Anti monopoly and regulations against anti competitive practices are cornerstones of capitalism ensuring free and fair competition.
So no, what we need is a return back to when these practices weren't allowed, away from allowing these things more than ever as we do now.
It's easy to see Russia has become an oligarchy, why can't we see it's happening to us too?
But we can't dismantle capitalism altogether, without creating an even bigger monopoly problem, the monopoly being corrupt governments like the soviet union and their 5 year plan economy, that very obviously wasn't a very good concept.
Maybe that's what you meant, I'd just not call it anti-capitalism, when regulations are for the purpose of making capitalism work better.
So just "regulation" is better.
Except Scandinavians have more freedom, and better free market than USA.
Repubtard: BUT IT'S SOCIALISM!!!
Ehrm, they also have better freedom of speech.
Repubtard: WHAT? ARE YOU A FUCKING COMMIE?
Actually they also rank way higher on democracy.
Repubtard: WHY DO YOU HATE AMERICA?
I don't, but wouldn't it be nice if everybody had healthcare, free education and social security so you didn't have to fear to starve if you got ill and lost yopur job?
Repubtard: HEY THAT'S SOCIALISM!!!
....
Ugh, my elderly neighbor was going on about how Harris was going to take away this and that, most of which I’d never heard her say or even read about her plans doing, and I said, “where did you hear that? It was Fox News wasn’t it?” He replied with, “well, what news do you watch?” I said, “it sure isn’t Fox where they lie constantly. Harris hasn’t said any of that crap … you need to get your news from multiple sources.”
We’d be a heck of a lot better off if the news agencies were held accountable for telling lies and making up stories. Yeah, I know it’s a fine line but it’s one I’m willing to walk at this point.
We’d be a heck of a lot better off if the news agencies were held accountable for telling lies
Yes, other countries have that, it's called responsible journalism.
You can't just parrot some source, and claim it's reporting. You need to check your sources.
When they help spread lies, they are part of the problem.
What is your elderly neighbor's view on Republican policies for the elderly compared to the Democrats; and does Fox care more about their elderly viewers half as much as their younger viewers—i.e. the ones who justify more money from advertisers?
In 30 years, Trump will be as cited by Republicans as much as Reagan is today—i.e. rarely if ever—probably less—Reagan at least won twice and in one election he won 49 states—as did Nixon in 1972—and back then, Nixon was about the same age as Harris is now.
Did your elderly neighbour support Ross Perot back in 1992?
a Texan speaks:
Ross Perot [Independent] 1992 Campaign Ad "Snapshot - :60"
I wonder if a typical Republican could point out Sweden on a map.
Regulations only exist because Capitalism would consume itself without guardrails.
I wonder if it's consuming itself a bit right now.
Late stage capiyalims, Baybee!
That's why they do regulatory capture to prevent that from happening. It all starts with money being equal to influence. This can temporarily be reset after a big crash of the system but sooner or later they start again.
All power to the users. And I do mean ALL. Complete control over cellular modems for one. Control over every little bit of hardware in the consumers hands.
That includes warranty promises, that includes schematics, source code for firmware, everything. For all current, past and future devices.
Fuck locked bootloaders.
Yes, even if you try to use the controls we have left, you will discover that they always clip out one little obscure but critical detail that means you can't actually use your device your way.
Example, starting ADB at boot in tcpip 5555 mode when your bootloader is locked
means you can’t actually use your device your way.
Then don't use the device.
(I myself can wait longer than many of their shareholders.)
I don't have the luxury of buying another.
I want legislative actions to make this illegal.
What do you need this device for?
Remotely operated wireless camera
You know something is wrong when Google is one of the most consumer friendly companies.
I respect the sentiment, but most users neither know nor care about that. They want to take their new device out of it's box, power it on, log in to whatever accounts they have, and carry on with their day.
The number of people who actually care about that is very small.
It doesn't matter if they care about this. They are too dumb to do anything about it anyway. They still can get to take advantage of this. Most notable would be that stuff like "bank apps only through play/apple store" would be much harder to pull of.
You're not wrong, but users should then be held accountable if they fuck up their device. For example, if you decide to force companies to allow unlocking of bootloaders, and the user decides to flash something that they shouldn't, and the device bricks, whose fault is it?
Then they can just get it repaired, at a shop that has the flasher to re-flash the device. Cuz it's open source
And pay a shop to do it? Do you realistically think the average person is gonna be willing to do that? I think it's more likely they'll complain to the phone company about their bricked phone.
I also don't know enough, but is a bricked phone "fixable"? If it is, the person could do it themselves. But that's just one example. Other examples include installing unsafe OSes because social media said so. I don't think the average person is tech savvy enough to give them this kind of freedom.
This may be symptomatic of the issue being addressed. Would we be more willing to get the phone repaired if we felt more ownership of it? My hands are tied if the device was designed without repeatability in mind and the manufacturer has no intention of volunteering assistance - so I must complain. In our current system, we don't have many options to choose from. I look forward to your thoughts.
Also I believe 'bricked' is a result of it becoming inoperable. Our devices aren't easily repaired so they will become 'bricked' SOONER than if designed to run unlocked boot systems and OS's. Feeling more ownership of your device may lead you to be more careful with it and only entrust it with reputable technicians.
This very much depends. Are there technical ways to restore this? Something like a jumper to make the flash storage writable. This would be possible with access to the firmware source code. So yeah, they can fix it themselves. Who is responsible? If the device is bricked after this: the company.
Build locked up products? Die.
Build in fuses? Better make those chips accessible by providing the plans to build them, otherwise refund your customers and die. Now everyone can build them, this won't be a monopoly and everyone wins.
But that's terrorism!
I am aware of this narrative. I don't agree.
So you're saying you side with the terrrists!
"I'm on my side."
The users already have a lot of control; many just don't use it.
Can any of you live without Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube for one calendar month? 25 years ago, millions of Americans did, and their lives were hardly the poorer for it. 25 years before that it was over 150 million Americans, including the 12 who walked the Moon.
I've been living without the first two for years now. I could live without youtube if I really needed to, though I do watch a lot of stuff about farming that is really helpful. Most of my youtube watching is educational with a slight smattering of games and entertainment and a tiny bit of news.
The kind of control we are talking about are different. You look at the law, in which I have only little trust, while I look at the ability to manipulate the hardware.
So no, they do not have control over the hardware, they just don't care that much. They do care if they are inconvenienced in any way, say by a service that disallows some parts that were previously offered. They don't understand and don't care, but they do win from some more control over their stuff.
I already live without any of the services you mentioned, I suspect most of Lemmy do. Well, not without YouTube (for me), I guess, but that gets more and more replaced by stuff like peertube.
Millions of Americans would still only occasionally visit those things if they had more options to plan their recreational time. Those options are mostly limited by less free time available while also having less money available. In that regard, and mostly limited to that regard, was then better than now.
Break up the mega corps. Enact user privacy-by-default laws. Market dominance via "free product" followed up by bait and switch tactics should be outlawed.
This would be a great start. Strong Antitrust = Competition.
Repairable technology with encouragement to repair things that break by designing them to be fixable.
Open source technologies becoming the rule, rather than the exception (this is already the case in some ways, but I truly mean EVERYTHING).
Open Standards that make interoperability easier by removing walled gardens (iMessage, G-Sync, etc).
Once capitalism is dead.
Technology is great, it's just naturally being used to exploit.
That's for too long a wait—if such ever happens.
DIY. Be your own boss. Not all economic relationships in this world are capitalist.
If we work together and do our part, we can shorten the wait by more than you might think
Starting out with small groups shouldn't be too difficult.
If people stopped using tech to exploit people they would stop feeling exploited by it
“People” is a great word. Who do you mean exactly for these roles? Who’s doing what here?
As usual, most people who have control of how technology is used on a broad scale are in positions of power suitable for exploitation. That is, the people I'm talking about are business owners and high-level executives (and the government) using technology to exploit workers. To be fair, that's not always the dynamic-- "normal" people can exploit each other too, and businesses and the government can as well. But it is the most pressing issue imo, because of the power imbalance. See also rent comtrol algorithms, automated insurance claim denials, etc.
Uh, NOT put surveillance and extremely questionable AI into everything? I don’t need my toilet tweeting how healthy I am
I’m a developer posting on Lemmy so maybe take this with a huge grain of salt but I think we need to focus less on STEM/finance and more on humanities education. Definitely in the United States but probably most of the world considering India and China focus on tech too.
When I was learning to code (in the 90’s and 2000’s unless you count a 9 year old making BASIC do loops), my mentors basically all had majored in something besides computer science because there wasn’t necessarily even a computer science major available if your college didn’t have “Tech” in the name. It was a lot of hippies who spent their weekends making pottery and got into IT or software development almost by accident; it was a job to fund their non-lucrative hobby or passion.
Basically, we lost something when being a programmer became a goal and not a way to reach some other goal. I’m not sure we can return to a time when it was tinkerers and hobbyists coming to the field with different backgrounds but more creatives should learn to code and more coders should be forced to make art.
Steve Jobs said taking a calligraphy class was the reason that having a wide variety of attractive fonts was important to him when designing the Mac.
Get rid of the billionaire tech-lords. The ones that create the only new tech we’re allowed to have: fees, ads, and enshittification.
Raze Silicon Valley to the ground and start over?
That just makes it even easier for Wall St to enshittify whatever comes after
Ugh I hate that you're right. Until we figure out capitalism we're fucked.
I think you wanted to write “democratic communism” 😏😂
Don't need to take things further than market socialism to fix the problems with capitalism.
That is the best step towards communism we, in the west, can do right now, in my opinion. Slowly add more and more socialism and democratic laws until we all can be happy together 😁
No: the bad guys will build another one.
However if 250 million Americans each spent 400 hours less on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube in the next 12 months, the shareholders might have the heads of many members of those corporate boards on pikes.
Producing products that the users wants, and that solves tje users real problems. And not trying to make products as addictive as possible, to harvest as much user data as possible to sell.
For that we need technical means ready which allow the platform itself to be untrusted. Signal claims to be that and apparently is. Sadly there are no such things for social media (Nostr maybe, but it's very raw now), personal webpages, so on so forth
Open source.
Decomodify software. Refuse to respect copyright laws for software, or mandate that all software must be GPL or an equivalent restrictive license.
Make it so that all government software must be GPL, that would remove an enormous install base from corporate entities. Certain EU countries are already doing this.
If you are a public institution of any kind, you should not be using corporate, proprietary software, no exceptions.
Closed source software and hardware is largely what allowed massive corpos to take over the software and hardware scene, and it's what creates the incentive for silicon valley tech bros to create new technology solely in the hopes of being acquired for hundreds of millions, or even billions of dollars by some massive megacorp.
Corpos and private equity scumbags wouldn't be interested in acquiring these companies if they knew all the code and technology was under a GPL-like license, and anybody could take that tech, modify it, redistribute it, fork it, rebrand it, etc.
Make it so that all government software must be GPL, that would remove an enormous install base from corporate entities. Certain EU countries are already doing this.
Schools included.
Many students today don't touch a personal computer a lot outside of school and then workplace.
My conspiracy theory:
I suspect that's the desired effect of "smartphones", and also the reason "smartphones" without keyboards are such an industry consensus. Not them being cheaper. Not them looking nicer. First, keyboards can be very sexy (think ZX Spectrum, or Blackberry for PDAs), second, however they look, touchscreen UIs are PITA, third, they are not that more expensive.
The strategy thus is that entertainment personal computing should be pressed out to devices hardly usable for work. So that "normal" people would gain their experience with that, and thus not gain the experience accompanying normal personal computing. As in - tinkering, customization, creation.
Because I remember how in my childhood any kid with a PC at home would do some tinkering and exploration. Today's kids scroll, and scroll, and scroll.
Mind-boggling actually, my sister (now kinda helpless with computers) was making websites and RPGs with RPGMaker2000, my younger cousin who is a designer was - I actually don't remember what she was doing, but something connected to editing amateur films they were making with my older cousin, who's a software engineer now.
Getting back to various pressures, this reduces the space for personal computing free from corporate and governmental policies. And this also reduces the unwanted effects from more creative entertainment - people who do something as a hobby are a direct competition to corporate gaslighting. The contrast is like between an 18yo girl on a rock festival and a Soviet propaganda poster. The latter never wins. And such a situation sadly negatively affects the chances of people getting the kinds of hobbies corps wouldn't want them to have.
I, for one, have become a lot more optimist about Tech ever since I've replaced the closed solutions that deny me control from corporations looking to squeeze every last cent of value from me - from smartphone OSes to TV Boxes - with open source solutions were it's me who holds the keys.
What TV box would you recommend?
Personally I replaced my TV Box with a Intel N100 Mini-PC (specifically a GMTek G3) running Lubuntu and Kodi, though it's used for a lot more than just being my TV box. I also got one of these remotes so I control it just like I would a dedicate TV Box (even though it has a mini-keyboard on the back and airmouse functionality, I almost never use it).
I use IPTV with it to watch just the free TV Channels, though there are providers out there who carry over 1000 channels for 5 bucks a month.
If you want something to just use as TV Box, start by checking Libreelec which is a Linux distro with Kodi configured to just work as a TV Box. It has builds for a whole lot of single board computers, which generally are cheaper than Mini-PCs (for example you can get a Banana Pi M5 - one of the supported SBCs - plus box, powersource and even the SD card for about half the price of the Mini-PC I got). The same remote I use should work fine with Libreelect on any platform which has at least one USB connector (not tested it myself but it makes sense since it uses the same kind of protocol and dongle as a wireless keyboard + mouse with pressing the "normal" remote buttons just generating keypresses according to some kind of standard of shortcut keys for media players)
Had I've been aiming for just a TV Box replacement I would've probably gone via checking which hardware Libreelec is compatible with and then chosen one of those and used the Libreelec since it's a Linux distro already preconfigures for acting as a proper TV Box (whilst with Lubuntu with Kodi on top I had to go around figuring out and changing the configuration for auto-login, auto-starting Kodi on startup and so on)
Cool! Thanks a lot for the thorough answer!
Automate terra forming against climate change. I want big machines and swarms of drones doing 24/7 regreening and planting forests in the desert.
Well first we kill all they lawyers Investment Bankers.
Then all the lawyers.
Any time anyone is able to claw back some scraps of justice or get some kind of recompense for wrongs or - here’s a big one - change the law: that’s lawyers too. The characterization of all lawyers as sharks and assholes has done more to exacerbate the justice gap then help.
Yes! The whole "lawyers are evil money grabbers" is a corporate psy-op. They want you to think it's unreasonable for a person to sue a corporation when the corporation's actions are harmful. They also want you to think defense attorneys are people who just look for technicalities to free guilty people.
They created armies of lawyers for themselves, while making americans distrustful of the ones fighting for normal people. We used to think of lawyers like Atticus Finch or Perry Mason. But now we just think of Saul Goodman and Lionel Hutz.
or Perry Mason.
Loved those books. Maybe he's too perfect a character morally, but still.
In Minecraft of course...
Taking patent, trademark, and copyright laws to what they were in, say, 1790, might be a good start.
Regard today's billionaires with the same contempt that one does of criminals.
Wait at least 5 years before buying a new computer.
Don't pay by credit card.
Don't pay by credit card.
This is bad advice for anyone with good credit and spending habits. A credit card with rewards is just free money if you're responsible with it. I haven't paid interest in over a decade and have made thousands from rewards.
Yep, the rich are rich because they borrow other peoples money. 0% free interest lines are about the best discount you can get on anything. I get to make the interest while you hold the loan? Sign me up! Siri, remind me in 11 months to pay off the X loan.
The reason why corpos been able to price gouge the peasants is particulaly to tp them having access to data this granular. Same reason why they want dynamic pricing schemes.
Not to mention the security that comes from being able to not pay if you get scammed for whatever reason. I paid for a course at a community college with a credit card, but then my schedule changed so I tried to cancel the class before it even started. The college gave me a whole runaround, and whether it was willful or just simple incompetence, I wasn't able to get a refund. So I called my credit card company and explained the situation to them, and they resolved the whole thing for me. Sometimes even mentioning that you'll refer such a problem to the fraud department at your credit card company is enough to get someone to back down and give you a refund.
Credit cards have issues, especially if you have problems with using them responsibly, but that's one particular way in which they can save you a lot of headache.
I haven’t paid interest in over a decade and have made thousands from rewards.
I'm not too familiar with credit cards, do you mean this in a literal money sense or something more complex, i.e. the value of rewards & money?
We pay for EVERYTHING on our credit card, shared account with my partner. 2% money back. Pay it off in full every month. Zero interest paid, thousands of monies back.
One of the better credit card rewards is a small percentage cash back, so literally free money. Money is fungible though, so any discounts on things you were going to buy anyway are effectively the same thing.
Fair enough, but they know what you bought.
Yes, but you can also do a chargeback if the company you purchased from sold you a lousy product and isn’t being reasonable about returning it. If you had paid with cash, that cash is GONE.
Each method has its pros and cons.
If you had paid with cash, that cash is GONE.
not if I have a receipt.
There are no free money. These are loans. And making them attractive with cashbacks and rewards is done to trap unresponsible spenders. 95% of the time you don't need to borrow money from the bank, unless you are in emergency or you are to invest these to achieve some payback (e.g. a loan to open your business).
These are loans. And making them attractive with cashbacks and rewards is done to trap unresponsible spenders
I am aware, which is why I specifically said
This is bad advice for anyone with good credit and spending habits.
For people who aren't irresponsible spenders, it's a bad financial decision not to take the short term bank loan. Sure, I don't need to spend the banks money because I have enough in my checking account to cover it. But by not doing so, I lose money on any transactions that don't charge me a fee to run my card.
If you're not responsible enough to use a credit card and not destroy your finances, absolutely do not use them. But for those of us who are, it's a dumb idea to eschew it just because you have the money on hand. Like I said, I haven't paid interest in a decade and have made thousands from my normal spending habits.
If I followed your advice, I would be objectively worse off, because I'd be losing money from my rewards for no benefit whatsoever. And I can guarantee I'd be materially worse off, since my credit card is the reason my credit is as good as it is, and that bullshit has a pervasive and perverse effect on your life. It's not only loans that are impacted, but insurance, housing and employment can be as well. So maybe I should have left good credit off, since responsible spending will build your credit up even if it is bad currently.
TL;DR - responsible credit card use is a good thing, and foregoing it just because you have money on hand is a bad financial decision. Pay that shit off immediately and there's no material downside and you still get all the benefits.
Irresponsible vs responsible is how the credit card companies frame it, but I think most of the time it's about luck. The kind of luck where the primary income gets hit by a car or someone in the family gets cancer.
My almost six year old 9900k machine is still playing everything amazingly, with a video card update being my only change. I love it so much.
My iPhone is also six years old and the only reason I’m upgrading this month is to get 120hz, USB-C, and a better low light camera for cat pictures. A terabyte would be nice, too.
Treating addiction as a disease and people intentionally seeking to exploit it at a mass scale should be charged for harm.
Organizations should be held liable for user data exposed to malicious actors both intentionally and through neglect of security.
We stop the acquisitions. We work out ways to foster innovation and protect patents only in the short term.
We need more than a couple phone manufacturers, we need more than a couple of food producers. All of these monolith mega corporations keep smaller upstarts from coming up and competing.
And more than a couple operating systems. We get a lot of horrifyingly bad compatibility issues from Apple, and to a lesser degree, Google.
Unfortunately some things will IMO always remain a natural monopoly. For example good luck trying to convince developers to write their apps for all those different operating systems.
Most of those apps could be replaced by a website that will work anywhere. But a website can't spy on you as easily.... so they push apps instead.
They could still be compatible, though. it's possible even today, to some degree
Yeah, Java slogan was code once, run everywhere for a reason.
Doesn't have to be that way
And it’s hard for anyone to say no to multi-millions that will change your family’s life by selling when it’s not even 1% of the corporations profit. Can’t blame them for selling out really. I’d do the same thing and so would you.
They actually said in their review of the sale that they'll be able to do better price fixing even if grocery stores demand price cuts.
The use of open, decentralized platforms such as the fediverse is one small step in the right direction at least.
FOSS / fediverse is really the only tech stuff that isn't massively disappointing as of late.
And sodium batteries, or so I hope.
And yet this community seems more techno-pessimistic than even /r/technology, which is a challenge.
I ditched my smartphone spring of 2023. Still use it on WiFi at home, but every time I leave the house, I only carry a fliphone.
Every time a stranger asks me about it, they say something like “I wish I could ditch my smartphone.” Like I get it. It’s not easy. I can’t even go to a baseball game unless my wife has our tickets on her phone. Paying for parking sometimes requires an app.
Yet apparently everyone hates this thing that they are now required to carry around.
How did we get here?
Concrete goals, and reasonable steps to achieve them.
I feel like lately we've hit a weird speculative investment period in tech, where we have a bunch of tech that's created because it can be, but not because it's needed. Do LLMs, crypto currency, or NFTs have actual uses? Very possibly, but nothing concrete enough to satisfy the bubble that formed from them.
We live in an age of unreality. Give us something achievable and genuine, we get excited. It doesn't have to be complicated, just real. Hell, I'm excited as fuck over solid sodium batteries, and that's boring as shit.
The tech sector is right now just running in hype and jumping from one hype to the next. It's a race to keep that investors throwing money at them with providing new targets to keep investors from realizing the stuff isn't that useful.
We cannot even play music from a device without needing some sort of patent license, usually paid by the hardware vendor.
Not an issue when you pirate 🤔
100% capitalism is part of the blame, why isnt there a public option for music? Promoting local artists that are in the public domain and can tour and make a living in public venues.
Instead we have ticket master and other such big music. Companies, now this is applied to music but really can be applied to every sector.
Elect local politicians who can make change for the people on the local level.
They didn't say copyright, they said patent.
Yes you can. I often ignore copyright with impunity. I've been doing it since the days of home-taping.
EMI refused to promote the cassingle due to lyrics ("Off the radio I get constant flow/Hit it, pause it, record and play/Turn it, rewind and rub it away") that promoted home taping[7] during an era when music piracy was a hot-button issue.[8]
In a capitalist economy, corporations act within the free market established by the government. Government is responsible for establishing fair and transparent ways of doing business, such as maintaining a currency, and legal and accounting frameworks. But that’s not enough.
The article has a good starting point about breaking up monopolies to reestablish competition. We’ve let so many monopolies grow in the last few decades, to our detriment.
But that’s not enough. It’s also governments role to incorporate externalities into the market so corporate actions are fairly priced instead of costing society, and to ensure the market is working for the citizens. As prime examples, corporations need to bear the costs of resource extraction or an imposition on the environment. How could the free market work effectively, if some corporations are allowed to impose costs on society that are not priced into their goods? They’re effectively being subsidized, given an unfair advantage against their competitors, while also working against the future of the citizens forming this market.
But a fair market is only fair, if all the participants have standing, including the consumers who are the focus of the market, and workers who make it all happen. Currently we’ve let corporation ps dominate other roles in the market, we’re following a corporate economy and of course are not happy with the results. For example, consider “terms of service” imposed for just about everything these days. They’re always phrased as a contract and as if customers agree, yet are completely one sided, imposed without recourse or even any reasonable standard for a legal contract, and without any real choice. How can that be called a free market?
We could go a long way toward a free market that serves society if government does it’s part of establishing fairness, transparency, honesty for all entities in that market, and remembering that both governments and the market serve society, rather than the other way around
I'll be optimistic about technology when the last techbro is strangled with the entrails of the last angel investor
Replace goodwill with encryption. That's about data and metadata safety, but the same logic applies to everything else. No trust to people interested in breaking it.
As in - browsers' developers' goodwill was intended to keep Web standards' race in check. Protocols' extensibility was intended to allow for future backward-compatible development.
This was a wrong idea.
Gemini is one example of solving it, but one can imagine many others.
And it's fine if we have 12 Web protocols each for some specific idea of the Web. Among them some, say, would allow people to easily create webpages like year 1996, but sufficient for modern tasks and without all the bother with DNS and hosting (perhaps there is a p2p solution), Telegram shows that this is in huge demand. Many such variants are better than one overly complex, dangerous, corporate and oligopolized Web.
That's similar to how it seemed working anyway, we had e-news for global forums, webpages for personal pages, IRC for chats, ICQ\AIM\MSN for DMs, e-mail for reliable DMs, well, everyone remembers that time.
Nostr is a very raw, but maybe interesting idea for public social media.
Funny how Unix philosophy always shows itself in unexpected places, yes? =)
Build anarcho-communism, thereby removing any incentives to enshittify.
I always find it very funny when someone suggests anarcho-something as a solution to all of capitalism's problems. How exactly do you plan to enforce that? Do you think social pressure & shunning will do anything more than create a class of extremists with an oppositional philosophy?
It's a rather bold claim to be able to create a system where you can achieve more power honestly than cannibalizing others. It's a good ideal goal, of course, and people are optimizing for it, but no, that's not a realistic solution.
#NO
The only way is to build technologies that allow humans to escape the capitalist system and allow us to build our own communities in direct opposition to capitalist greed and exploitation.
Relevant for me; i nearly changed careers out of tech entirely -- being fed up with the state of the industry -- but found some great folks in worker cooperative spaces. Here's what's kept me optimistic:
Plucked a vid off this channel and let it be known the idea of the channel name is to "reject isms/be your own ism"
Solarpunk has replaced, for me, the plasteel+glass greenhouse skyscraper skylines. Afrofuturism offers a much better preconfiguration than anything of capitalist and anglo origins. Importantly, the dismantling of unjust heirarchies.
I never lost the optimism, i just recognized that the root cause of our pain is not going to be addressed by technnlology (new invention) without an equal-or-greater effort into decolonizing and unlearning on the part of those building, using and promoting a given technology.
“reject isms/be your own ism”
Autism
Should we?
When I see technology actively making the world consistently better rather than constantly trashing the ecosystem that literally keeps us alive, I'll have optimism about it.
The technological innovations of the last fifteen years, from advertising enshittifcation to AI cheating, have largely been a disaster. We are sadly at the point where, as Ted Gioia says, “most so-called innovations are now anti-progress by any honest definition.” I dare say that if we could revert all digital technology to where it was in 2009 – before the invention of the retweet – we’d all be better off.
I'd go back even further (to 2007) before the invention of the iPhone. The smartphone has, arguably, IMO been a bad, or at least premature invention. It created a generation of kids obsessed with their photographies, giving girls eating disorders and creating/spreading unrealistic beauty ideals, etc... Also it has severely disrupted teenagers' social living, created sleeping disorders, chronic doomscrolling, addiction, and more bad stuff. The iPhone was, IMO, not ready for this world.
Anarcho-transhumanism, or ig more open source innovations unsullied by the profit motive would-be nice.
Stop tariffs on new technologies
Get rot economists out of tech companies and return to private ownership.
Most of the venture capital that fueled the techno booms were Russian - hence all this dumb "Let's make everything family friendly!" (anti-LBGTQ, anti-NSFW) mindset. Now that money is going ... elsewhere.
Source: my tinfoil hat
No, you don't understand. The tin foil hat protects me from the government brainwashing 5g cell towers.
Those things are useful as fuck. At first they blocked mind controlling aliens. Then it also worked against mind-reading NSA. And now it blocks brainwashing 5G. The DoD must be spending trillions to bypass tinfoil technology.
Anti-capitalist regulations, I imagine.
Anti monopoly and regulations against anti competitive practices are cornerstones of capitalism ensuring free and fair competition.
So no, what we need is a return back to when these practices weren't allowed, away from allowing these things more than ever as we do now.
It's easy to see Russia has become an oligarchy, why can't we see it's happening to us too?
But we can't dismantle capitalism altogether, without creating an even bigger monopoly problem, the monopoly being corrupt governments like the soviet union and their 5 year plan economy, that very obviously wasn't a very good concept.
Maybe that's what you meant, I'd just not call it anti-capitalism, when regulations are for the purpose of making capitalism work better.
So just "regulation" is better.
Let me tell you about the Nordic model
Repubtard: HEY THAT'S SOCIALISM!!!
Except Scandinavians have more freedom, and better free market than USA.
Repubtard: BUT IT'S SOCIALISM!!!
Ehrm, they also have better freedom of speech.
Repubtard: WHAT? ARE YOU A FUCKING COMMIE?
Actually they also rank way higher on democracy.
Repubtard: WHY DO YOU HATE AMERICA?
I don't, but wouldn't it be nice if everybody had healthcare, free education and social security so you didn't have to fear to starve if you got ill and lost yopur job?
Repubtard: HEY THAT'S SOCIALISM!!!
....
Ugh, my elderly neighbor was going on about how Harris was going to take away this and that, most of which I’d never heard her say or even read about her plans doing, and I said, “where did you hear that? It was Fox News wasn’t it?” He replied with, “well, what news do you watch?” I said, “it sure isn’t Fox where they lie constantly. Harris hasn’t said any of that crap … you need to get your news from multiple sources.”
We’d be a heck of a lot better off if the news agencies were held accountable for telling lies and making up stories. Yeah, I know it’s a fine line but it’s one I’m willing to walk at this point.
Yes, other countries have that, it's called responsible journalism.
You can't just parrot some source, and claim it's reporting. You need to check your sources.
When they help spread lies, they are part of the problem.
What is your elderly neighbor's view on Republican policies for the elderly compared to the Democrats; and does Fox care more about their elderly viewers half as much as their younger viewers—i.e. the ones who justify more money from advertisers?
In 30 years, Trump will be as cited by Republicans as much as Reagan is today—i.e. rarely if ever—probably less—Reagan at least won twice and in one election he won 49 states—as did Nixon in 1972—and back then, Nixon was about the same age as Harris is now.
Did your elderly neighbour support Ross Perot back in 1992?
a Texan speaks:
Ross Perot [Independent] 1992 Campaign Ad "Snapshot - :60"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naHdnyogJjA
1:02
I wonder if a typical Republican could point out Sweden on a map.
Regulations only exist because Capitalism would consume itself without guardrails.
I wonder if it's consuming itself a bit right now.
Late stage capiyalims, Baybee!
That's why they do regulatory capture to prevent that from happening. It all starts with money being equal to influence. This can temporarily be reset after a big crash of the system but sooner or later they start again.
All power to the users. And I do mean ALL. Complete control over cellular modems for one. Control over every little bit of hardware in the consumers hands.
That includes warranty promises, that includes schematics, source code for firmware, everything. For all current, past and future devices.
Fuck locked bootloaders.
Yes, even if you try to use the controls we have left, you will discover that they always clip out one little obscure but critical detail that means you can't actually use your device your way.
Example, starting ADB at boot in tcpip 5555 mode when your bootloader is locked
Then don't use the device.
(I myself can wait longer than many of their shareholders.)
I don't have the luxury of buying another.
I want legislative actions to make this illegal.
What do you need this device for?
Remotely operated wireless camera
You know something is wrong when Google is one of the most consumer friendly companies.
I respect the sentiment, but most users neither know nor care about that. They want to take their new device out of it's box, power it on, log in to whatever accounts they have, and carry on with their day.
The number of people who actually care about that is very small.
It doesn't matter if they care about this. They are too dumb to do anything about it anyway. They still can get to take advantage of this. Most notable would be that stuff like "bank apps only through play/apple store" would be much harder to pull of.
You're not wrong, but users should then be held accountable if they fuck up their device. For example, if you decide to force companies to allow unlocking of bootloaders, and the user decides to flash something that they shouldn't, and the device bricks, whose fault is it?
Then they can just get it repaired, at a shop that has the flasher to re-flash the device. Cuz it's open source
And pay a shop to do it? Do you realistically think the average person is gonna be willing to do that? I think it's more likely they'll complain to the phone company about their bricked phone.
I also don't know enough, but is a bricked phone "fixable"? If it is, the person could do it themselves. But that's just one example. Other examples include installing unsafe OSes because social media said so. I don't think the average person is tech savvy enough to give them this kind of freedom.
This may be symptomatic of the issue being addressed. Would we be more willing to get the phone repaired if we felt more ownership of it? My hands are tied if the device was designed without repeatability in mind and the manufacturer has no intention of volunteering assistance - so I must complain. In our current system, we don't have many options to choose from. I look forward to your thoughts.
Also I believe 'bricked' is a result of it becoming inoperable. Our devices aren't easily repaired so they will become 'bricked' SOONER than if designed to run unlocked boot systems and OS's. Feeling more ownership of your device may lead you to be more careful with it and only entrust it with reputable technicians.
This very much depends. Are there technical ways to restore this? Something like a jumper to make the flash storage writable. This would be possible with access to the firmware source code. So yeah, they can fix it themselves. Who is responsible? If the device is bricked after this: the company.
Build locked up products? Die.
Build in fuses? Better make those chips accessible by providing the plans to build them, otherwise refund your customers and die. Now everyone can build them, this won't be a monopoly and everyone wins.
But that's terrorism!
I am aware of this narrative. I don't agree.
So you're saying you side with the terrrists!
"I'm on my side."
The users already have a lot of control; many just don't use it.
Can any of you live without Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube for one calendar month? 25 years ago, millions of Americans did, and their lives were hardly the poorer for it. 25 years before that it was over 150 million Americans, including the 12 who walked the Moon.
I've been living without the first two for years now. I could live without youtube if I really needed to, though I do watch a lot of stuff about farming that is really helpful. Most of my youtube watching is educational with a slight smattering of games and entertainment and a tiny bit of news.
FWIW,
wc:Category:Videos of agriculture
The kind of control we are talking about are different. You look at the law, in which I have only little trust, while I look at the ability to manipulate the hardware.
So no, they do not have control over the hardware, they just don't care that much. They do care if they are inconvenienced in any way, say by a service that disallows some parts that were previously offered. They don't understand and don't care, but they do win from some more control over their stuff.
I already live without any of the services you mentioned, I suspect most of Lemmy do. Well, not without YouTube (for me), I guess, but that gets more and more replaced by stuff like peertube.
Millions of Americans would still only occasionally visit those things if they had more options to plan their recreational time. Those options are mostly limited by less free time available while also having less money available. In that regard, and mostly limited to that regard, was then better than now.
Break up the mega corps. Enact user privacy-by-default laws. Market dominance via "free product" followed up by bait and switch tactics should be outlawed.
This would be a great start. Strong Antitrust = Competition.
Repairable technology with encouragement to repair things that break by designing them to be fixable.
Open source technologies becoming the rule, rather than the exception (this is already the case in some ways, but I truly mean EVERYTHING).
Open Standards that make interoperability easier by removing walled gardens (iMessage, G-Sync, etc).
Once capitalism is dead.
Technology is great, it's just naturally being used to exploit.
That's for too long a wait—if such ever happens.
DIY. Be your own boss. Not all economic relationships in this world are capitalist.
If we work together and do our part, we can shorten the wait by more than you might think
Starting out with small groups shouldn't be too difficult.
wp:Affinity group
Yeah but what if I don't want to starve :-( ?
Why would you starve?
If people stopped using tech to exploit people they would stop feeling exploited by it
“People” is a great word. Who do you mean exactly for these roles? Who’s doing what here?
As usual, most people who have control of how technology is used on a broad scale are in positions of power suitable for exploitation. That is, the people I'm talking about are business owners and high-level executives (and the government) using technology to exploit workers. To be fair, that's not always the dynamic-- "normal" people can exploit each other too, and businesses and the government can as well. But it is the most pressing issue imo, because of the power imbalance. See also rent comtrol algorithms, automated insurance claim denials, etc.
Uh, NOT put surveillance and extremely questionable AI into everything? I don’t need my toilet tweeting how healthy I am
I’m a developer posting on Lemmy so maybe take this with a huge grain of salt but I think we need to focus less on STEM/finance and more on humanities education. Definitely in the United States but probably most of the world considering India and China focus on tech too.
When I was learning to code (in the 90’s and 2000’s unless you count a 9 year old making BASIC do loops), my mentors basically all had majored in something besides computer science because there wasn’t necessarily even a computer science major available if your college didn’t have “Tech” in the name. It was a lot of hippies who spent their weekends making pottery and got into IT or software development almost by accident; it was a job to fund their non-lucrative hobby or passion.
Basically, we lost something when being a programmer became a goal and not a way to reach some other goal. I’m not sure we can return to a time when it was tinkerers and hobbyists coming to the field with different backgrounds but more creatives should learn to code and more coders should be forced to make art.
Steve Jobs said taking a calligraphy class was the reason that having a wide variety of attractive fonts was important to him when designing the Mac.
Get rid of the billionaire tech-lords. The ones that create the only new tech we’re allowed to have: fees, ads, and enshittification.
Raze Silicon Valley to the ground and start over?
That just makes it even easier for Wall St to enshittify whatever comes after
Ugh I hate that you're right. Until we figure out capitalism we're fucked.
I think you wanted to write “democratic communism” 😏😂
Don't need to take things further than market socialism to fix the problems with capitalism.
That is the best step towards communism we, in the west, can do right now, in my opinion. Slowly add more and more socialism and democratic laws until we all can be happy together 😁
No: the bad guys will build another one.
However if 250 million Americans each spent 400 hours less on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube in the next 12 months, the shareholders might have the heads of many members of those corporate boards on pikes.
Producing products that the users wants, and that solves tje users real problems. And not trying to make products as addictive as possible, to harvest as much user data as possible to sell.
For that we need technical means ready which allow the platform itself to be untrusted. Signal claims to be that and apparently is. Sadly there are no such things for social media (Nostr maybe, but it's very raw now), personal webpages, so on so forth
Open source.
Decomodify software. Refuse to respect copyright laws for software, or mandate that all software must be GPL or an equivalent restrictive license.
Make it so that all government software must be GPL, that would remove an enormous install base from corporate entities. Certain EU countries are already doing this.
If you are a public institution of any kind, you should not be using corporate, proprietary software, no exceptions.
Closed source software and hardware is largely what allowed massive corpos to take over the software and hardware scene, and it's what creates the incentive for silicon valley tech bros to create new technology solely in the hopes of being acquired for hundreds of millions, or even billions of dollars by some massive megacorp.
Corpos and private equity scumbags wouldn't be interested in acquiring these companies if they knew all the code and technology was under a GPL-like license, and anybody could take that tech, modify it, redistribute it, fork it, rebrand it, etc.
Schools included.
Many students today don't touch a personal computer a lot outside of school and then workplace.
My conspiracy theory:
I suspect that's the desired effect of "smartphones", and also the reason "smartphones" without keyboards are such an industry consensus. Not them being cheaper. Not them looking nicer. First, keyboards can be very sexy (think ZX Spectrum, or Blackberry for PDAs), second, however they look, touchscreen UIs are PITA, third, they are not that more expensive.
The strategy thus is that entertainment personal computing should be pressed out to devices hardly usable for work. So that "normal" people would gain their experience with that, and thus not gain the experience accompanying normal personal computing. As in - tinkering, customization, creation.
Because I remember how in my childhood any kid with a PC at home would do some tinkering and exploration. Today's kids scroll, and scroll, and scroll.
Mind-boggling actually, my sister (now kinda helpless with computers) was making websites and RPGs with RPGMaker2000, my younger cousin who is a designer was - I actually don't remember what she was doing, but something connected to editing amateur films they were making with my older cousin, who's a software engineer now.
Getting back to various pressures, this reduces the space for personal computing free from corporate and governmental policies. And this also reduces the unwanted effects from more creative entertainment - people who do something as a hobby are a direct competition to corporate gaslighting. The contrast is like between an 18yo girl on a rock festival and a Soviet propaganda poster. The latter never wins. And such a situation sadly negatively affects the chances of people getting the kinds of hobbies corps wouldn't want them to have.
I, for one, have become a lot more optimist about Tech ever since I've replaced the closed solutions that deny me control from corporations looking to squeeze every last cent of value from me - from smartphone OSes to TV Boxes - with open source solutions were it's me who holds the keys.
What TV box would you recommend?
Personally I replaced my TV Box with a Intel N100 Mini-PC (specifically a GMTek G3) running Lubuntu and Kodi, though it's used for a lot more than just being my TV box. I also got one of these remotes so I control it just like I would a dedicate TV Box (even though it has a mini-keyboard on the back and airmouse functionality, I almost never use it).
I use IPTV with it to watch just the free TV Channels, though there are providers out there who carry over 1000 channels for 5 bucks a month.
If you want something to just use as TV Box, start by checking Libreelec which is a Linux distro with Kodi configured to just work as a TV Box. It has builds for a whole lot of single board computers, which generally are cheaper than Mini-PCs (for example you can get a Banana Pi M5 - one of the supported SBCs - plus box, powersource and even the SD card for about half the price of the Mini-PC I got). The same remote I use should work fine with Libreelect on any platform which has at least one USB connector (not tested it myself but it makes sense since it uses the same kind of protocol and dongle as a wireless keyboard + mouse with pressing the "normal" remote buttons just generating keypresses according to some kind of standard of shortcut keys for media players)
Had I've been aiming for just a TV Box replacement I would've probably gone via checking which hardware Libreelec is compatible with and then chosen one of those and used the Libreelec since it's a Linux distro already preconfigures for acting as a proper TV Box (whilst with Lubuntu with Kodi on top I had to go around figuring out and changing the configuration for auto-login, auto-starting Kodi on startup and so on)
Cool! Thanks a lot for the thorough answer!
Automate terra forming against climate change. I want big machines and swarms of drones doing 24/7 regreening and planting forests in the desert.
Well first we kill all they
lawyersInvestment Bankers.Then all the lawyers.
Any time anyone is able to claw back some scraps of justice or get some kind of recompense for wrongs or - here’s a big one - change the law: that’s lawyers too. The characterization of all lawyers as sharks and assholes has done more to exacerbate the justice gap then help.
Yes! The whole "lawyers are evil money grabbers" is a corporate psy-op. They want you to think it's unreasonable for a person to sue a corporation when the corporation's actions are harmful. They also want you to think defense attorneys are people who just look for technicalities to free guilty people.
They created armies of lawyers for themselves, while making americans distrustful of the ones fighting for normal people. We used to think of lawyers like Atticus Finch or Perry Mason. But now we just think of Saul Goodman and Lionel Hutz.
Loved those books. Maybe he's too perfect a character morally, but still.
In Minecraft of course...
Taking patent, trademark, and copyright laws to what they were in, say, 1790, might be a good start.
Regard today's billionaires with the same contempt that one does of criminals.
Wait at least 5 years before buying a new computer.
Don't pay by credit card.
This is bad advice for anyone with good credit and spending habits. A credit card with rewards is just free money if you're responsible with it. I haven't paid interest in over a decade and have made thousands from rewards.
Yep, the rich are rich because they borrow other peoples money. 0% free interest lines are about the best discount you can get on anything. I get to make the interest while you hold the loan? Sign me up! Siri, remind me in 11 months to pay off the X loan.
You pay with your data lol
The reason why corpos been able to price gouge the peasants is particulaly to tp them having access to data this granular. Same reason why they want dynamic pricing schemes.
Not to mention the security that comes from being able to not pay if you get scammed for whatever reason. I paid for a course at a community college with a credit card, but then my schedule changed so I tried to cancel the class before it even started. The college gave me a whole runaround, and whether it was willful or just simple incompetence, I wasn't able to get a refund. So I called my credit card company and explained the situation to them, and they resolved the whole thing for me. Sometimes even mentioning that you'll refer such a problem to the fraud department at your credit card company is enough to get someone to back down and give you a refund.
Credit cards have issues, especially if you have problems with using them responsibly, but that's one particular way in which they can save you a lot of headache.
I'm not too familiar with credit cards, do you mean this in a literal money sense or something more complex, i.e. the value of rewards & money?
We pay for EVERYTHING on our credit card, shared account with my partner. 2% money back. Pay it off in full every month. Zero interest paid, thousands of monies back.
One of the better credit card rewards is a small percentage cash back, so literally free money. Money is fungible though, so any discounts on things you were going to buy anyway are effectively the same thing.
Fair enough, but they know what you bought.
Yes, but you can also do a chargeback if the company you purchased from sold you a lousy product and isn’t being reasonable about returning it. If you had paid with cash, that cash is GONE.
Each method has its pros and cons.
not if I have a receipt.
There are no free money. These are loans. And making them attractive with cashbacks and rewards is done to trap unresponsible spenders. 95% of the time you don't need to borrow money from the bank, unless you are in emergency or you are to invest these to achieve some payback (e.g. a loan to open your business).
I am aware, which is why I specifically said
For people who aren't irresponsible spenders, it's a bad financial decision not to take the short term bank loan. Sure, I don't need to spend the banks money because I have enough in my checking account to cover it. But by not doing so, I lose money on any transactions that don't charge me a fee to run my card.
If you're not responsible enough to use a credit card and not destroy your finances, absolutely do not use them. But for those of us who are, it's a dumb idea to eschew it just because you have the money on hand. Like I said, I haven't paid interest in a decade and have made thousands from my normal spending habits.
If I followed your advice, I would be objectively worse off, because I'd be losing money from my rewards for no benefit whatsoever. And I can guarantee I'd be materially worse off, since my credit card is the reason my credit is as good as it is, and that bullshit has a pervasive and perverse effect on your life. It's not only loans that are impacted, but insurance, housing and employment can be as well. So maybe I should have left good credit off, since responsible spending will build your credit up even if it is bad currently.
TL;DR - responsible credit card use is a good thing, and foregoing it just because you have money on hand is a bad financial decision. Pay that shit off immediately and there's no material downside and you still get all the benefits.
Irresponsible vs responsible is how the credit card companies frame it, but I think most of the time it's about luck. The kind of luck where the primary income gets hit by a car or someone in the family gets cancer.
My almost six year old 9900k machine is still playing everything amazingly, with a video card update being my only change. I love it so much.
My iPhone is also six years old and the only reason I’m upgrading this month is to get 120hz, USB-C, and a better low light camera for cat pictures. A terabyte would be nice, too.
Opensource (specifically Libre)
Worker and community cooperatives.
Right to repair.
Public money, public goods.
Privacy by default.
Decentralization > Federation > Disconnected > Centralized
Treating addiction as a disease and people intentionally seeking to exploit it at a mass scale should be charged for harm.
Organizations should be held liable for user data exposed to malicious actors both intentionally and through neglect of security.
We stop the acquisitions. We work out ways to foster innovation and protect patents only in the short term.
We need more than a couple phone manufacturers, we need more than a couple of food producers. All of these monolith mega corporations keep smaller upstarts from coming up and competing.
And more than a couple operating systems. We get a lot of horrifyingly bad compatibility issues from Apple, and to a lesser degree, Google.
Unfortunately some things will IMO always remain a natural monopoly. For example good luck trying to convince developers to write their apps for all those different operating systems.
Most of those apps could be replaced by a website that will work anywhere. But a website can't spy on you as easily.... so they push apps instead.
They could still be compatible, though. it's possible even today, to some degree
Yeah, Java slogan was code once, run everywhere for a reason.
Doesn't have to be that way
And it’s hard for anyone to say no to multi-millions that will change your family’s life by selling when it’s not even 1% of the corporations profit. Can’t blame them for selling out really. I’d do the same thing and so would you.
We can at least stop crap like this
https://www.confectioneryproduction.com/news/49392/mars-moves-to-deliver-35-9-billion-kellanova-takeover-including-flagship-pringles-brand/
They actually said in their review of the sale that they'll be able to do better price fixing even if grocery stores demand price cuts.
The use of open, decentralized platforms such as the fediverse is one small step in the right direction at least.
FOSS / fediverse is really the only tech stuff that isn't massively disappointing as of late.
And sodium batteries, or so I hope.
And yet this community seems more techno-pessimistic than even /r/technology, which is a challenge.
I ditched my smartphone spring of 2023. Still use it on WiFi at home, but every time I leave the house, I only carry a fliphone.
Every time a stranger asks me about it, they say something like “I wish I could ditch my smartphone.” Like I get it. It’s not easy. I can’t even go to a baseball game unless my wife has our tickets on her phone. Paying for parking sometimes requires an app.
Yet apparently everyone hates this thing that they are now required to carry around.
How did we get here?
Concrete goals, and reasonable steps to achieve them.
I feel like lately we've hit a weird speculative investment period in tech, where we have a bunch of tech that's created because it can be, but not because it's needed. Do LLMs, crypto currency, or NFTs have actual uses? Very possibly, but nothing concrete enough to satisfy the bubble that formed from them.
We live in an age of unreality. Give us something achievable and genuine, we get excited. It doesn't have to be complicated, just real. Hell, I'm excited as fuck over solid sodium batteries, and that's boring as shit.
The tech sector is right now just running in hype and jumping from one hype to the next. It's a race to keep that investors throwing money at them with providing new targets to keep investors from realizing the stuff isn't that useful.
We cannot even play music from a device without needing some sort of patent license, usually paid by the hardware vendor.
Not an issue when you pirate 🤔
100% capitalism is part of the blame, why isnt there a public option for music? Promoting local artists that are in the public domain and can tour and make a living in public venues. Instead we have ticket master and other such big music. Companies, now this is applied to music but really can be applied to every sector.
Elect local politicians who can make change for the people on the local level.
They didn't say copyright, they said patent.
Yes you can. I often ignore copyright with impunity. I've been doing it since the days of home-taping.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YejbpHA9Yo
2:37
wp:C·30 C·60 C·90 Go
In a capitalist economy, corporations act within the free market established by the government. Government is responsible for establishing fair and transparent ways of doing business, such as maintaining a currency, and legal and accounting frameworks. But that’s not enough.
The article has a good starting point about breaking up monopolies to reestablish competition. We’ve let so many monopolies grow in the last few decades, to our detriment.
But that’s not enough. It’s also governments role to incorporate externalities into the market so corporate actions are fairly priced instead of costing society, and to ensure the market is working for the citizens. As prime examples, corporations need to bear the costs of resource extraction or an imposition on the environment. How could the free market work effectively, if some corporations are allowed to impose costs on society that are not priced into their goods? They’re effectively being subsidized, given an unfair advantage against their competitors, while also working against the future of the citizens forming this market.
But a fair market is only fair, if all the participants have standing, including the consumers who are the focus of the market, and workers who make it all happen. Currently we’ve let corporation ps dominate other roles in the market, we’re following a corporate economy and of course are not happy with the results. For example, consider “terms of service” imposed for just about everything these days. They’re always phrased as a contract and as if customers agree, yet are completely one sided, imposed without recourse or even any reasonable standard for a legal contract, and without any real choice. How can that be called a free market?
We could go a long way toward a free market that serves society if government does it’s part of establishing fairness, transparency, honesty for all entities in that market, and remembering that both governments and the market serve society, rather than the other way around
I'll be optimistic about technology when the last techbro is strangled with the entrails of the last angel investor
Replace goodwill with encryption. That's about data and metadata safety, but the same logic applies to everything else. No trust to people interested in breaking it.
As in - browsers' developers' goodwill was intended to keep Web standards' race in check. Protocols' extensibility was intended to allow for future backward-compatible development.
This was a wrong idea.
Gemini is one example of solving it, but one can imagine many others.
And it's fine if we have 12 Web protocols each for some specific idea of the Web. Among them some, say, would allow people to easily create webpages like year 1996, but sufficient for modern tasks and without all the bother with DNS and hosting (perhaps there is a p2p solution), Telegram shows that this is in huge demand. Many such variants are better than one overly complex, dangerous, corporate and oligopolized Web.
That's similar to how it seemed working anyway, we had e-news for global forums, webpages for personal pages, IRC for chats, ICQ\AIM\MSN for DMs, e-mail for reliable DMs, well, everyone remembers that time.
Nostr is a very raw, but maybe interesting idea for public social media.
Funny how Unix philosophy always shows itself in unexpected places, yes? =)
Build anarcho-communism, thereby removing any incentives to enshittify.
I always find it very funny when someone suggests anarcho-something as a solution to all of capitalism's problems. How exactly do you plan to enforce that? Do you think social pressure & shunning will do anything more than create a class of extremists with an oppositional philosophy?
It's a rather bold claim to be able to create a system where you can achieve more power honestly than cannibalizing others. It's a good ideal goal, of course, and people are optimizing for it, but no, that's not a realistic solution.
#NO
The only way is to build technologies that allow humans to escape the capitalist system and allow us to build our own communities in direct opposition to capitalist greed and exploitation.
Relevant for me; i nearly changed careers out of tech entirely -- being fed up with the state of the industry -- but found some great folks in worker cooperative spaces. Here's what's kept me optimistic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UmU1dSe3n0
Plucked a vid off this channel and let it be known the idea of the channel name is to "reject isms/be your own ism"
Solarpunk has replaced, for me, the plasteel+glass greenhouse skyscraper skylines. Afrofuturism offers a much better preconfiguration than anything of capitalist and anglo origins. Importantly, the dismantling of unjust heirarchies.
I never lost the optimism, i just recognized that the root cause of our pain is not going to be addressed by technnlology (new invention) without an equal-or-greater effort into decolonizing and unlearning on the part of those building, using and promoting a given technology.
Autism
Should we?
When I see technology actively making the world consistently better rather than constantly trashing the ecosystem that literally keeps us alive, I'll have optimism about it.
I'd go back even further (to 2007) before the invention of the iPhone. The smartphone has, arguably, IMO been a bad, or at least premature invention. It created a generation of kids obsessed with their photographies, giving girls eating disorders and creating/spreading unrealistic beauty ideals, etc... Also it has severely disrupted teenagers' social living, created sleeping disorders, chronic doomscrolling, addiction, and more bad stuff. The iPhone was, IMO, not ready for this world.
Anarcho-transhumanism, or ig more open source innovations unsullied by the profit motive would-be nice.
Stop tariffs on new technologies
Get rot economists out of tech companies and return to private ownership.
Most of the venture capital that fueled the techno booms were Russian - hence all this dumb "Let's make everything family friendly!" (anti-LBGTQ, anti-NSFW) mindset. Now that money is going ... elsewhere.
Source: my tinfoil hat
No, you don't understand. The tin foil hat protects me from the government brainwashing 5g cell towers.
Those things are useful as fuck. At first they blocked mind controlling aliens. Then it also worked against mind-reading NSA. And now it blocks brainwashing 5G. The DoD must be spending trillions to bypass tinfoil technology.