Things that went whizzing by that I want to remember: First: Facebook as we know it needs to be shut down. But how do we replace it with something that does what it does without being a similar center for destructive grifting and brain-hacking?: Brian Stelter: Authors of New Book Depict ‘Facebook’s Dilemma & Its Ugly Truth’:... They’ve produced the ultimate takedown via careful, comprehensive interrogation of every major Facebook scandal. ‘An Ugly Truth’ provides the kind of satisfaction you might get if you hired a private investigator to track a cheating spouse: It confirms your worst suspicions and then gives you all the dates and details you need to cut through the company’s spin…
"Why had Germany, long one of the most ostensibly civilized, highly educated societies on earth, transformed itself into an instrument that turned a continent into a charnel house? Why had Germany delivered itself over to the raving exterminationist dictates of one man, the man Shirer refers to disdainfully as a “vagabond”? Why did the world allow a “tramp,” a Chaplinesque figure whose 1923 beer hall putsch was a comic fiasco, to become a genocidal Führer whose rule spanned a continent and threatened to last a thousand years?"
Glibly, Asimov had an explanation, humans in crowds become irrational mobs. Less glibly, people don't want to become outsiders. If a person can be persuaded that their neighbors think in way X, then they will conform to X, even if by passive acceptance. Religion certainly works that way. Identity politics works that way. Nazi Germany wasn't the first, nor will it be the last to become crazed. Was it that different from a religious Jihad? Was it that different front a brutal colonialist nation, where the population supported the government and the military enforced it?
I suspect that if you prick a Trumpist, the reasons they support him are not that different from why the German people supported Hitler and the Nazi party. As the quote makes clear, education, the solution advocated by liberals, is not the vaccine that works. "Indoctrination" of children in schools might work, but that is falling into the trap that conservatives complain about and will try to undermine.
Axelrod's game theory experiments suggest (to me) that any sufficiently motivated, but minority behavior can change the majority behavior unless actively excised early on. But this excision is contrary to free speech and a democratic society. So the ractchet works to move democracy and free speech society to authoritarian, censored society. In the long run, resistance may be futile. Depressing, really.
Facebook's success would become the model for any similarly motivated person/company to replicate if FB was changed. While I liked KSR's public solution in "The Ministry of the Future", I suspect it wouldn't work, even if there was a trivially easy way to port all the data from FB to the new platform. A malevolent entity, whether private or public could just replicate FB and continue, offering the same service and competing with any benign alternative that was forced to either grow more slowly or be publicly financed. Groups with agendas that benefit from viral outrage would either stick with FB, or join the FB clones, rather than the hobbled sane version.
FB's MO to do their worst and apologize later is the same MO of many businesses. How many times have oil companies had a serious spill, apologized, promised it wouldn't happen again, and had another accident? Banks are another example.
Unless you want to engineer greed out of the human genome, I don't think doing much beyond regulating the industry to constrain the bad behavior is going to work. Motivated people will always push the envelope of legality, and in some cases, go well beyond if they can get away with it.
"Why had Germany, long one of the most ostensibly civilized, highly educated societies on earth, transformed itself into an instrument that turned a continent into a charnel house? Why had Germany delivered itself over to the raving exterminationist dictates of one man, the man Shirer refers to disdainfully as a “vagabond”? Why did the world allow a “tramp,” a Chaplinesque figure whose 1923 beer hall putsch was a comic fiasco, to become a genocidal Führer whose rule spanned a continent and threatened to last a thousand years?"
Glibly, Asimov had an explanation, humans in crowds become irrational mobs. Less glibly, people don't want to become outsiders. If a person can be persuaded that their neighbors think in way X, then they will conform to X, even if by passive acceptance. Religion certainly works that way. Identity politics works that way. Nazi Germany wasn't the first, nor will it be the last to become crazed. Was it that different from a religious Jihad? Was it that different front a brutal colonialist nation, where the population supported the government and the military enforced it?
I suspect that if you prick a Trumpist, the reasons they support him are not that different from why the German people supported Hitler and the Nazi party. As the quote makes clear, education, the solution advocated by liberals, is not the vaccine that works. "Indoctrination" of children in schools might work, but that is falling into the trap that conservatives complain about and will try to undermine.
Axelrod's game theory experiments suggest (to me) that any sufficiently motivated, but minority behavior can change the majority behavior unless actively excised early on. But this excision is contrary to free speech and a democratic society. So the ractchet works to move democracy and free speech society to authoritarian, censored society. In the long run, resistance may be futile. Depressing, really.
Facebook's success would become the model for any similarly motivated person/company to replicate if FB was changed. While I liked KSR's public solution in "The Ministry of the Future", I suspect it wouldn't work, even if there was a trivially easy way to port all the data from FB to the new platform. A malevolent entity, whether private or public could just replicate FB and continue, offering the same service and competing with any benign alternative that was forced to either grow more slowly or be publicly financed. Groups with agendas that benefit from viral outrage would either stick with FB, or join the FB clones, rather than the hobbled sane version.
FB's MO to do their worst and apologize later is the same MO of many businesses. How many times have oil companies had a serious spill, apologized, promised it wouldn't happen again, and had another accident? Banks are another example.
Unless you want to engineer greed out of the human genome, I don't think doing much beyond regulating the industry to constrain the bad behavior is going to work. Motivated people will always push the envelope of legality, and in some cases, go well beyond if they can get away with it.