic Silicon Valley ethos, like I used to, this would definitely put me off before I fully ingested the argument.

I wish I had an example of an introductory text in the style I would like to see. I will try to find something like that. I'm sure it exists, given how much writing there has been on this topic over the last decade.

Yes, this is the commodity fetish in action. The laptop seems to just appear before me when I fork over a thousand bucks, conjured out of the ether of "the market." But of course there are long (often blood soaked) supply chains, all with their own interesting international, political, developmental history, that brought the thing to me. But the details are mystified by the complexity of all the actors and processes involved.

The feeling that tech work is mostly mental and somehow "immaterial," like we're just beyond all that concrete meatspace stuff, is really an illusion.

> The stock market and housing prices are higher than ever, so a large part of the population is doing good.

confusing the map for the terrain

Your body/capability to work is labor.

Property that you can use to produce value beyond itself through workers' labor is capital.

We're never going to have a productive discussion if you think capital and labor are the same thing.