[austerity]

You know where those evil profits ultimately come from? People paying to have their needs satisfied.

I make a decent living providing people with solutions to some of the problems described in this article (censorship and fragmentation) and I'm not ashamed to say I am driven purely by profit.

[TeMPOraL]

I'm not trying to demonize for-profit work (at least not in this comment). My point is, there's money to be made off breaking the Internet, and there's little money to be made off fixing it.

> You know where those evil profits ultimately come from? People paying to have their needs satisfied.

Satisfying someone's needs doesn't justify anything. Not all needs are meant to be satisfied - especially if they conflict with the needs of others, whether directly or by generating externalities.

[fx85ms]

YES thanks for this! I've seen too many people justify something that could be considered immoral by invoking this "but it satisfies user needs" pseudo-argument.

[baddox]

I've seen a heck of a lot more people justify things by claiming to have objective moral knowledge. Throughout history, the most atrocious acts imaginable have been justified this way. I am much less worried about invoking the satisfaction of people's needs.

[TeMPOraL]

You can't convince people to go kill and die for you by saying they're just satisfying your needs. So you have to invent something people will actually buy, and this tends to be something about morality, religion or politics.

[lovemenot]

So what? There are so many ways to be wrong, why introduce an entirely different one into this discussion? It's a false dilemma.

[calibraxis]

Capitalist morality merely poses as amoral. The moment you propose a more sensible alternative, you're hit by moral arguments about terrible things happening when you interfere with the invisible hand (of Providence).

When we mention "satisfying people's needs", those with more money get more satisfaction. That's how markets work. Like advertisers (corporations paying other corporations to spread propaganda), nation-states (which must control their populaces pretty much by definition), etc.

[lostlogin]

The subtle distinction between "want" and "need" is at the root of this. What the user wants is at odds with what they need.

[ckozlowski]

Who decides what they "need", if not the user in so much as what they "want"?

I'm terrified of others prescribing what's "needed" because someone else has decided what what's "wanted" isn't the best for them.

That's no freedom at all.

[TeMPOraL]

You can't look at it in a binary way. Of course it's a bad idea to prescribe people their needs. I wouldn't want someone telling me what I am to have for dinner. But there are also needs that are obviously better left unmet. For instance I may feel a need to take possession of your property. It's not a kind of freedom you'd want to grant to me.

[TuringTest]

> I'm terrified of others prescribing what's "needed" because someone else has decided what what's "wanted" isn't the best for them.

I'm equally terrified of others convincing you that what they have to offer is the best for you, with minor tweaks to "cover your needs"; yet that's the basis of profit-based marketing.

[spython]

It is great fun, when any previous authority is replaced by the logic of the market. What thrives, they say, deserves to thrive, what fails, deserves to fail. Their argument is, if people really wanted a better world, they would have it already. Which is of course foolish, the market doesn't care about good or evil.

[mdpopescu]

"The market" is people. You just said that people don't care about good or evil. I submit that this is an exaggeration.

[shrikant]

In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence is a process whereby larger entities, patterns, and regularities arise through interactions among smaller or simpler entities that themselves do not exhibit such properties.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence

[spython]

The market is not people, nor was it ever about people. It is about money and capital, and capital is not governed by moral principles.

[eevilspock]

Oh the market is about people when it commoditizes them, and that just makes the consequences even less moral.

[SpaghettiCat]

> Satisfying someone's needs doesn't justify anything. Not all needs are meant to be satisfied - especially if they conflict with the needs of others, whether directly or by generating externalities.

What cases are you talking about? If a consumer pays for something, they want it. What is the evil of supplying a consumer with what they want? If they don't want it they don't have to buy it. If they don't like it they don't have to use it. Ultimately, the decision is up to the consumer for what is the for them.

[TeMPOraL]

First of all, the consumer and the supplier do not form a closed system (regardless of what some ideologies would want one to believe). You have to account for the effects supplying a customer with something has on the third parties. Those are the externalities I've mentioned, and even Wikipedia has a lot of examples.

Secondly, you have to take a look at the aggregate effects. So for instance I may need a new, shittier way to spam web with ads, and there's a company who'll happily satisfy my needs. By having this transaction, I start earning more, and now my competitors see the strategy and all decide to adopt it. The end result is that web is more spammed, my advantage disappers, and the new solution probably costs more than the old one, but now no one can go back. A classic coordination problem[0].

Finally, as 'lostlogin points out downthread, what you want doesn't always equal to what you need.

[0] - http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/, a day does not go by without me linking to it...

[ashark]

I like that page, and also the Non-Libertarian FAQ[1] linked on it, which saves me summing up my feelings on the topic.

I'd still love a good dissenting take on it. The one linked near the bottom is awful.

[1] http://raikoth.net/libertarian.html

[EDIT] Now includes the link!

[SpaghettiCat]

> The end result is that web is more spammed, my advantage disappers, and the new solution probably costs more than the old one, but now no one can go back.

These are not the only players in the game like you believe. Those who advertise more effectively on the web have more of an advantage over those who advertise via other media and those who don't advertise at all. And, as ads are more spammy and in-your-face, the advertised products get bought more whether all competitors are spamming or only some. Advertised products are bought more than they would be if the ads were mild or there were no ads at all.

PS: Thanks for the blog link it looks very interesting, I'll read it later.

[escherize]

And in doing so, you create a larger market for anti newer-shittier-spam ads, with the potential to erase ads for anyone who cares enough.

[TeMPOraL]

Which is strictly worse than not creating that market at all. It's just resources going to waste over the pointless zero-sum games, and that's exactly another reason where "satisfying user needs" doesn't cut it as a justification.

[woah]

So, are you going to determine for us what people are allowed to put on their websites?

[eevilspock]

I admire your perseverance T. The doctrine that the free market leads to truth is difficult to dispel.

[pjc50]

Software and hardware are sufficiently complex that the user has only the vaguest idea of what they actually bought. They cannot possibly make a fully informed decision and have to go on partial information.

I don't think it's sensible to say that customers "wanted" VW cars with "defeat devices". In that case, it's not even clear how much of the vendor company knew what was in the product.

[SpaghettiCat]

Clearly VW engaged in deception of the customer as they cheated their test results. Customers are protected from such deception by the law.

My point was to criticise the "Internet Dream" utopian fairy tale advocated by commenter TEMPORAL--where a user gets everything but pays nothing--and to explain that the internet's commercialisation is perfectly OK.

[pjc50]

I think there's a legitimate question to ask about how some kinds of commercialisation (selling privacy; expensive in-app purchases bought by children or compulsive gamblers; etc) are in some way deceptive or dishonest. It's certainly not as simple as a direct upfront payment for goods or services.

[JupiterMoon]

What if they want something illegal/immoral/harmful to others?

[SpaghettiCat]

That's where the government intervenes by legislating, thereby society is protecting individuals from themselves (and from harming others).

I don't see how there is a need to do this with the internet in the way the "Internet Dream" describes it.

[meddlepal]

I think it's an often forgotten (perhaps purposefully to push an agenda in some circles?) part of these discussions about corporations and business models. They're just driven by demand. It's not some shady nebulous force at work trying to screw everything and everyone.

Another problem, idealists often ignore the practical realities of a society when dreaming of their idealist visions for the future. Could the internet have turned into a purely free and perfect forum for communication? In an ideal world yes, but not in our flawed world where there are a host of competing contrasting ideas.

To the authors point. Technology is moving too fast for laws, governments and political systems to cope with. The political and legal constructs we use today are not radically different from 200 or 300 years ago. I don't know if there has ever been a time in human history where the rate of technological innovation and change has been moving at such a speed that the legal and political systems cannot stay synced with the change and have no chance of catching up due to the increasing velocity.

[TeMPOraL]

> corporations and business models. They're just driven by demand. It's not some shady nebulous force at work trying to screw everything and everyone.

Oh it's not shady in the sense that it has agency and decides to screw everything up. But it's very powerful and increasingly misaligned with the interest of humans. Being driven by demand does not map well to the shared wishes and morals of humanity, only if because of coordination problems.

I agree with your other points. And I didn't mean to point out that if Internet stayed non-profit, we'd have a perfect communication platform by now. For instance I think that if it became powerful, it'd still have problems with power and influence being a similar incentive to money. I only wanted to highlight the source of the problems we now have, which are those demand-satisfying, profit-driven actions. And that to make the Internet a better place, we would need to refuse doing things that seem optimal from business point of view but are detrimental to the Internet itself.

A pessimist in me says: this isn't likely to happen, because coordination is hard. So tragedy of commons here, no way to make a bottom-up group opposition there; we're screwed by coordination problems.

[qznc]

See also Meditations on Moloch for a more poetic desription: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

[jacobush]

That is such an awesome text.

[mdpopescu]

I generally upvote your comments but I think this one is far too pessimistic. You're worrying about coordination problems on the internet? That's like, I don't know, worrying about dying of thirst in the middle of the ocean.

Oh wait... :P

On a more serious note, though, I think this is just another problem to be solved. Long-term, I am an absolute optimist: everything will get better, everywhere. Short-term, I admit there are some speed bumps :)

[TeMPOraL]

> On a more serious note, though, I think this is just another problem to be solved. Long-term, I am an absolute optimist: everything will get better, everywhere. Short-term, I admit there are some speed bumps :)

Yeah, that's why I keep my pessimist locked up in a cage underground, and only let it out to get some air every now and then. :). I still want to believe we'll get the United Federation of Planets :).

[anon4]

To be annoyingly pedantic, ocean water is unfit to drink, i.e. contains too much salt, so you can very easily die of thirst in the middle of the ocean.

Just s/ocean/any big lake/

[mdpopescu]

That's why I said "oh wait" :)

[CognitiveLens]

The important qualifier for "just driven by demand" and "People paying to have their needs satisfied" is that some demands/needs/desires are more profitable than others regardless of their long-term importance to a particular system. Just because people are willing to pay for something (e.g. a new gadget) doesn't make it more valuable than something they are not willing to pay for (e.g. clean drinking water for thousands of children). Just because the short-term-focused free market is producing economic activity that satisfies a demand doesn't mean that the system is either healthy or long-term sustainable, and that's the crux of the issue about the idealized Internet - its viability as a platform for human advancement (broadly defined) has been undermined by its corresponding suitability to support independent profit-making.

[nekopa]

> They're just driven by demand. It's not some shady nebulous force at work trying to screw everything and everyone.

A great quote I read somewhere:

In marketing, there are those who satisfy needs and those who create wants

[chippy]

>needs

If I tell you that you have a need to purchase an eleven foot swimming pool for you back yard, and if you dont have a back yard you now have a need for a back yard, how long will it take for you to believe you have a need for it? How many of your peers would it take to have the same, and for them to tell you that this need has to be satisfied.

What does that mediation upon "needs" mean?

We know about Maslows triangle of actual needs, comfort, security food. But what about all these other "needs" - people do pay to have these somewhat manufactured needs satisfied. This is how a profit driven world works.

It needs happy docile obedient workers, that are "not ashamed to be driven by profit" so do their ills with a clear conscience.

"I'm just working here"

[yourapostasy]

As others have so aptly pointed out, externalities are the huge fly in your ointment. Rather than keep prattling on about externalities, I want to direct your attention to a practical example, environmental mercury contamination. [1] As a civilization, we knew from over 200 years ago that various mercury compounds were bad news bears in sufficiently-high quantities and/or cumulative exposures.

Industrial utilization of mercury is incredibly useful, adequate remediation and recovery expensive, and venting mercury-laden industrial waste into the atmosphere so easy and innocuous-looking, combined to land us in a modern situation any 16-18th century fisherman would find utterly absurd and fantastical. Lots and lots of people paid over many decades and centuries to have their needs satisfied with the help of mercury-laced compounds and mercury itself, to dump (and continue to dump to this day) their cumulative externality upon us, despite extremely early knowledge about cumulative effects, so that we go about our day-to-day in a real, live sci-fi world where some fish have so much bioaccumulated mercury that we have to ration our consumption of them.

There is an enormous amount of economic activity in the world today that works solely from finding and monetizing externalities. I expect this only gets worse in the future.

[1] http://www.researchgate.net/publication/272563841_Mercury_in...