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It's not your imagination: tech really *is* underregulated. There are plenty of avoidable harms that tech visits upon the world, and while some of these harms are mere negligence, others are self-serving, creating shareholder value *and* widespread public destruction.

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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/20/scalesplaining/#administratability

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A giant set of balance scales. One scale's platform bears a US flag motif, and atop it stands a mustachioed guerrilla fighter with an impressive hat, bandoleers, and a rifle. On the other scale is an EU flag, atop which stands a muscle-bound male figure standing at rigid attention. Behind them is a 'code waterfall' as seen in the credit sequences of the Wachowskis' 'Matrix' movies. Looming over the scene is an impatient-looking man in a grey suit; in one hand he holds a sheaf of papers; he is staring intently at his watch. Image: Noah Wulf (modified) https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Thunderbirds_at_Attention_Next_to_Thunderbird_1_-_Aviation_Nation_2019.jpg CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en
Cory Doctorow

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@Ethan Zuckerman
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@Locus Magazine
Ten wpis został zedytowany (8 miesiące temu)
Josh
Great thread (as always) - this stuff is so important. In some ways it's like history repeating itself and in others it's like we gotta figure out from scratch how to have a decent society now everything uses the internet and computers. Guess it's a continual battle for now!

Cory Doctorowudostępnił to.

Jack William Bell
@krnlg
This is me jumping into someone else's conversation and I'm about to do it with a thread, so feel free to ignore…

…But I've been watching a series of lectures about Medieval Britain titled, 'The Story of Medieval England: From King Arthur to the Tudor Conquest'. It's on Amazon prime for only 10 more days, which is why I started. But why I kept consuming these dry unadorned history lectures has to do with what you just said.

Still reading? I'm getting to the point now.
@Josh
Ten wpis został zedytowany (8 miesiące temu)
Jack William Bell
@krnlg
The Anglo-Saxons didn't originally have much in the way of a justice system. It was kind of 'do it yourself', with some cultural adaptations meant to avoid feuds.

Eventually, by the ninth century, a couple of strong kings managed to establish a state-controlled justice system. It wasn't perfect, far from it. But, here's the thing – it was better than anyone else in Europe had at the time.

And the economy did gangbusters. Until they became so rich the Vikings moved in.
@Josh
Jack William Bell
@krnlg
Of course this ruined the economy, along with pretty much everything else. (Like that justice system.)

Eventually king Alfred the Great pushed the Vikings out again and re-established the state-justice system. Only even better.

And the economy did gangbusters again. Guess what happened next?

Yup its, "More Vikings."

So it works like this:

1. Crap justice system, bad economy, no Vikings

2. Good justice system, great economy, lots of Vikings.
@Josh
Cavyherd
@jackwilliambell @krnlg
And not just in Europe. I ran across something a few months ago talking about the pre-Columbian cultural dynamic in North America's Pacific Northwest, with local equivalents of the vikings. This other culture down the coast didn't struggle with raiders nearly as much, but that was mainly because they were less well resourced.
@Jack William Bell @Josh
Pyperkub

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Xnet

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Pyperkub
Just wait until the Supremes dismantle Chevron, and the only "experts" will be corporate shills...

Cory Doctorowudostępnił to.

Dave Neary
I think there have been at least five missed opportunities at regulation that might have radically changed the tech landscape - the emergence of Intel and Microsoft in the 1980s and 1990s as monopolies, and among the modern internet giants, Google, Amazon, and Facebook have all adopted consumer-harming behaviours in the interests of investors.
Janis
@dneary ✋ I live by 3M. The consumer harm isn't limited to... well, it isn't really limited. Not really. When your business nodes AND endpoints are other businesses, who also hold most of the investments, the situation is incredibly precarious all around.

Too many of us bought into grabbing fast food to get back to our desks, including moms. No one was watching what that would end up building.
@Dave Neary
Old Fucking Punk
When you boil it down, talking Big Tech is about talking software these days, and not too many in the business are measuring or applying meaningful metrics to software. Capers Jones and e.g., IFPUG have a lot of data and some good methods, but not too many are using their methods and data. This results in a lot of crappy software (apps, languages, tools, OSes, ...) with no empirical measure of its crappiness. #regulation please!
#regulation
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@axoona
Cory Doctorow
@lxo see:

https://www.eff.org/interoperablefacebook

Interoperable Facebook

In this video, we discuss the forces that keep us using services like Facebook long after we stop enjoying them (hint, it's not because social media is "addictive") and we present a short "design fiction" explaining what it might be like to use socia…
Electronic Frontier Foundation
@Alexandre Oliva (moved to @lxo@gnusocial.jp)
Cory Doctorow
You can't complain that too many people use bad social media networks and also say that we shouldn't address the single biggest factor that keeps them from leaving.

I've been hearing that the "newcomers will wreck our good thing" since Fidonet was bridged into Usenet.

If you want the people you love to escape from Zuck and Musk, you should be on the side of making it easy for them to leave.

"Being a Facebook user" isn't an ideological defect, it's a collective action trap.
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Alexandre Oliva (moved to @lxo@gnusocial.jp)
thanks for the link. it doesn't seem to address my concerns, though. they boil down to the colonial effects of merging a behemoth network with a nascent one. there are decent reasons for the fediverse to be hesitant with federation with e.g. threads (heh, I freudian-typoed it as threats at first :-), or even with the waves of users from ex-twitter, who bring their toxic habits with them and seems to bring us closer to being in the same cesspool they left.
Cory Doctorow
@lxo No one is proposing that smaller platforms should be required to federate with dominant ones; rather, that dominant ones should not be able to avoid connecting to others

As to cesspools and so on, that's like saying, "If we let in people who want to flee a badly run, nightmare country into our nice country, how can we stop the people from ruining our place, too?"

It supposes that the problem with Facebook is its users, not its owners.
@Alexandre Oliva (moved to @lxo@gnusocial.jp)
Alexandre Oliva (moved to @lxo@gnusocial.jp)
if they end up on another server that's connected to the same *verse as f*k, how is that not the same cesspool? how is that leaving?
worse: if every nascent network goes for such interoperation, there won't be any way to stay away from that cesspool.
I love the notion of adversarial interoperation, and I think it makes a lot of sense to mandate it onto dominant players
but it looks like we're still missing an important part of the puzzle to avoid making the problem worse by connecting our safe havens to the cesspool
Jack
"Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, there are no libertarians in government-protected monopolies."

I would like this framed

Cory Doctorowudostępnił to.

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