[winternett]

This is 2021, where almost everyone creates a global problem, then makes money off of being the one to "mitigate the problem"... The people dedicated to not creating new problems, but trying genuinely to fix problems simply fail and/or run out of money are increasingly ignored because they don't have the biggest marketing budgets. Honesty isn't making money any more... A huge problem.

The absence of any real accountability, and admiration of hypocrisy, is what threatens us most heading into the future.

[teddyh]

“It's a gigantic social phenomenon. People find ways of getting money by impeding society. Once they can impede society, they can be paid to leave people alone.”

— Richard Stallman, 1986 https://www.gnu.org/gnu/byte-interview

[kordlessagain]

By that logic (abuse of) the global internet is a problem, but the underlying technology isn’t, if it were localized.

[systemvoltage]

I am not convinced, do you have any sources that prove your conspiracy?

[wpietri]

I don't see any mention of conspiracy. I see a (colorfully hyperbolic) description of systemic problems.

And there are plenty of them out there. Look at the opioid epidemic, where a pain-relieving drug creates pain when you try to stop it. Look at Facebook, which simultaneously creates loneliness [1] and purports to offer its cure. To say nothing of more traditional addictive substances, like nicotine and alcohol, which create problems for users that more consumption temporarily ameliorates.

Then we could look at more subtle, multi-agent problems. For example, consider the way the US's incarceration rate is 5-10x peer countries. [2] Why is that? There are many factors, but look at the way for-profit prisons and prison guard unions are big spenders on influencing politicians to be "tough on crime". Look at the media that profitably generates fear about crime. The way police are not incentivized to reduce crime, but just to performatively fight it. This of course takes money away from schools and social services. And all of that creates disruption in communities that ensure the supply of criminals necessary to keep this going.

Is there any conspiracy there? I doubt it. One of the miracles of free-market systems is the extent to which conspiracy is unnecessary. All you need is networks of agents with aligned incentives and you get very robust, persistent systems. There's no conspiracy to get lovely fresh produce in my grocery store the year round; there's no need of one. But markets are morally neutral, so we always have to use POSIWID [3] thinking to keep an eye out for pernicious systems.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7820562/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_United_States_in...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

[winternett]

Oh No... No... Not me!... :P

Not really a conspiracy theory... Just a personal opinion.

These days sharing "conspiracy theories" get people banned online and worse...

Just made as a statement in reply to the parent comment, but if you watch the commercials during television news, you might perhaps wonder how "Restless Leg Syndrome" became a real thing, and why there's now how conveniently there is a drug that claims to "fix it" if you're willing to sacrifice diarrhea for in exchange for the pill's implied benefits.

[cedilla]

Your ignorance of a neurological disorder before you watched a commercial about it doesn't imply it's an invention. Restless leg syndrome has been described for centuries.

[secondaryacct]

Dude, Cloudflare is not encouraging ddos to then benefit from it, it existed and will exist with or without them.

[gaganyaan]

Capitalism incentivizes selling a pill to cure something instead of other solutions, I'll grant you that.

However, I have RLS to the point that I'll kick my wife awake at night. I have found that certain foods trigger this, and avoid those foods. Search for "IBS RLS" if you don't believe me.

I guess what I mean is, don't let the existence of hucksters for a problem's cure convince you that the problem doesn't exist.

[winternett]

I didn't intend to mock the syndrome... It was moreso about a company's attempt to classify it as any kind of rapid leg movement that can be fixed with a pill that potentially causes diarrhea that made me roll my eyes during the commercial... Then they played a "Reverse Mortgage" commercial just after it, which also causes diarrhea..