Comment by mindslight
14 hours ago
> I don't believe government regulation is the answer
While I agree with where you're coming from in spirit, if you want to push this then you've got to do the work of actually coming up with workable concrete approaches rather than hand waving against a whole general category of action. The problem is that digital communications lend themselves to centralized power, and power vacuums inevitably get filed by something, right?
I too would love to see the power of surveillance companies get magically reduced by something that isn't centralized government action. But that hasn't happened so far, right? If anything, they've grown stronger - sucked in ever more of our lives, sucked in technical communities who were culturally predisposed to and capable of resisting, and even taken over control of parts of the de jure government!
So barring that, government regulation (ie democratic accountability) seems like a necessary approach. This fails too of course (eg how all the natural rights referenced in the Bill of Rights are being infringed in one way or another). But once again what is the alternative to attempting to codify lofty ideals, writing them down, and then pushing to implement them wherever they're being infringed? Regulation like the GDPR and other EU directives at least attempt to draft rights-based paradigms, as imperfect as their implementation and enforcement may be.
The real problem would seem to be that we're soured on the idea of having reasonable laws in the US from every attempt at meaningful regulation ending up with a multitude of holes in it due to corporate lobbying. It seems like that is what needs to be focused on and addressed - thinking one can let the corpos run wild and then somehow outrun or individualistically push back on them is a pipe dream.
What you're saying is super reasonable and the ways I think about it too sometimes. I have two thoughts on this and I'm not sure how clear I can be.
1. I think sometimes the shape of a technology pushes a shape of society. But there's a feedback loop here. The like 15 years of tech were dominated by ad-tech which lead to algorithmic feeds that made engagement the game. This had an accidental effect of enraging people against eachother. This all started because of how much money google started raking in money on ads - people were aware, and we copy. Tech's focus on ads was an accident of history which could have gone other ways.
Maybe this seems intuitively wrong. Like there is some evolution about how these things must go. But there are a lot of examples in my experience that people see something successful and copy it and then it turns into a cottage industry of whatever that community was.
The best way forward here is to build and be successful while still following good values. The tech moment right now is ripe for it. There's a lot of reasons why open source, local first, and catering to the end user (and not making them the product) is a great way to be successful starting a company right now. Being successful in this way and talking about it breeds more likewise.
2. From what I can tell, pessimism is actively harmful. I've spent a lot of time with Russian communities (most who left due to the war) in these past years. That got me very interested in Russian history.
The weird thing about the arc of it is how similar it has been in every government they've transformed into. The same basic values hold which leads to the same problems: centralized authority, low value for human life, and general oppression. This is true in czarist times, or soviet times, or post-soviet times. Government change doesn't change cultural norms.
That's not to say I think that they are forever doomed. But it is the general zeitgeist of society that leads to the same place. And for it to ever change, their cultural values need to change.
There's a parallel universe out there where Russia is the richest country in the world that enriches and benefits the rest of world as a partner. This is obvious given its natural resources and geographic location at the nexus between great markets, and its history of producing terrific scientists and engineers.
It is the pessimism that kills all of that ultimately leading to autocrats that live to hold on to power at the very high cost of the rest of the country. The assumption that the world will just continue to be shit is what causes this cycle of abuse. It's a very hard cycle to break out collectively once entrenched. As all collective action problems are. But my, now longwinded point, is that it is not government that is the mover of change but philosophical attitude.
Zero-sum thinking, tribalism, and low appreciation for individual self-determination turns us all into a raging bucket of crabs. There will be a king crab but his life will suck too.
IP is super decentralised. Digital communications could have led to a more decentralised society than ever before, and in the beginning , they end. But in the end, they didn't, because large actors figured out how to exploit them.