The Internet Dream is sadly not compatibile with profit-driven world. We had some good times back when it all begun, because then nobody besides techies cared. Now that the Internet is a money making machine, there are tons of incentives to make it worse and little to make it better.
In order to keep the corruption away, or maybe even limit it, all of us and our coworkers would have to start risking their livelihoods by torpedoing the insane ideas our managers and bosses have. I tried, and it's hard, and unless it's a collective action your boss won't listen to a lone techie telling him that this business idea of his is actually socially destructive and is abusing the users.
And that even doesn't begin to solve the problems of techies who went over to the dark side, who have both the profit-at-all-costs mindset and skills to pull it off.
You know where those evil profits ultimately come from? People paying to have their needs satisfied.
I make a decent living providing people with solutions to some of the problems described in this article (censorship and fragmentation) and I'm not ashamed to say I am driven purely by profit.
I'm not trying to demonize for-profit work (at least not in this comment). My point is, there's money to be made off breaking the Internet, and there's little money to be made off fixing it.
> You know where those evil profits ultimately come from? People paying to have their needs satisfied.
Satisfying someone's needs doesn't justify anything. Not all needs are meant to be satisfied - especially if they conflict with the needs of others, whether directly or by generating externalities.
YES thanks for this! I've seen too many people justify something that could be considered immoral by invoking this "but it satisfies user needs" pseudo-argument.
I've seen a heck of a lot more people justify things by claiming to have objective moral knowledge. Throughout history, the most atrocious acts imaginable have been justified this way. I am much less worried about invoking the satisfaction of people's needs.
You can't convince people to go kill and die for you by saying they're just satisfying your needs. So you have to invent something people will actually buy, and this tends to be something about morality, religion or politics.
Capitalist morality merely poses as amoral. The moment you propose a more sensible alternative, you're hit by moral arguments about terrible things happening when you interfere with the invisible hand (of Providence).
When we mention "satisfying people's needs", those with more money get more satisfaction. That's how markets work. Like advertisers (corporations paying other corporations to spread propaganda), nation-states (which must control their populaces pretty much by definition), etc.
You can't look at it in a binary way. Of course it's a bad idea to prescribe people their needs. I wouldn't want someone telling me what I am to have for dinner. But there are also needs that are obviously better left unmet. For instance I may feel a need to take possession of your property. It's not a kind of freedom you'd want to grant to me.
I think it is rather binary, but I think your example in this case demonstrates a different principle.
Having my "needs" defined separately from my "wants" denies me my freedom. But that's different from you say, deciding to confiscate my things without due process.
> I'm terrified of others prescribing what's "needed" because someone else has decided what what's "wanted" isn't the best for them.
I'm equally terrified of others convincing you that what they have to offer is the best for you, with minor tweaks to "cover your needs"; yet that's the basis of profit-based marketing.
I respect your concern (I'm trying to be non-specific in terms of pronouns here, but it's hard), but that's a fear we have to live with, no? The notion that someone else's argument might be more persuasive than our own, that someone else's message might be accepted instead. Surely, there's something perverse about it, underhanded, or perhaps I'm just not enlightened enough, otherwise I wouldn't accept such a false pretense. Surely, if I'd been shown the light, and not doused in such propaganda, I'd make a better choice!
The problem with that of course, is that a lot of people can make that argument. And regardless of who's making the argument, be they weak or strong, they all rely on the premise that the person needs convincing of something, because to imagine that they might come to a conclusion that's not your own /by themselves/ is a terrifying thought.
I'm sorry, but I really can't condone the notion that some messages should be feared in that way, and that someone else knows what's best because they presume I do not.
It is great fun, when any previous authority is replaced by the logic of the market. What thrives, they say, deserves to thrive, what fails, deserves to fail.
Their argument is, if people really wanted a better world, they would have it already.
Which is of course foolish, the market doesn't care about good or evil.
In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence is a process whereby larger entities, patterns, and regularities arise through interactions among smaller or simpler entities that themselves do not exhibit such properties.
> Satisfying someone's needs doesn't justify anything. Not all needs are meant to be satisfied - especially if they conflict with the needs of others, whether directly or by generating externalities.
What cases are you talking about? If a consumer pays for something, they want it. What is the evil of supplying a consumer with what they want? If they don't want it they don't have to buy it. If they don't like it they don't have to use it. Ultimately, the decision is up to the consumer for what is the for them.
First of all, the consumer and the supplier do not form a closed system (regardless of what some ideologies would want one to believe). You have to account for the effects supplying a customer with something has on the third parties. Those are the externalities I've mentioned, and even Wikipedia has a lot of examples.
Secondly, you have to take a look at the aggregate effects. So for instance I may need a new, shittier way to spam web with ads, and there's a company who'll happily satisfy my needs. By having this transaction, I start earning more, and now my competitors see the strategy and all decide to adopt it. The end result is that web is more spammed, my advantage disappers, and the new solution probably costs more than the old one, but now no one can go back. A classic coordination problem[0].
Finally, as 'lostlogin points out downthread, what you want doesn't always equal to what you need.
> The end result is that web is more spammed, my advantage disappers, and the new solution probably costs more than the old one, but now no one can go back.
These are not the only players in the game like you believe. Those who advertise more effectively on the web have more of an advantage over those who advertise via other media and those who don't advertise at all. And, as ads are more spammy and in-your-face, the advertised products get bought more whether all competitors are spamming or only some. Advertised products are bought more than they would be if the ads were mild or there were no ads at all.
PS: Thanks for the blog link it looks very interesting, I'll read it later.
Which is strictly worse than not creating that market at all. It's just resources going to waste over the pointless zero-sum games, and that's exactly another reason where "satisfying user needs" doesn't cut it as a justification.
Software and hardware are sufficiently complex that the user has only the vaguest idea of what they actually bought. They cannot possibly make a fully informed decision and have to go on partial information.
I don't think it's sensible to say that customers "wanted" VW cars with "defeat devices". In that case, it's not even clear how much of the vendor company knew what was in the product.
Clearly VW engaged in deception of the customer as they cheated their test results. Customers are protected from such deception by the law.
My point was to criticise the "Internet Dream" utopian fairy tale advocated by commenter TEMPORAL--where a user gets everything but pays nothing--and to explain that the internet's commercialisation is perfectly OK.
I think there's a legitimate question to ask about how some kinds of commercialisation (selling privacy; expensive in-app purchases bought by children or compulsive gamblers; etc) are in some way deceptive or dishonest. It's certainly not as simple as a direct upfront payment for goods or services.
I think it's an often forgotten (perhaps purposefully to push an agenda in some circles?) part of these discussions about corporations and business models. They're just driven by demand. It's not some shady nebulous force at work trying to screw everything and everyone.
Another problem, idealists often ignore the practical realities of a society when dreaming of their idealist visions for the future. Could the internet have turned into a purely free and perfect forum for communication? In an ideal world yes, but not in our flawed world where there are a host of competing contrasting ideas.
To the authors point. Technology is moving too fast for laws, governments and political systems to cope with. The political and legal constructs we use today are not radically different from 200 or 300 years ago. I don't know if there has ever been a time in human history where the rate of technological innovation and change has been moving at such a speed that the legal and political systems cannot stay synced with the change and have no chance of catching up due to the increasing velocity.
> corporations and business models. They're just driven by demand. It's not some shady nebulous force at work trying to screw everything and everyone.
Oh it's not shady in the sense that it has agency and decides to screw everything up. But it's very powerful and increasingly misaligned with the interest of humans. Being driven by demand does not map well to the shared wishes and morals of humanity, only if because of coordination problems.
I agree with your other points. And I didn't mean to point out that if Internet stayed non-profit, we'd have a perfect communication platform by now. For instance I think that if it became powerful, it'd still have problems with power and influence being a similar incentive to money. I only wanted to highlight the source of the problems we now have, which are those demand-satisfying, profit-driven actions. And that to make the Internet a better place, we would need to refuse doing things that seem optimal from business point of view but are detrimental to the Internet itself.
A pessimist in me says: this isn't likely to happen, because coordination is hard. So tragedy of commons here, no way to make a bottom-up group opposition there; we're screwed by coordination problems.
I generally upvote your comments but I think this one is far too pessimistic. You're worrying about coordination problems on the internet? That's like, I don't know, worrying about dying of thirst in the middle of the ocean.
Oh wait... :P
On a more serious note, though, I think this is just another problem to be solved. Long-term, I am an absolute optimist: everything will get better, everywhere. Short-term, I admit there are some speed bumps :)
> On a more serious note, though, I think this is just another problem to be solved. Long-term, I am an absolute optimist: everything will get better, everywhere. Short-term, I admit there are some speed bumps :)
Yeah, that's why I keep my pessimist locked up in a cage underground, and only let it out to get some air every now and then. :). I still want to believe we'll get the United Federation of Planets :).
To be annoyingly pedantic, ocean water is unfit to drink, i.e. contains too much salt, so you can very easily die of thirst in the middle of the ocean.
The important qualifier for "just driven by demand" and "People paying to have their needs satisfied" is that some demands/needs/desires are more profitable than others regardless of their long-term importance to a particular system. Just because people are willing to pay for something (e.g. a new gadget) doesn't make it more valuable than something they are not willing to pay for (e.g. clean drinking water for thousands of children). Just because the short-term-focused free market is producing economic activity that satisfies a demand doesn't mean that the system is either healthy or long-term sustainable, and that's the crux of the issue about the idealized Internet - its viability as a platform for human advancement (broadly defined) has been undermined by its corresponding suitability to support independent profit-making.
If I tell you that you have a need to purchase an eleven foot swimming pool for you back yard, and if you dont have a back yard you now have a need for a back yard, how long will it take for you to believe you have a need for it? How many of your peers would it take to have the same, and for them to tell you that this need has to be satisfied.
What does that mediation upon "needs" mean?
We know about Maslows triangle of actual needs, comfort, security food. But what about all these other "needs" - people do pay to have these somewhat manufactured needs satisfied. This is how a profit driven world works.
It needs happy docile obedient workers, that are "not ashamed to be driven by profit" so do their ills with a clear conscience.
As others have so aptly pointed out, externalities are the huge fly in your ointment. Rather than keep prattling on about externalities, I want to direct your attention to a practical example, environmental mercury contamination. [1] As a civilization, we knew from over 200 years ago that various mercury compounds were bad news bears in sufficiently-high quantities and/or cumulative exposures.
Industrial utilization of mercury is incredibly useful, adequate remediation and recovery expensive, and venting mercury-laden industrial waste into the atmosphere so easy and innocuous-looking, combined to land us in a modern situation any 16-18th century fisherman would find utterly absurd and fantastical. Lots and lots of people paid over many decades and centuries to have their needs satisfied with the help of mercury-laced compounds and mercury itself, to dump (and continue to dump to this day) their cumulative externality upon us, despite extremely early knowledge about cumulative effects, so that we go about our day-to-day in a real, live sci-fi world where some fish have so much bioaccumulated mercury that we have to ration our consumption of them.
There is an enormous amount of economic activity in the world today that works solely from finding and monetizing externalities. I expect this only gets worse in the future.
I don't think it's nearly as grim as you make it out to be... it's just as easy to deploy a personal not-profit driven application/bulletin-board or whatever on Amazon, Linode, DigitalOcean, Azure and many others as it has EVER been to start a project and deploy it online.
People are choosing to use Facebook, Twitter and other sites... that doesn't stop anyone from doing other things. That said, I think some government actions from spying to DMCA takedown shams and the like are pretty bad.
More people today have enough knowledge to put up a web application than did in 1996... I've been working developing web applications since that year. I also remember a lot of the nay-sayers back then... guess what, it's still better today for the most part. I really miss BBSing, that said I'd rather have today's tools and connectivity.
There's efforts to open up communications via WebRTC based application networks, and I think that may well be the future for some classes of applications. When you shut one thing down, other ideas present themselves.
People were choosing to drink heavily radioactive water in the early 20th century.
People are choosing to take drugs that destroy their lives.
When people chose something it doesn't mean they understand all the consequences. Especially since all the bad sides are conveniently hidden away in some tech, nerd stuff.
People use Facebook because other people use Facebook. Simple as that. People haven't assessed all the facts about Facebook and decided they are ok with them. They just use Facebook because their friends use Facebook.
Pretending people are rational and have perfect information considered harmful, etc.
As long as there is ability, and relatively common knowledge in order to create alternatives, there is less to fear. Natural monopolies aren't inherently bad so long as the ability to compete is preserved. That's just my opinion.
I don't think that the position that Facebook and Google in are inherently bad... but I do appreciate alternatives more than most. It comes down to freedom of information and accessibility of knowledge.
> People are choosing to use Facebook, Twitter and other sites
Which people, the early techies OP was talking about, or the other bunch who joined the Internet later on having no experience and knowledge how to use it to keep their privacy and maintain same responsibility for other online participants ?
The same argument was made (correctly IMHO) before as well. "The best minds of my generation destroyed by Wall Street and Hedge Funds."
Perhaps i'm naive but on average, the product shipped by the west coast is a whole lot more useful than the product shipped by Wall St, no? Certainly on relative terms, I would think on absolute terms as well?
Yes, the same idea for Finance Industry. Loads of our brightest get drawn into there and never leave.
However, I was thinking more along the lines of these minds leaving these brain destroying occupations and making something better (e.g. something described in the article) rather than choosing between one and the other bad cases.
A decent future for humanity is not compatible with a profit-driven world. The solution is to end the profit driven world in a way that will lead to a better future, because like it or not, the profit driven world IS ending.
Feudalism may have lifted more humans out of poverty than any other system that came before it by leaps and bounds. It's a good thing we didn't decide to stop there.
Secondly, I'm not sure we should so quickly even concede your point. What if The Enlightenment, mathematics and science, and democracy were actually greater contributors to lifting humans out of poverty? All the greatest advancements in mathematics and science (think Einstein) don't appear to be profit driven.
It did. We can't forget that all that wealth we have around is mostly thanks to market economy. It's a powerful driving force.
But just because it's powerful, doesn't mean it goes in the direction we want. It did, mostly, for the better part of the last two centuries. But more and more, we now find ourselves at odds with where the market wants to go. This is the issue we have to deal with - our present economical engine becoming incompatible with a better future.
It's not like the market economy is some distinctive, separate force from humanity; it's made up of people. And perhaps frustratingly, it's made up of all of those who participate, and not by diktat.
I think what maddens some is that masses of people sometimes make decisions we don't necessarily agree with, and often with information we don't think they have. We want change /now/, and that's just not possible with massive systems of people.
So we may look at issues of inequality today and issues of budgets and austerity and whatnot, and assume that we're all heading for the end. But as you insinuate in your earlier comment, man has steadily increased their economic output for centuries. The quality and longevity of life, over time, has increased inexorably. We can't confuse the turbulence of a decade with a scope over centuries.
But all of this I feel is somewhat moot. Because for as many calls as there had been for greater control over market forces, be it mercantilism of the 18th and 19th centuries, or socialism and communism in the 20th, we find that we're still, wherever freely possible, conducting business by barter and exchange, gathering wealth, and acting in our own interests. We do this because it's natural, because it requires no direction from elsewhere, or guidelines to follow that someone else sets. Place a person in whatever place and she or he will try to make themselves a profit.
We can only be frustrated to a point with the way things are, because to go further is to refute who we are. Freedom is desired naturally, be it in rule or economics. Best to help things remain open and fair, and not try and set a direction. People will find the best one for themselves.
"Poverty" is a relative condition that couldn't exist without Capitalism. There is no objective state of poverty anyone has been lifted out of by Capitalism.
That's complete rubbish. Anthropologists and historians use measures in terms of nutrition, health, life expectancy, child mortality and leisure time that apply regardless of the economic system in operation and track changes over time in order to characterize changes in lifestyle. You can set benchmarks to characterize poverty regardless of whether the population in question live in an agrarian, capitalist, Marxist or whatever system. Arguing that the massive objective improvements in living standards generated in capitalist economies somehow don't count on obscure technical semantic grounds is pure Marxist* sophistry.
* It occurs to me that it's possible you might not be a Marxist, but the argument you're making is one often put forward by Marxists, along the lines that capitalism by establishing monetary systems to measure capital establish scales on which poverty is measured and therefore create that poverty. Of course every Marxist society ever created has also used a monetary system to measure and allocate capital. But then Marx never, in any of his publications or letters, ever described how a communist economy would actually function so obviously building one has proven somewhat problematic.
Your starred comment beautifully allowed you to knock down your own strawman. Nicely done. :D
It is worth looking at his comment with the "red" filters removed. The point is that every game has winners and losers. You actually can't have one without the other, by definition. One creates the other.
The real question is just how far do you want to tilt the board before all of the pieces fall off? Money is just a representation of material and effort. Do you really want to leave the decision about where all material and effort are spent up to those who figured out how to win this game? To some degree that's fair, but to what degree?
Remember: there are no self-made men. Anyone who thinks this is deluding themselves. We exist in an interconnected net, where everything is related. There is not one thing sitting within arms reach of you right now that you made completely by your own hand. You are standing, at all times, on the shoulders of others. Hopefully this is a true circle, where those at the top allow those on the bottom to stand on their shoulders.
> Hopefully this is a true circle, where those at the top allow those on the bottom to stand on their shoulders.
Of course this is true. The company I work for was founded by, and is run by very successful wealth members of the top 0.1%. The salary I get from that company feeds and clothes me any my children, provides us with a car, holidays, health care, a pension plan and all the other trappings of western civilization. Just because I work for them doesn't mean I have in any way 'lost'. I have gained massively. I hope they go on winning so they can employ even more people like me.
When my wife arrived in this country, she got a bottom-of-the-ladder job at a coffee shop. Within 2 months she was an assistant manager. She used the money she earned to support herself and pay the course and transport fees to go to a community college 'access to nursing' course and now 13 years later is head nurse at a specialist fracture clinic. Everybody won. They got a hard working Barista, and she got the resources she needed to build a successful career and their customers got great tasting coffee. Nobody lost a single thing.
>The point is that every game has winners and losers.
If so, then the point is wrong, because Game Theory[0]. With very few exceptions (e.g. futures and options contracts, IIRC) trade - that thing markets do - is a positive sum cooperative game, that is to say win/win.
Both sides can certainly win in a futures contract and often do. A farmer sells his future crop now at a discount so he can buy fertilizer he couldn't otherwise afford, but without which there would be less crop to sell. Meanwhile the future crop buyer gets the crop at a discount. Win-win.
Pure financial derivatives trading can generate absolute winners and losers, but they know that getting into the game, and the advantage for commercial participants is that the 'gamblers' increase liquidity in the market.
Fuck this kind of answer. Perfect capitalism ends up with a perfect world. Perfect socialism too. Or communism.
It's the way we corrupt each of them which is the problem, corrupted by people who want power. There's no way we have found of solving that yet. None.
So far, that we're still alive seems to be pure luck, and that we make it out alive or not, seems to also be pure luck or bad luck. We certainly ain't helping ourselves all that much.
I'd say it's collapsing on itself. It's trying to optimize people out of the loop, but is not yet able to sustain itself without humans. Nor will the humans lay down and die without giving a fight.
Capitalism optimizes people into the loop in fact. It pulls more people into higher standards of living, and produces more jobs for people.
We have four billion more people than 50 years ago, and more people have jobs today globally than at any other time in history, and less people are in poverty, and there's more food available for everyone, and famines are almost non-existent, and the infant mortality rate has been drastically reduced, and the global life expectancy keeps rising, and a hundred other things that prove you wrong.
"More people have jobs" is a completely meaningless sentence. There is an amount of work that all humans have to do to ensure the survival of themselves and all other humans. If we were doing it right, we would all he doing less work, not more, and we would have some kind of equality of access to the total product of society. Instead, and increasingly, the people doing the hardest work are disconnected from access to the product of their labor or the chance at ever getting access to it.
The internet deals mostly in intellectual property, where socialism is actually working quite well. Github is essentially a communist marketplace: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs"
I think, to put it short, the middle path is the right one: partway socialist, partway capitalist. The capitalist side has had an upswing in Sweden recently, and the development it started is noticeable. Socalism can and does lead to stagnation, while capitalism can and does lead to overexploitation.
I wouldn't call countries with strong property laws socialists because of their welfare programs. After wall socialists want to abolish property (as the comment I replied to mentions). Unless you're talking about some Keynesian welfare state "socialist". As to your comment on the dictatorships... https://i.imgur.com/41fsQ9z.jpg
In order to keep the corruption away, or maybe even limit it, all of us and our coworkers would have to start risking their livelihoods by torpedoing the insane ideas our managers and bosses have. I tried, and it's hard, and unless it's a collective action your boss won't listen to a lone techie telling him that this business idea of his is actually socially destructive and is abusing the users.
And that even doesn't begin to solve the problems of techies who went over to the dark side, who have both the profit-at-all-costs mindset and skills to pull it off.