Social media is the 21st century’s tobacco company. The companies selling it know it’s terrible for people’s health, but they keep doing it because $$$.
If one wants to work in that industry is a personal ethical one, but 20 years from now we’ll probably look at folks working at these companies like we’d look at someone who worked as a tobacco executive. Made good money but maybe not leaving a legacy of an ethical career.
In other words there will be no/positive economic and social downsides for those engaged in, "world levels" of unethical conduct.
This is the world that software developers create. Any society which rewards less laborious work for significantly greater pay will eventually find reasons to reward, "profits over people." Whether they're Neokantian or free-market liberal justifications it doesn't matter. Thankfully you people have to put up with Forever Trump which almost makes the thing bearable.
I strongly encourage anyone who finds Meta's repeated crappy behaviour objectionable to delete their accounts on Whatsapp, Instagram, Facebook, etc. Or, at least, to delete as many as they can get away with, given their personal constraints and obligations, and otherwise minimise as much as possible the interactions with this company.
Personally I do somewhere between one and three strikes with companies. Of course I still must use certain things at certain times, but generally a lot of them can be avoided if you develop the habit of looking for other solutions. It's great fun, actually, once you accept the challenge.
It's only a small action, but it's good on a personal level to practice any kind of resisting.
And I encourage anyone who cannot delete their WhatsApp due to personal constraints to set WhatsApp profile picture to QR code with the link to their preferred messenger and set name in profile to "W̶h̶a̶t̶s̶A̶p̶p̶ Telegram".
Meta has a monopoly on socialisation, if you delete these apps it does have a detrimental effect on your social network. I refused to use any Meta apps for the longest time but eventually caved on using Instagram and it has given me the ability to connect with people more, even though I hate it.
In practice, what does that look like? B/c large corporations are constantly doing shady stuff, but in day-to-day life, how does one avoid being in situations where you're dependent on them, without that avoidance becoming its own large source of problems?
- who provides your utilities?
- who provides your food, medications, other stuff that goes in your body?
- where do you get financial services, insurance, etc?
- do you drive? who made your car? do you ever fly?
For many of these categories there are likely a few examples of local governments, co-ops, or mid-size/small companies offering in some of these categories, but not in a comprehensive way -- i.e. you can get some of your food from a local CSA but likely not your whole diet, you might get much of your medical care from a Direct Primary Care model until you need something that's outside of their capacities, etc.
You don't need to trust them. They're all very predictable. They will always do whatever makes them the most money in the long term while nominally being able to defend all their actions in court. There is a theoretical dial with "ignore all laws" on one end, and "follow the letter and spirit of every law" on the other. Every big company wiggles the dial around in the middle until it finds a place where they're confident they won't lose more money than they make from lawsuits.
I grew up on star trek TNG. However at a certain point in the past I was having kind of a hard time rewatching episodes. "We have the Internet and social media now, and they're obviously not going anywhere so why doesnt star trek have either? It is simply scifi of the past and now we need new scifi to incorporate new technological and social advancements."
These days though. Yeah, it's kind of obvious that you can't have a space faring civilization with the Internet and social media weighing you down. Honestly the Eugenics wars probably get kick started by social media.
A lot of Star Trek writing wildly errs with computers. And other things, but also computers.
Like, IRL we can't fire modern artillery over the horizon without a computer assisting us, and that's only a few hundred miles; a starship within range of their transporters (up to three times the diameter of this planet) is just an invisible dot on an invisible dot if you're looking for it out of a window. (IRL you can see the ISS flybys because it's only a few hundred km up, last I heard nobody can see any of the geostationary satellites).
Or comms: Uhura was written in an era when telephone switchboard were still around, manually connecting your phone calls by plugging and unplugging cords. (Did any later shows even have a comms officer?)
Even later, VOY tries to show how fancy the ship is with "bio-neural gel packs", but even when that show was written, silicon transistors were already faster (by response time) than biological synapses by the same degree to which going for a walk is faster than continental drift.
How would the Internet work with interstellar distances? Even at Mars distances the latency to Earth makes it almost impossible for all but forums and email.
They can obviously communicate with Starfleet. "Subspace frequencies" or whatever they called it. Presumably personal and not just official communication would happen the same way. It's just not something that was top of mind when those shows were made. Long distance phone calls were still something you paid for at a substantial cost per minute. The idea that you'd be casually chatting with friends light-years away just didn't occur to anyone.
Which would be a welcome improvement. The speed of communication and content needs to slow down, and people need to return to longer form reading. People who lacked the patience and impulse control for this would actually drop off the platform, which would be a net improvement.
Presumably the same way faster than light travel works. I suppose you would wrap the IP packet in a warp bubble.
Or maybe the old adage of "a station wagon hurtling down the highway has more bandwidth than the biggest network links" would apply here -- send little storage modules at warp speed around the universe.
But also, in the show, they have clearly solved this problem, given that they can be out in Beta quadrant and still have live conversations with Starfleet back in San Francisco.
A side note, but there've been a couple of times in the most recent season of (the largely excellent) Strange New Worlds where I've thought "they're talking to the computer like an LLM now". The holodeck episode springs to mind, but I'm sure it's happened a few times.
I've noticed my mind thinking along similar lines when watching most recent movies. Many of the story points are driven by plots that would be upended if any one of the protagonists (or antagonists) had access to even the most basic of internet and/or portable communication devices.
Don’t they also have ways of sending messages wirelessly in real time, just bounded by speed of light? That’s a down-sight lot better than what we have now as we basically just blast radio signals in all directions at roughly the speed of light- which degrades very rapidly over distance.
I’m coloured largely by Voyager, but I don’t see any technology that we have now that they don’t have, not at the distances it would need to work at and without the infrastructure to make it work.
Even in Star Trek weren’t the Eugenic Wars only ended by the invention of the warp drive (by a single guy no less) followed by first contact with an advanced and benevolent alien race?
No the Eugenics wars were endeded well before the nuclear holocaust of WWIII. When you see Zephram Cochran in First Contact, it was many years after Earth was devastated by nuclear winter. That's why populations were sparse, and there were various warring sects all over the world fighting for power. The warp drive (and discovery of aliens) is what united humanity after all the wars.
Facebook will not try to show your suicidal teen stuff that could help them. Facebook will only show your suicidal teen things that keep your suicidal teen doomscrolling.
Facebook WILL put a small textbox of "Here's the suicide hotline" and then overshadow it with a huge ad for "You aren't pretty enough, buy this body deodorant" that autoplays and includes sound and can take over part of your screen.
Facebook WILL show your suicidal teen stuff that makes them really angry. They do this on purpose. They do this knowingly. That's what "optimizing for engagement" means
I don't know how everyone doesn't see this. I pray. I hope. One day people look at you in complete repulsion and dumbfounded that we gave anyone, let kids unfettered access to social media. Absurdity.
Readit News
If one wants to work in that industry is a personal ethical one, but 20 years from now we’ll probably look at folks working at these companies like we’d look at someone who worked as a tobacco executive. Made good money but maybe not leaving a legacy of an ethical career.
This is the world that software developers create. Any society which rewards less laborious work for significantly greater pay will eventually find reasons to reward, "profits over people." Whether they're Neokantian or free-market liberal justifications it doesn't matter. Thankfully you people have to put up with Forever Trump which almost makes the thing bearable.
-Silicon Valley before the 80's
Personally I do somewhere between one and three strikes with companies. Of course I still must use certain things at certain times, but generally a lot of them can be avoided if you develop the habit of looking for other solutions. It's great fun, actually, once you accept the challenge.
It's only a small action, but it's good on a personal level to practice any kind of resisting.
That's it. It hasn't let me down yet in my many long years of life.
- who provides your utilities?
- who provides your food, medications, other stuff that goes in your body?
- where do you get financial services, insurance, etc?
- do you drive? who made your car? do you ever fly?
For many of these categories there are likely a few examples of local governments, co-ops, or mid-size/small companies offering in some of these categories, but not in a comprehensive way -- i.e. you can get some of your food from a local CSA but likely not your whole diet, you might get much of your medical care from a Direct Primary Care model until you need something that's outside of their capacities, etc.
It's pretty sensible. You wouldn't advise people the opposite, would you?
Deleted Comment
These days though. Yeah, it's kind of obvious that you can't have a space faring civilization with the Internet and social media weighing you down. Honestly the Eugenics wars probably get kick started by social media.
Like, IRL we can't fire modern artillery over the horizon without a computer assisting us, and that's only a few hundred miles; a starship within range of their transporters (up to three times the diameter of this planet) is just an invisible dot on an invisible dot if you're looking for it out of a window. (IRL you can see the ISS flybys because it's only a few hundred km up, last I heard nobody can see any of the geostationary satellites).
Or comms: Uhura was written in an era when telephone switchboard were still around, manually connecting your phone calls by plugging and unplugging cords. (Did any later shows even have a comms officer?)
Even later, VOY tries to show how fancy the ship is with "bio-neural gel packs", but even when that show was written, silicon transistors were already faster (by response time) than biological synapses by the same degree to which going for a walk is faster than continental drift.
The horizon is in mortar range. Like 10 km at 10m elevation of the observer.
The horizon is not very far usually.
Or maybe the old adage of "a station wagon hurtling down the highway has more bandwidth than the biggest network links" would apply here -- send little storage modules at warp speed around the universe.
But also, in the show, they have clearly solved this problem, given that they can be out in Beta quadrant and still have live conversations with Starfleet back in San Francisco.
Don’t they also have ways of sending messages wirelessly in real time, just bounded by speed of light? That’s a down-sight lot better than what we have now as we basically just blast radio signals in all directions at roughly the speed of light- which degrades very rapidly over distance.
I’m coloured largely by Voyager, but I don’t see any technology that we have now that they don’t have, not at the distances it would need to work at and without the infrastructure to make it work.
My favorite part: just-in-time ad delivery to your suicidal teen for products they might need
Facebook will not try to show your suicidal teen stuff that could help them. Facebook will only show your suicidal teen things that keep your suicidal teen doomscrolling.
Facebook WILL put a small textbox of "Here's the suicide hotline" and then overshadow it with a huge ad for "You aren't pretty enough, buy this body deodorant" that autoplays and includes sound and can take over part of your screen.
Facebook WILL show your suicidal teen stuff that makes them really angry. They do this on purpose. They do this knowingly. That's what "optimizing for engagement" means
Dead Comment
Tobacco has zero utilities, meanwhile Facebook is heavily used for connecting families and sharing small life events.
Saying it is the same as Tobacco isn't useful. It's an exaggeration, which makes it hard to take the argument seriously.
Dead Comment