Comment by hliyan
6 years ago
Not on the topic of Facebook, but on employers who fear these trends so much that they want this level of control:
Fundamental social shifts cannot be nipped in the bud. The best anyone can do is understand them and ensure the changes are gradual, rather than letting them build-up to a big bang.
This is an oversimplification, but: early 20th century rise of communism was a violent backlash against the presiding monarchies and oligarchies who suppressed all attempts at gradual reform. Dissatisfaction with growing wealth disparity at the time was a fundamental trend that could not have been "nipped in the bud".
The current trend seems to be very reminiscent of this. When those in power suppress all avenues of gradual reform, fundamental trends tend to boil over in abrupt and often destructive forms.
Only question is: is what we're seeing today just a passing trend or a fundamental shift?
>>is what we're seeing today just a passing trend or a fundamental shift?
Facebook advertised to Walmart with union busting capabilities. Walmart has a union busting history going back 50 years minimum.
Looking at public opinion on unions, it seems to be rising the past few years, while membership keeps going down (in the US).
> Facebook advertised to Walmart with union busting capabilities. Walmart has a union busting history going back 50 years minimum.
I am pretty certain this particular feature went the other way around: Facebook has to work very hard to retain customers on Workplace, because they're competing against Microsoft (who have extremely deep pockets, and arguably a better product in many regards).
I'm willing to bet Walmart went to Facebook and told them to implement this feature, or they'd jump ship. Certainly that's what's happened with other Workplace features in the past, such as the ability to control access for hourly employees.
> This is an oversimplification, but: early 20th century rise of communism was a violent backlash against the presiding monarchies and oligarchies who suppressed all attempts at gradual reform.
It seems to me that we are in a death spiral here. Our political class seems to only care about re-election, and actually fixing problems deprives you of polarizing wedge issues by which you can divide the voter base.
Even better if you can blame the other team for blocking you (whether true or not), and this is blatant on both sides of the political divide.
The expense of passing laws, mixed with ethical copenhagenism, compounds this. What we should be doing is science: making predictions, running small-scale tests, iterating and ramping what achieves the agreed, stated objectives, and discarding what doesn't work.
But because passing a law is expensive, we don't, and we get eternal programs that seem almost designed to do nothing other than make problems worse while funneling money to a preferred political party's funding machine.
It is also political suicide to only benefit a test group: New York once tested a homeless benefit program by randomly selecting applicants to be part of either the experimental (in the program) or control (left as-is) group.
They helped as many people as they had funds -- there was no withholding of possible aid -- and merely labeled those not accepted as being in a control group.
Not a single person in the entire experiment was worse off than they were before.
The resulting data would have provided evidence as to whether or not the program was effective, and thus worthy of expansion, but the public outcry painted the organizers as modern-day Nazis, "making guinea pigs out of its most vulnerable."
And the program was prematurely shut down.
If you can't science, you can't effectively solve problems.
I don't see this resolving in any way but ugly, and I very much hope that I am wrong about that.
> Dissatisfaction with growing wealth disparity at the time was a fundamental trend that could not have been "nipped in the bud".
Well, this was the whole idea of "Fabian" socialism, named after Fabius the Delayer: bring in reforms now, otherwise revolution will happen outside your control. A big part of the foundation of the UK Labour party.
It seems to me that the BLM movement is just such a "big bang" against a slow increase in racism and very long term failure to resolve problems in Americna policing.
> It seems to me that the BLM movement is just such a "big bang" against a slow increase in racism
Over the last few decades, there has been rapid _decrease_ in racism throughout the West.