SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Veteran author and longtime Silicon Valley resident Andrew Keen has stepped up his criticisms of the Internet. Describing the net as a platform that has devolved from its initial ideals and promise into a vehicle of monopolistic, manipulative and exploitative practices, a Guardian article summarizes views now gaining traction. By using Amazon, Google, Facebook, Airbnb, Uber or any other online giant, are we striking a Faustian pact, behind which lays a mass of suffering, surveillance and ruthless harvesting?
Keen supports his arguments by mentioning that even online businesses that cite individual collaboration, those of the 'sharing' economy, are mere cynical fronts for firms already valued in the billions. As money has been sucked out of retail, transportation, photography, research and other industries into the coffers of new Internet giants, the net result has been losses of jobs and the compromise of working conditions. As for the Internet's much-touted 'individual empowerment', Keen counters with the rise of mob mentality - “Rather than creating more democracy, it’s empowering the rule of the mob. Rather than encouraging tolerance, it’s unleashed such a distasteful war on women that many no longer feel welcome on the network". Keen's book - The Internet is not the Answer - is, a touch ironically, available on Amazon.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 10 2015, @09:14PM
Rather than creating more democracy, it’s empowering the rule of the mob.
wtf does keen think democracy is if not mob rule?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by mtrycz on Tuesday February 10 2015, @09:23PM
"Democracy" is just an elaborate scheme of the few to govern the many, by making them actually *participate* in it.
Genius.
In capitalist America, ads view YOU!
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 10 2015, @09:39PM
This is a great insight. You can get out the pitchforks and torches as long as there is a dictator you can dethrone but what if it's supposedly yourself you have to be angry at? That's the real kicker of democracy.
And it gets even more silly if there are basically two rotten parties you can choose between...
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday February 11 2015, @06:47PM
Interesting...and very true.
If you are choosing between multiple parties you don't have a Democracy, you have a Republic. Of course that first insight can be applied to both (as well as a few other systems probably.) Which is worth pointing out I think because the entire point of a republic is supposed to be to mitigate some of those problems of democracy. If you read some of The Federalist Papers you'll see that America's founders put a hell of a lot of thought into how to prevent the problems of mob rule. The solution they came up with kinda sucks too, but they did put a lot of thought into it...and at the time it might well have been the best solution available. We can do better today, but raw democracy still is not the answer.
I do actually think raw democracy is perfectly fine on the internet though. It's not quite what actually exists there, as a lot of companies have far more power than other individuals. And decisions are most often based on dollars, not votes. But when you're just talking, democracy is fine. It's when you start looking at decisions about where to send troops or who to lock up in prison where things start to break down. Mob rule is only a problem IMO where it becomes impossible for people to simply disagree and walk away. Mob rule is a problem when it starts violating peoples' basic human rights, but it's damn hard to do that with TCP/IP packets alone...
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday February 10 2015, @10:02PM
Yes, so it seems more and more. Give the rabble the illusion of participation, but not real decision-making power. Then you get to have your cake and eat it, too. No more pesky rebellions and coup attempts, just herds of sheep rushing the entrance to Walmart to get in on the 2-for-1 deal on Cheetohs. Every once in a while you pick out a sacrificial lamb from your ruling circle (usually the guy who laughed insincerely at your escargot joke) and railroad him, to both show him and give the rabble the illusion that you have the rule of law and that the rest of you are really good, honest guys who are obscenely wealthy because you're [smarter|harder-working|hotter|more talented|beloved of Jesus].
I think the successor political system to this must screen out sociopaths and other amoral actors.
But between now and then it would be helpful for the people of the world to have a full and transparent accounting of how the world really works, and the anatomy of every lie. Opensecrets.org and Wikileaks have part of it, but tech people can also play an important role because the villains of the world rely upon our skillset more than any other now to carry out their schemes. We can refuse to help, expose them, and take away every scrap of the very privacy they have already taken from us (for starters).
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 11 2015, @12:54AM
I read a good article the other week about how truly democratic that ancient city-state was and how the USA's founding fathers had turned the notion into an oligarchy (by specifying a republic with a tiny number of individuals who form the actual inner circle).
N.B. I'll add that the Citizens United SCOTUS decision was the coup de grace.
What would it be like if we really lived in a democracy? [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [dissidentvoice.org]
...and, getting back on the original topic, most online places are a dictatorship where you can get banned/deleted on the whim of 1 guy.
The paywall'd and members-only-even-to-read sites are a meme all their own.
At other online places with comments, it's more of an anarchy ("without rulers"), bordering on the common (but incorrect) connotation of that word: "chaos".
None of those is democratic to my way of thinking.
The Slashcode mod system is the most democratic meme I've seen, specifically the recent S/N update that includes a no-points-off Disagree moderation.
...and a big High 5 to the guy that made sure Slashcode offered a threaded presentation; I HATE flat forum presentations.
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday February 11 2015, @02:15PM
First, gewg_, if you sign your posts, why bother to post as Anonymous Coward? It doesn't make sense.
But I do agree that the Slashcode mod system is the best way I've yet seen to boost the signal-to-noise ratio. For me it supplants Robert's Rules of Order, which is the nah-nah-nah tyranny of lawyers from the 17th century that persists to this day among those of that ilk, and MUNUC enthusiasts.
There is still room for improvement on Slashcode. One that occurs to me is to borrow an idea from hackathons, whereby you post your project idea, the kinds of help you need, and have functionality whereby people can pile on with you. It doesn't really work so well with hackathons because those mostly tend to be one-off affairs, but here it could work brilliantly. It's also a more structured version of what Linus did originally when he asked people to help him build Linux; that turned out pretty well and I think many other excellent projects could likewise develop here.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday February 11 2015, @03:35PM
N.B. I'll add that the Citizens United SCOTUS decision was the coup de grace.
It's just a natural defense of the First Amendment. The rule of law doesn't always swing your way.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 11 2015, @09:29PM
First Amendment
A supermajority of Americans disagree with that position.
If you were to poll a group of USAians, I'm pretty sure the numbers would come out with about 97 percent saying "Money is not speech; corporations are not people."
The rule of law doesn't always swing your way
True--in the short run.
Dred Scott (1854)
The black man has "no rights that the white man is bound to respect".
Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)
"separate but equal"
Brown v Board (1954)
"separate is inherently unequal"
Bad Supreme Court majorities come and bad Supreme Court majorities go.
...and people need to remember what happened in France in 1789 when the system had become so lopsided and unfair.
-- gewg_
(Score: 3, Interesting) by fadrian on Wednesday February 11 2015, @01:26AM
Immoral actors will be with us always. And any control system can be corrupted given application of enough power. Although one can ameliorate these two factors, one can never eliminate them. As such, one must always have a non-bypassable way to limit the amount of relative power ever aggregated by any one group. Right now, this is done, but at high cost, by revolution. It would have been nice if the founding fathers would have ensconced this as a founding principle, as well as individual liberty. I don't think they ever thought that networks of bad actors could take down a system this quickly. Where is the scalable governmental system for the world that avoids this? That minimizes exploitation while maximizing benefit? Communism may not have been the solution, but the oligarchy we have now as a result of (unfettered capitalism, corrupting influence of government on the free market, take your pick) isn't either. Our system did not scale in the face of technical change. Leverage granted by technological capabilities and associated network effects continued apace while the systems of governance lagged behind, allowing too few to exert economic control and lay virtual serfdom on the many. What system to use? Who knows. It must allow individual success to be rewarded while limiting power to those who are so successful that they gain enough power to destroy the system? Myself, I think setting an arbitrary limit on what anyone can own works best. Make it something large enough to let someone live his life out in almost absolute luxury - I don't know... pick a number. Index it to the overall wealth of the nation. After anyone obtains this amount, fuck, I don't know how you make him redistribute it, but redistribute it he must, lest he accumulate too much power over his fellow man. In the end, if you want a stable system that destroys neither freedom nor the system that provides prosperity, you must have some form of redistribution to limit the amount of power any one actor or coordinated group of actors can obtain because otherwise, you do get revolution.
That is all.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday February 11 2015, @12:02PM
Yes, and it should reward innovation and meaningful contributions to the common good. No more worthless bankers sitting around playing number games that don't actually produce anything. No more bond traders getting obscenely wealthy in the circle jerk that is the debt market. In fact, we should replace every class of financial worker with a very small shellscript.
The dream of striking it rich is a good motivator, so a system that eliminates that won't thrive. A system that discourages hard work by taxing labor many times the rate of taxing capital will not thrive. A nation that transforms itself into a society of layabouts who collect handouts--and rents--from an increasingly hard-pressed middle will fail. If you siphon capital from the productive and hand it to the shiftless poor and shiftless ultra-wealthy, the pool of the future's entrepreneurs, engineers, and social drivers will starve.
So your idea of a cap on wealth could be an answer. Something on the order of, "Once you have $100 million, you can afford anything anyone would ever want."
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday February 11 2015, @09:54AM
"Democracy" is just an elaborate scheme of the few to govern the many, by making them actually *participate* in it.
Given this interpretation of democracy, what do you think of people who wring their hands about "mob rule"?