[maxbond]

I'd like to point out something my sibling commenters seem to be missing; nopenopenopeno never suggested that the _government_ run these services instead. They said that private companies were incapable of doing this, and that competition was not a suitable mechanism for achieving the necessary outcomes.

It is quite possible that neither the state nor private industry can do this, and that we need _something else_. I don't know what this is, it seems apparent to me that Mastodon-style, self hosted solutions are not tenable either, or perhaps their time has simply not come yet. But let us not limit our imagination to two broken options.

[ajb]

Absolutely.

As engineers, we don't reduce the world to a choice between two mechanisms, to be battled over with no hope of improvement. We are not divided into mongoites and postgresists, we are interested in new solutions and improvements.

We should think of institutional design in the same way. How do institutions work? What are the options and how do they fit together? How do they affect the affordances and limitations of each?

Politics should be limited to goals, it is a crap way to decide about methods.

[nopenopenopeno]

Yes! But analyzing private companies is little use because ultimately they are authoritarian. That will somehow have to change.

[nopenopenopeno]

I appreciate your comment and I don’t mind putting my cards on the table: I am a Marxist. I believe in democratic institutions by the people and for the people. Capitalist states will never suffice. Social democracy is good, but unsustainable. Soviet Communism was a failure, but a single failure. Capitalism is a necessary step in human progress, but it cannot last. Libertarian solutions, as you propose, are no more idealistic than mine, but I don’t put my faith in them because ultimately we are social beings. We all live in a society, and we must attend to it as such. We need institutions by the people and for the people, and the great leaps in technological developments made by capitalist state funded programs in the past century (private companies did very little in comparison) give us a chance to reimagine a new future, but that can only happen by acknowledging the old one is dying, and already dead for for an increasing proportion of the working class.

My only issue with Mastadon is that regular busy working people with families to raise on depressingly low wages cannot justify the effort to participate. If if can’t work for all of our society, it can’t work for our society. Period. So, if we can figure out how to make it work for everybody, then it sounds like the answer to me. I suggest we start by fighting for a national universal healthcare program to undermine the first of the private interests that control our public goods. It will also incentivize development of democratic institutions of the working class and save millions of lives.

[im3w1l]

> My only issue with Mastadon is that regular busy working people with families to raise on depressingly low wages cannot justify the effort to participate. If if can’t work for all of our society, it can’t work for our society. Period.

That's assuming it doesn't get simpler and cheaper over time. I don't think being hard to use is inherent rather it is because the technology is not yet mature.

[nopenopenopeno]

I’m not necessarily assuming that! But I guess IRC still isn’t simple and cheap enough, and how long has that been around?

[im3w1l]

Irc is controlled by greybeards that love it just the way it is. They love their setups with bouncers and bots and scripts and how it can run in a terminal. Irc isn't getting better because they don't want it to.

New kid on the block Matrix might become eventually become a good choice for regular people.

[jokethrowaway]

We disagree a lot but I really like your post.

Capitalism is a natural behaviour which emerge in human interactions. As you say, we're social animals and we interact with one another.

The problem lies with the "capitalist" states which are not capitalism but crony capitalism, aka just socialism with extra steps. When a state with regulatory monopoly and a monopoly of violence exists, you can't have pure capitalism. Big businesses will just corrupt the government and you'll end up in a system where the top dogs can keep everyone else poor and under control - while still believing their democratic vote is worth anything.

I don't think Marxism is a solution, for the simple reason that human beings are not perfect: they are corruptible and as soon as you end up having an institution with the power to do something for a large number of people, you'll have power and corruption. Marxism is great in theory, but in practice it just devolves to the same system we live in where top dogs eat small dogs.

The shift we really need is decentralisation. No centralised governments. People trading with people and exchanging services and goods with no third parties stealing a part. Healthcare and protection (and private protection agencies offering different sets of laws) being sold and insured like any other services. Voluntary charity to help those in needs instead of mandatory taxes.

We need to have the smallest entities possible so that there won't be someone far away deciding what you can and cannot do. In a world without taxes, big companies won't have ways of avoiding taxes and shift them to the upper middle class, they won't have someone to corrupt to prevent innovation.

The answer for social networks is, again, decentralisation. The systems we have now (eg. mastodon) are still immature but, unless Facebook pay some government to introduce even more laws to comply with (GDPR comes to mind), a good decentralised competitors is going to come up, eventually.

Everyone should have their own server with their own data and communicate with other users on their own servers.

[kylebyproxy]

> as soon as you end up having an institution with the power to do something for a large number of people, you'll have power and corruption

Honest question: What would lead you to this conclusion?

I hear this sentiment often, but I've never understood how anyone could think so little of other people and (evidently) themselves.

It sounds like you're saying you can't even trust yourself to resist corruption in a position of power, which strikes me as pure cynicism.

Moreover, you seem to have made the assumption that factoring corruption out of government at a structural level is impossible. If that's the case, I think you're being unimaginative.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Honest question: What would lead you to this conclusion?

A person's incentive to pay attention to something is proportional to their ability to do something about it. If you have an organization meant to represent hundreds of millions of people, each individual has effectively ~zero control over it, and so pays little attention.

Meanwhile, the larger the organization it is, the more resources it can extract from its base, the larger it can become. With size comes complexity. Complexity means there are more things for people to pay attention to.

In combination the little attention people pay is spread thin over a large number of things. This makes corruption unlikely to be noticed and punished, which attracts corrupt people.

> Moreover, you seem to have made the assumption that factoring corruption out of government at a structural level is impossible. If that's the case, I think you're being unimaginative.

Which existing large government is free of corruption?

Note that states with lower corruption scores like Denmark and Singapore are less than 5% of the size of the United States and have less corruption, not none.

[IG_Semmelweiss]

>>>> as soon as you end up having an institution with the power to do something for a large number of people, you'll have power and corruption Honest question: What would lead you to this conclusion?

Honest answer : With respect, because that's real-life works. Look around you. A senatorial campaigns will always amass millions in campaign contributions. The local comptroller candidate will be lucky to raise 100K. The more people are impacted by a single individual, the more power that single individual has. The more power is as stake, the more corrupt attempts to usurp that power.

>>>>It sounds like you're saying you can't even trust yourself to resist corruption in a position of power,

No. It means that money will color all your decisions and edge cases will tend to resolve in a particular way because a decision favored by your moneyed supporters will be easier to justify.

Take for example a doctor treating a heart attack patients with prior has cold-like symptoms . The doctor is marking the cause of death. The doctor has seen many doctors get laid off due to pandemic. Waiting rooms are overcrowded with patients dying due to lack of doctors & COVID. There's no money coming in - the state has suspended the traditional hospital cash cow: elective surgery. The hospital medical director looks like a ghost, and has been urging staff to not forget to label patients with COVID-like symptoms as COVID-positive, to obtain government fund support.

The doctor is sure the patient didn't die of COVID. The doctor is not even sure the patient had COVID. But there's no time to check. There are no tests, ICU is packed, and he's worried about other patients needing medical attention, plus the doctor knows his assessment could be wrong. So he puts down cause of death: COVID.

Is the doctor corrupt ? No. The doctor is human.

So are politicians. (particularly unvirtuous humans at that, unlike doctors)

[cheschire]

"In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king."

How do you create a self-reinforcing decentralized system that actively prevents centralization, to the point where no individual nor stand-alone complex can rise up?

We have so much fiction produced talking about the capacity for life to find a way around limitations, artificial or natural. I cannot imagine anything other than utopian fantasy where full decentralization succeeds long term.

[dsego]

I don't think it can work, it seems to naturally devolve into feudalism.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTN64g9lA2g

[thethrowaway87]

Are you an anarchist? That sounds a lot like the ancap proposal, and I think this was one of the best pitches I've read for it. Respectful but also pretty convincing.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Libertarian solutions, as you propose, are no more idealistic than mine, but I don’t put my faith in them because ultimately we are social beings.

Libertarianism is not opposed to organizations, it's opposed to coercion. If you want to get together with ten million of your closest friends and create your own not for profit Facebook to be run in the public interest, libertarians would not stand in your way unless you try to force everyone to use it or pay for it etc.

That means if you want to build something you have to convince people to support it, and not everyone will. But that stands in the way of what you want to do no more than saying that the US can't fund development of the internet without people in China paying US taxes.

You don't need everyone, you just need enough people to exceed the price of doing what you want to do. If you can convince the majority of Americans (<5% of world population) to raise their taxes by $5 to fund something, how is it any different than convincing any other arbitrary ~5% of the world population to bring it into existence voluntarily by contributing the same amount? You were already doing it using a small minority of everyone. It doesn't always have to be the same set of people.

> My only issue with Mastadon is that regular busy working people with families to raise on depressingly low wages cannot justify the effort to participate.

This is the fundamental problem with all of it. It's the same reason they can't self-beneficially participate in the political process -- no time to become informed, so too easy to make self-harming decisions. And then you get heuristics like "always vote for X party instead of Z party" that most certainly do not actually fix it.

Maybe the solution is greater specialization. Instead of everyone funding everything and then having neither meaningful control nor understanding of any of it, have different people choose what they care about. A million people decide they want to support cancer research, and so they spend real time figuring out who is doing the best work and then give all of what would've been their tax dollars to that. A different million people decide they want to support development of communications technology, so they take the time to understand how communications technology works, and they're the ones to support that with their time or money.

In principle the amount of funding that goes to each thing is the same as it would be if everyone is funding everything, but instead of 100M people each paying $1 to a hundred things, you have a million people each paying $100 to one thing and a different million people each paying $100 for another and so on. And then it becomes self-balancing, because if a problem gets worse, more people start paying attention to and caring about solving it.

And don't say nobody would do it, or explain why a government would fund research instead of letting some other government do it. People do it because they want to live in the world where it happens. Or they don't, but then why would they vote for it either?

[hutzlibu]

Non profit organisations could fill that gap. If proper financed directly by its users, otherwise they will go down the same path, if they get their money directly or indirectly from advertisement.