Change is inevitable.
If you live in a capitalist society, everything will eventually become monetized.
Tech isn't the problem; monetization is.
Monetization and commodification. Many things should be off limits to those cretins. Like healthcare and all types of insurance. (and food and shelter, but we've got to start with something, and healthcare is far more understandable to most)
Here's something that gets overlooked.
A big part of Ronald Reagan's 'deregulation' was letting third rate business people make lots of money. Toy companies could run half hour ads for products like Pokemon and Transformers. Federally insured S&Ls could make unlimited loans.
When you look at things being awful, it almost always comes back to Reagan.
The problem is not just monetization. Capitalism can function and provide reasonable prices, but that takes actual robust competition, and actual robust competition, requires lots of small players, not a few big monopolies.
So to OP's point, yes, it would have been better to get off big tech earlier. Supporting small companies over big companies is always an inherent good in a capitalist society.
Robust competition and regulation, or you get flour with plaster in to make it cheaper and whiter again
Yes, you absolutely still need regulation because there are numerous ways of unnoticeably cutting corners.
Capitalism provides none of that
Sweden is an example of an economy that has capitalistic elements with a strong safety net.
That is correct. It's still Capitalism with all of the gross exploitation, but the people get a bigger piece of the pie.
Explain your point or shut the fuck up with this low effort nonsense.
It doesn't even make grammatical sense given that I claimed capitalism can provide one thing (reasonable prices), and you responded with 'none of that' as if I listed a multitude of things.
Jesus Christ Lemmy is becoming as brain dead as Reddit.
You seem a bit angry. Maybe take a break from technology today.
Good advice, but my point stands. Post better.
You want me to write a dissertation on why Capitalism doesn't provide reasonable prices, cannot provide "actual robust competition", and cannot stop a few big monopolies?. Sorry, I'm not going to. Lenin was writing about this stuff 100 years ago.. The current state of Capitalism, that is Capitalism. That's how it functions. There isn't some idyllic form of Capitalism that we can work towards ... that has never existed ever.
People like to point to the 1950s and 1960s postwar US and the Nordics as examples of "how Capitalism should function". Postwar US was in a red scare, Communism spreading across Europe, fear of uprisings at home, and that fear forced progressive concessions. The one era of capitalism people romanticize is that one, and it was shaped by fear of Communism plus massive grassroots working-class movements.
Same thing in the Nordics. What is right next door? The Soviet Union, with a successful revolution that brought millions out of abject poverty and brought USSR from a feudal backwater to modern superpower within decades. The fear of that spreading caused Nordics and elsewhere to give more concessions to the working class. The form of Capitalism itself hasn't changed one single bit. There's still wars, worker exploitation, imperialism, global extraction and exploitation of the 3rd world (global south), etc.
Same thing in the Nordics. What is right next door? The Soviet Union, with a successful revolution that brought millions out of abject poverty and brought USSR from a feudal backwater to modern superpower within decades. The fear of that spreading caused Nordics and elsewhere to give more concessions to the working class. The form of Capitalism itself hasn't changed one single bit. There's still wars, worker exploitation, imperialism, global extraction and exploitation of the 3rd world (global south), etc.
I'm guessing you're American given your piss poor knowledge of world history.
Because no, the Nordic countries did not give worker concessions because the USSR next door.
First of all, the conditions of the USSR were not seen as good by basically anyone. Do you know how many mass purges happened in communist countries and how poor they were? It was not seen as a glowing ideal in Nordic countries. East Germany was not seen as paradise compared to West Germany by literally anyone.
Second of all, this ignore the enormous concessions, changes, and progress that Nordic countries made since ether fall of the Soviet Union.
Your analysis of capitalism is just black-pill edginess. Congrats on being a "nothing can ever be done to fix this" nihilist. Billionaires love people like you.
I responded in good faith. And you reply with this. Goodbye.
lol, yes "billionaires love me", as I'm actively fighting against them and organizing my community and the working class against them. Yep. You got my number. I find it fascinating that Libs would rather fight against Socialists like me than enact real change in the world....
EDIT: throwing in some reading:
ANTI-COMMUNIST MYTH NUMBER 5: EVERYBODY HATED SOCIALISM
ANTI-COMMUNIST MYTH NUMBER 6: LIFE UNDER SOCIALISM WAS TERRIBLE
lol, yes "billionaires love me", as I'm actively fighting against them and organizing my community and the working class against them
Incompetent enemies can be more valuable than competent friends.
And you responded with made up bs about Nordic countries having to placate their population's desire for communism.
That's not why they moderated, and the fact that any capitalist system can be moderated and regulated to be somewhat effective disproves your black pilled nonsense about how capitalism is doomed to repeat America's specific flavour of unregulated, big-is-good, monopolistic, capitalism.
The part of capitalism where the owner sits back, the workers do the work, and the owner keeps the profits is not necessary. It is in fact fucked up.
You can have competition without that. (You can have other bad things too- it's not a magic cure-all for workers to own the business)
We did. #Linux #LibreOffice #Thunderbird #DuckDuckGo #Nextcloud #Signal #Mastodon
We should have stopped at MySpace.
Regular users were warned 10 years ago to drop all social media like Facebook but they have no incentive to do this. They are now using AI on top of that because they don't care about privacy anymore.
Governments were too lazy to change, but they had/have to do it now because of Trump (mostly) and maybe a bit because of the war in Ukraine, and Russia, China, and North Korea hacking everything. That's why they are now thinking of replacing Microsoft products like Office, creating European clouds, and relying more on European AI. But administrations are not known for being smart or fast in their decisions.
The Edward Snowden leaks were in 2013, so at a minimum 13 years ago.
I would say the biggest unifying factor for all Lemmy users is the belief that big tech sucks for one reason or another. If you want someone to answer 'No' to this question then you need to ask it somewhere else.
Yes.
We should have done that yesterday.
But the next best time is now.
yes your right
The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second best time to plant a tree is now
Your digital footprint is an extension of yourself and how much effort you put into it is up to you. In the same way we encourage people to not eat junk food made by shitty companies, we encourage people to manage their digital presence and support non-shitty companies.
But its hard to eat healthy in the same way its hard to set up accounts and tech that you control, its a concious effort. Do not let perfection be the enemy of progress, anything done to improve your footprint is progress in not feeding digital dragons.
We SHOULD be passing laws that protect people's rights from corporations the same way we protect those rights from the government. We SHOULD be passing laws that enshrine the right to be forgotten, by forcing companies to either respond quickly to delete requests, or have massive penalties per day, paid to the person, not to the govt. We SHOULD be building public, free alternatives like a library in cyberspace that is for public good, not profit. We should stop forcing ID laws, and start forcing encryption. Think bigger than tech withdrawals, instead take the opinion that tech should serve everyone, not the rich and powerful. Hobbyists and open source built practically all of the internet, and only later did money and politics take over.
The internet used to be a quirky free library. They turned it into an aggressive rent seeking monster.
We should have enforced monopoly laws
Yes, of course.
Yes but most people don't give a fuck if companies collect and track everything about you just so they can get their menes.
The issue isn't creating the tools, but making them easy enough for mass adoption. Big tech got big, not because they had the best tools, but because they made sure that anyone could use them in a way a lot of open source tools aren't.
And generating those tools was easier when you can pay people to work full time on it; open source doesn't pay nearly as well if at all.
but making them easy enough for mass adoption
In the attention economy, making them easy enough translates to making them addictive enough. I've been using a dumbphone for four years and every time someone asks about it, they say something like "I wish I could do that."
The thing people want is also what they hate.
And they did that because of loads of funding from those who understood the geopolitical power that comes from these tools and a willingness to accept massive spending and financial losses for decades, that normal investors wouldn't touch, e.g. The US government. DARPA, NSF, DOD... funding
E.g. The Internet, Google, Apple, Tesla etc...
Depends on who you mean by we; if you mean literally everyone then yes absolutely, but I highly doubt we'd be that coordinated or monolithic. If you mean the people like us on the fediverse who are currently trying to do it then I think starting earlier would only make a mild to modest increase in our number.
We should've slowed down tech earlier. It's gotten too rapid.
Agreed, but anyone saying that 5 or 10 years ago would have sounded like a Luddite.
Yes. We already screwed it up when Internet Protocol took over and DNS was established. There were better methods. There are better methods.
That aside, we did have alternatives to big tech software for a long time:
I'm curious as to what issues IP and DNS caused that were so glaring. I assume better methods were (and are) available for addressing and routing, but that seems more a discussion about network architecture design than the kinds of societal problems that "big tech" is generally considered responsible for (if I am interpreting OP's question correctly, that is).
I'm curious as to what issues IP and DNS caused that were so glaring.
Internet Protocol makes addresses location-based, allowing for geoblocking and tracking. It's also centralized by design, allowing for consolidation of power, censorship, and control. DNS is one of the greatest examples of that consolidation of power, and is the reason owning a web domain costs money. In a decentralized public commons registrar or some kind, this would be no issue; a decentralized public commons registrar works better with a decentralized protocol.
I assume better methods were (and are) available for addressing and routing
Look into Reticulum. It's a good example of a better design.
Thanks, I'll read up on it. I hadn't considered the geographic implications baked into the IP system before
I'm glad to be helpful. :)
Good point @bold_omi.
I was playing with Linux back in the kernel 2.0 days. The tech was mostly ready for us geeks, but not for everyone else. Switching meant new habits, and “it’s free and open” was never a strong enough reason for most people.
People use big tech products for convenience: already installed, works out of the box, compatible with everything their friends use. Microsoft knew that playbook very well.
No matter how much we argue and explain, if it isn’t more convenient, most people won’t switch.
The silver lining: building small alternatives has never been cheaper
Yes
Most people, most of the time, do not care about anything that doesn't directly affect their daily life.
In order to accomplish most things, it requires going against basic human nature.
Yes, or start raising the potential problems much sooner.
To any anti AI millennials I try to point out that there’s a direct line from google search (which millennials were crazy about in the day) to AI.
Most people literally pay big tech companies so that big tech companies solve technical problems for the user. There is literally not a single reason why an ordinary user should refuse this.
And responding to some comments, computers were originally damn expensive. The fact that for a short period of time computers' prices leveled out with consoles is not the norm, but a lucky coincidence. I think soon consoles will finally stop being PCs on an AMD chip with a custom OS... Again.
100% yes. These fucks should be told to get back in their respective baskets for a whole multitude of reasons. Learning how to self host has become a hobby. A hobby which is becoming increasingly difficult to expand on due to insane costs caused by you guessed it, Big Tech
Something about the best time to plant a tree
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