Aral Balkan has a blog post about taking small steps to end surveillance capitalism. In particular he focuses on the need for federated services. He points out that the move to re-decentralize the WWW is difficult and needs to start at the beginning, using a comparison of Apple's original computers to their latest generation of tablets as an illustration.
Five years ago, when I decided to devote myself to tackling the problem of surveillance capitalism, it was clear what we needed: convenient and beautiful ethical everyday things that provide seamless experiences1 on fully free-as-in-freedom stacks.
This is as true today as it was then and it will remain so. The only way to compete with unethical products built by organisations that have control over hardware + software + services is to create ethical organisations that have control over hardware + software + services and thus have at least the possibility to craft competitive experiences. We remove our eyes from this goal at our peril.
Related: Tim Berners-Lee Launches Inrupt, Aims to Create a Decentralized Web
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 11 2018, @05:30PM (4 children)
Ok back up that claim, what is your reasoning to support the claim that people use FB because they could blame them for, what exactly?
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday December 11 2018, @05:51PM (3 children)
It's easy enough to set up your own blog at your own website, but were you to do that you'd have to accept the blame for fucking it up.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 11 2018, @06:38PM (1 child)
I think this whole argument is just two sides of the same coin. I still maintain people are making their choices out of convenience, not the more negative aspect of being able to blame the service if things go wrong; but you could say that blaming the service IS the convenience.
I think you are conflating the idea that people look for blame when things go wrong with the motivating principle that gets them to set things up in the first place. When electing politicians we aren't looking for someone we can easily blame, but when things go wrong we definitely start looking for the easy targets.
All I am saying is that people are NOT choosing to use centralized social media so they can blame them, people choose those services because they are conveniently easy to access and often have their friends and family with them. That was the original argument, not some exercise in cognitive dissonance. Which btw please go look it up, it was a little more detailed than I thought it was and you definitely used it wrong.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday December 11 2018, @06:47PM
Now is the time for Salty Spice to sell boiled peanuts on the street corner.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 11 2018, @06:46PM
PS: you run scripts to check for replies? last I checked SN doesn't notify you of AC replies.