Two books explore the price we’ve paid in handing over unprecedented power to Big Tech—and explain why it’s imperative we start taking it back.
  • hendrik@palaver.p3x.deEnglish
    20·
    2 days ago

    I’m not sure if I agree with the whole backstory on the individuals and their very own motivation… I think it boils down to simple capitalism. Big tech makes a lot of money by being the opposite of democratic and exploiting things. And I think it’s mainly the consecuence of this dynamic, that leads us to the current situation. Originally, the internet was intended to connect people. And do it pretty much on one and the same level. But that’s not what we have today. We lock people into small golden cages, foster filter bubbles. Make everything about selling ads and user data. And big tech get’s to decide what’s right and what is wrong and how things get implemented. And that’s deeply undemocratic. And the effects on society actively harm democracy… We don’t need any conspiracy or certain individuals for that, because it’s just how business works in that field.

    • rottingleaf@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      2 days ago

      This is true, but not entire truth.

      Simple capitalism is usually brought up as something sane by anyone as a (ideal hypothetical) stable system where it’s guaranteed that market power and administrative power do not mix. Where money can’t buy laws and license for crime, and where government officials can’t use their position to get financial power.

      It is a failure to be fixed for any somewhat popular capitalist ideology I know. For ancaps they are clearly violating NAP. For market liberals they are clearly an oligopoly. One can go on.

      Ayn Rand and her following are the only types who, in short, think that power is noble and deserved by itself. For them there’s no NAP - if you can buy license for murder, then it’s fine. And there’s also no value in competition - those who managed to make an oligopoly or a monopoly are by definition noble.

      And I have seen such people in the Interwebs, simping for Musk and Trump, thinking something like Colombia is the best place to live, whatever. But that’s frankly just an inferiority complex of people who want to feel themselves tough and thus simp for ideologies where you suffer if you are not tough, kinda burning bridges and feeling apparently it’ll help them.

      Like my dad tried to do things the way disadvantageous for an autistic person, that is, me (and himself, of course), as if blackmailing nature into making me different. Of course that doesn’t work.

      • hendrik@palaver.p3x.deEnglish
        3·
        2 days ago

        Yeah, that won’t work.

        And I mean we’re talking about ideal concepts here. (At least I have been…) And the real world is way more complex. We don’t have ideal democracy, or capitalism. And things often are entangled or a combination of different factors… I don’t follow the news about those people very closely. But I’d certainly agree with the oligopoly part.

      • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        4·
        2 days ago

        Well, it’s less about “distorting” than it is about accelerating a societal collapse -> reformation progression. Accelerationists believe that societal collapse is inevitable at this point, and that the collapse should be accelerated so that it’s not as drawn out, and so that (ostensibly) society can recover more quickly. Probably with those same shitass accelerationist billionaire fucksticks as the landed gentry / nobility / whatever the fuck happens after.

        Whereas most reasonable people would say we should, you know, try to fucking fix the stuff we have currently, instead of burning it all to the ground.